Doctorow Weighs in On Mature Subjects in YA Fiction

Cory Doctorow has an excellent column on Locus Online about  sex and other mature subjects in Young Adult Fiction.  Here’s the heart of the piece:

There’s really only one question: “Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don’t you punish them for doing this?”

Now, the answer.

First, because teenagers have sex and drink beer, and most of the time the worst thing that results from this is a few days of social awkwardness and a hangover, respectively. When I was a teenager, I drank sometimes. I had sex sometimes. I disobeyed authority figures sometimes.

Mostly, it was OK. Sometimes it was bad. Sometimes it was wonderful. Once or twice, it was terrible. And it was thus for everyone I knew. Teenagers take risks, even stupid risks, at times. But the chance on any given night that sneaking a beer will destroy your life is damned slim. Art isn’t exactly like life, and science fiction asks the reader to accept the impossible, but unless your book is about a universe in which disapproving parents have cooked the physics so that every act of disobedience leads swiftly to destruction, it won’t be very credible. The pathos that parents would like to see here become bathos: mawkish and trivial, heavy-handed, and preachy.

Read the rest of the column here.

TWILIGHT: The Internet Crucial to its Success

Stephanie Meyer grew her books’ readership with a constant, open, grateful and helpful online presence

By Susan Carpenter

November 29, 2008

Mania is almost too sedate a term to describe the ongoing frenzy surrounding “Twilight,” Stephenie Meyer’s mega-hit young adult series about a devastatingly handsome vampire and the plain-Jane human he wants to sink his teeth into.

Since 2005, when the first of the four books was published, more than 25 million copies of the “Twilight ” saga have been sold worldwide. At least 350 fan sites have cropped up online. And the movie, which opened Nov. 21, has been the season’s breakout hit; it’s grossed close to $100 million in fewer than 10 days, the kind of numbers that guarantee sequels.

Yet only five years ago, no one had even heard of Meyer. In 2003, she was a 29-year-old stay-at-home mother who spent her days doing what any other Phoenix mom was doing: chasing her kids around and trying to keep her sanity. Going from maternal obscurity to cultural phenomenon in a scant five years is no easy feat. Like so many success stories, hers was a combination of hard work, dumb luck and being in the right place — and doing the right things — at the right time, including a brilliant and strategic use of the Web.

Read the rest of the article here.

Read our other posts on TWILIGHT here, here, here and here.