Hello fellow readers!
If you are anything like me, the local bookstore--okay, the local ~library~--is a weekly stop. And it's always been this way, even since I was a kid. Getting those grown up Sweet Valley High books (like the one where Bruce Patman unties Jessica's bathing suit top--
scandalous!) as a kid felt like a right of passage and a taste of what was to come in my bright, glorious adolescent/young adult life.
Naturally, there was a phase of crushing disappointment when I got into high school and realized that the guys were the same immature jackasses they were in middle school; no one wanted my frizzy-haired, unibrowed self no matter what I wore; and there wasn't a constant stream of school dances, beach parties, or meet-ups at the local hip burger joint.
When I looked beyond the first level of reading, however, a lot of my YA heroines showed me sides of high school and of life after school that I consider of great importance such as: when you're lonely, try something you wouldn't have done before (Jessica Wakefield from Sweet Valley Junior High), sometimes fighting for the rights of the little guy can be tough because of the ways it affects the community (John from California Blue), the death of one person can cause a ripple effect in an entire town (God of Beer), and that speaking about a tragedy can sometimes be the best way to heal, even if it's the last thing you want to do (Melinda from Speak). Note that these books range from the guilty-pleasure to the somewhat literary in nature for YA and yet all of them have engaging storylines and characters with realistic flaws and rather admirable strengths.
So why is it when I walk into the teen/YA section at Barnes and Nobles I get inundated with vampires that save wimpy teenage girls or some other variation thereof? I've always hated the argument that young people are lazy hooligans and that only classics and older books are worth reading. It's demeaning and frankly, if it were true, the human species has reproduced so many times that by now we should be mouth-breathing baboons who think that watching each other pick fleas off our bodies is the highest form of entertainment, Jersey Shore notwithstanding.
However, the popularity of these anti-feminist archetypes in stories can't have come out of nowhere, so I'm going to be that shotgun-toting nana that complains about kids these days and their deplorable taste in literature. More than that, however, I want to explore the culture of why these books (in YA and in "adult" literature) become so popular and why books with more active female characters don't hit it big.
Or, you know, I'm just gonna make snarky comments about the books I just read. It all depends on which level you wanna take.
