Over at the Interroblog: Call for a New New Realism
I have a post up on the Interroblog today on emotional realism in genre YA.
I was reading the fortieth-anniversary edition of John Donovan’s woefully little-known young adult classic I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip last. If you’re not familiar with this title (and you might not be; it was out of print for twenty years!), it was the first “gay” young adult fiction ever published, way back in 1969.
But to call it merely the first gay YA novel would be to sell it short, because I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip is, in fact, a searing novel about grief and dogs and crazy moms and New York City, all told through the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy who is somewhat of a mini-Holden Caulfield, in terms of voice, if not wangst. One of the accompanying essays at the back of my e-book discussed the role Donovan’s novel–along with Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy and SE Hinton’s The Outsiders–played in the shift from saccharine children’s literature that seemed to exist in a sort of escapist fairyland to realistic books that more accurately depicted the lives of children and adolescents.
To read the whole post, go here. Review of Donovan’s book is forthcoming (spoiler: it was amazing).
Phoebe
Phoebe is a 20-something writer who lives in New York State with her husband and cat. She is a dork, not a geek or a nerd.
Her debut novel, Starglass, will be released from Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers in Summer 2013.
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