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koganbotTell me what I should read from your past in order to understand you. More specifically, what was young adult fiction like during the years when you would have been in its target audience? What decade would that have been? Recommend a particular book.
A couple of months ago![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
girlboymusic and quirkytaverna, 10,000 miles away from each other but of the same generation, each separately posted the trailer for Tomorrow When The War Began, and wrote enthusiastically about their memories of the Tomorrow stories. So I went to the Denver Public Library and borrowed the first two in the series, and was so engrossed that I've just now got three and four. Anyhow, today on one of Dave's threads I started describing to girlboymusic how I thought it differed from the young adult books of my childhood (my years for "young adult" were actually kid years, age 8 through 12, '62 through '66; what I read was on the borderline of boys' adventure and young adult; but by age 10 I was already jumping to science fiction and Agatha Christie and C.S. Forester and the like, and even some Dickens and Poe; and at age 12 or 13 I stopped reading books that were specifically targeted to young people, though I'm sure the Leon Uris etc. I then read was also read by a lot of teens).
When I was a boy, guerrilla war stories were for boys, period. My memory tells me that "young adult" fiction was heavily gendered that way, though my memory may not be altogether correct, and what I read may not have been entirely typical - though I'd wager that my memory was right and my reading typical. (My memory also says that young adult classics - Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and such - were less heavily gendered, that my era may have been more gendered than usual. But someone who's studied the history of children's and young adult literature may well know a different story.)
In any event, Ellie as narrator is a vehicle to allow/encourage girls to read war stories, though I wouldn't be surprised if that trend was already decades old by the mid '90s. The use of first-person narrative that's a combination of personal and self-critically observational surely increased among narrators of both sexes starting in the late '60s (that is, several years after I'd have stopped reading young adult fiction), and my guess is that such narration was part of a trend that made what had previously been boys-only adventure stories more appealing to girls. (And I'm wondering if teen vampire stories are a vehicle for making the teen romance novel more appealing to boys. But I've never read a teen vampire story, so I'm being even more speculative with that idea.)
There was a sequence in The Dead Of Night that I went back and reread to study how Marsden pulled it off. Foolishly, I didn't copy any of it before returning the book. It's a taut action scene (the one where the youngsters are to each sneak separately into a different guarded house and turn on the gas and set time bombs). What I noticed was that during the sequence - Ellie is alone, treading as silently as she can through a backyard, hoping not to attract the attention of an enemy sentry - Ellie's narrative voice retains its conversational tone, peppering her description with reflective comments about herself, as if she were talking to us, the readers, just as she would during non-action episodes. Or anyway, Marsden inserts a few of those conversational comments, enough so that the description isn't pure workmanlike suspense, while nonetheless the scene retains all of its tension and propulsion.
My own recommendation is John R. Tunis's The Kid From Tomkinsville, though I haven't read it since I was about nine. I'll say something about it in the comments.
A couple of months ago
girlboymusic and quirkytaverna, 10,000 miles away from each other but of the same generation, each separately posted the trailer for Tomorrow When The War Began, and wrote enthusiastically about their memories of the Tomorrow stories. So I went to the Denver Public Library and borrowed the first two in the series, and was so engrossed that I've just now got three and four. Anyhow, today on one of Dave's threads I started describing to girlboymusic how I thought it differed from the young adult books of my childhood (my years for "young adult" were actually kid years, age 8 through 12, '62 through '66; what I read was on the borderline of boys' adventure and young adult; but by age 10 I was already jumping to science fiction and Agatha Christie and C.S. Forester and the like, and even some Dickens and Poe; and at age 12 or 13 I stopped reading books that were specifically targeted to young people, though I'm sure the Leon Uris etc. I then read was also read by a lot of teens).When I was a boy, guerrilla war stories were for boys, period. My memory tells me that "young adult" fiction was heavily gendered that way, though my memory may not be altogether correct, and what I read may not have been entirely typical - though I'd wager that my memory was right and my reading typical. (My memory also says that young adult classics - Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and such - were less heavily gendered, that my era may have been more gendered than usual. But someone who's studied the history of children's and young adult literature may well know a different story.)
In any event, Ellie as narrator is a vehicle to allow/encourage girls to read war stories, though I wouldn't be surprised if that trend was already decades old by the mid '90s. The use of first-person narrative that's a combination of personal and self-critically observational surely increased among narrators of both sexes starting in the late '60s (that is, several years after I'd have stopped reading young adult fiction), and my guess is that such narration was part of a trend that made what had previously been boys-only adventure stories more appealing to girls. (And I'm wondering if teen vampire stories are a vehicle for making the teen romance novel more appealing to boys. But I've never read a teen vampire story, so I'm being even more speculative with that idea.)
There was a sequence in The Dead Of Night that I went back and reread to study how Marsden pulled it off. Foolishly, I didn't copy any of it before returning the book. It's a taut action scene (the one where the youngsters are to each sneak separately into a different guarded house and turn on the gas and set time bombs). What I noticed was that during the sequence - Ellie is alone, treading as silently as she can through a backyard, hoping not to attract the attention of an enemy sentry - Ellie's narrative voice retains its conversational tone, peppering her description with reflective comments about herself, as if she were talking to us, the readers, just as she would during non-action episodes. Or anyway, Marsden inserts a few of those conversational comments, enough so that the description isn't pure workmanlike suspense, while nonetheless the scene retains all of its tension and propulsion.
My own recommendation is John R. Tunis's The Kid From Tomkinsville, though I haven't read it since I was about nine. I'll say something about it in the comments.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 08:10 pm (UTC)Most of the time I read books where the protagonist was several years older than me but their age wasn't really a defining aspect of their character (school was just a structural backdrop and puberty was apparently taboo outside JB books - kissing was as good as it got). By the time I was actually a young adult (say 13-14) I didn't really have time to read many books except the Discworld novels and Lord Of The Rings. I got my hormone fix from trashy Virginia Andrews novels which all followed the same plot: poor girl inherits vast fortune, unwittingly sleeps with family member, runs away to become ballerina. Hahahah I want to re-read Flowers In The Attic now...
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Date: 2010-06-06 08:40 pm (UTC)Haha, this is precisely why I felt they were more mature than most other YA books. ROMANCE IS FOR BABIES. TALK TO ME WHEN YOU HAVE REAL PROBLEMS.
I still basically feel this way, actually.
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Date: 2010-06-06 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 08:17 pm (UTC)I would say start with "The Days Are Just PACKED," though -- that was the beginning of Watterson's creative renaissance, when he got his wishes to start laying out a full half-page Sunday comic each week.
I actually can't think of many young adult books that really spoke to me. I didn't really have a great time reading a book for class (aside from reading Greek mythology stuff, as I recall) until I read Candide my junior year.
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Date: 2010-06-06 08:31 pm (UTC)I really was an all-American boy, and those books were models for all-American boys, but with complexity: Tunis was anti-racist and against class injustice, though that didn't make his novels a window into black culture and music or into the lives of hoods and greasers and white trash. The young hero usually has to learn to sacrifice, sacrificing himself for team and victory but also at times sacrificing victory for moral principle, and at times standing against commercialism that inhabits the fringes of his sport. But the novels are fundamentally a liberal middle-class boy scout's view, no lower-class sense of life as a game that's fixed and of a world reserved for someone else. Virtue and dignity triumph, if not always in the win-loss column, then in a lived integrity, as society works its way towards justice.
But also occasionally the sports star has a sense of isolation: a couple of decades before Sillitoe, Tunis gives us a long-distance runner who refuses to run a climatic race.
I don't remember anything of the writing style, however. Just some characters, and their situations. One that I reread fifteen years ago, Highpockets, has a well-paid baseball player, a reliable home-run hitter who does his job but feels no commitment to his team, or warmth. He hits the ball, that's what the fans want to see, that's what he's been hired to do, he takes home his paycheck. Of course, the plot cures him of his alienation, but not through team dynamics, but rather through events off-field, not involving sports. In essence the character is walking though his loneliness without explaining it to anyone, where it comes from. The struggle against it is something that none of his teammates or any other adult knows about or, therefore, can help him with. (It's a little kid who gets him out of himself, a kid who's almost as isolated as he is.) In rereading I was disappointed that the book doesn't make more of a case for the player's original isolation and cynicism, doesn't give it particular value. But I do recall a strong sense of the player's lonely mood.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 08:49 pm (UTC)The weather must have been bad.
(A climactic race.)
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Date: 2010-06-06 09:53 pm (UTC)The best of these would be his first, "So Much to Tell You," which I recently repurchased when I found it in Powell's in Portland for $2. It's a school story about a girl who hasn't spoken since her father disfigured her face with acid, but it's written in the same first-person confessional style as the Tomorrow books are, so isn't quite as painfully melodramatic as the plot outline makes it seem. I also loved Checkers, about the daughter of a high profile politician. She's diarying from a mental health institution. (Marsden loves to write about teenagers with Problems and Bad Parents. Institutions - prisons, hospitals, boarding schools - are a common feature.) Another, more light-hearted take on the boarding school story is his the Great Gatenby, which, unusually for Marsden, had a male lead.
All of which is to say that Ellie being the lead in Tomorrow doesn't seem that unusual to me, because she is such a typical Marsden character. His favored protagonist is the teenage girl, his favored style is first person. Tomorrow just added some explosions to the angst.
Um. ANYWAYS. Checkers and So Much to Tell You. Those are my Marsden picks.
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Date: 2010-06-06 10:01 pm (UTC)I wonder what Marsden read as a kid. He's four years older than I am.
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Date: 2010-06-06 10:19 pm (UTC)"Your books are really popular because they have characters that kids can relate to well. How do you do that, particularly with girl characters like Ellie?
I suppose I've always been attracted to strong people in real life and in fiction. As a kid I read a lot of books like The Naked Island about Russel Braddon and his experiences on the Burma-Thai Railway and The Cattle King, which is the biography of Sydney Kidman, and they had a profound impact on me and I read those books many times."
"What's your favourite book – aside from Winter, which is your favourite of your own books?
Over the years I'd say Pride and Prejudice because I keep going back to that over the years and re-reading it again. At the moment I'm a bit Jane Austen-ed out, so I can go another few more years without re-reading that. Hamlet – anytime a production of Hamlet comes to town I'll always go and see it.
As a kid The Children of Cherry Tree Farm was just my bible, by Enid Blyton. I knew that book inside out and backwards, I'd read it so many times. But as an adult probably non-fiction things like Dibs by Virginia Axline, because it's insight into the human mind."
I'm pretty sure I also remember him mentioning a secret fondness for romance novels as a teenager. The Blyton thing is funny because it's 1) so obvious, 2) so incongruous and 3) probably why he took to his books so enthusiastically after outgrowing Blyton.
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Date: 2010-06-06 10:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 10:48 pm (UTC)As for what else I was reading as a teen - I was reading The Silence of the Lambs next to the "Point Horror" and Christopher Pike series for teens; I was a big fan of horror, which I mixed with classics and good old angsty teen novels. Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy wasn't a series, but one of the most important books I've ever read - there's a beauty to it, this story of a boy in Darwin and his piano teacher.
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Date: 2010-06-06 10:57 pm (UTC)I will write a reply about the PUFFIN CLUB tomorrow.
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Date: 2010-06-07 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 11:34 pm (UTC)Before that... Beverly Cleary and books about collie dogs and horses.
If I had to name one book: Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence (which is definitely both YA and fantasy).
Jonathan Bogart sez:
Date: 2010-06-07 06:59 am (UTC)I was a kid in the 80s, but I wasn't a kid of the 80s -- and in fact I still think it's kind of weird when kids are into current, ongoing series. But I never understood reading as a social thing (I actually rarely understood anything as a social thing -- intense, personal, and incommunicable experiences were my default setting, so of course I became a writer to try to communicate them), and I don't even know how I would have gone about finding out about new stuff. I never knew anyone outside my family who was interested in books before I reached high school. And by then I was into Tolkien and followed standard adolescent-nerd paths until they too fed me up and I escaped into the less well-traveled wilds of Wodehouse and Sayers and learned how to follow my muse.
Re: Jonathan Bogart sez:
Date: 2010-06-08 04:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-07 08:53 am (UTC)I can't really remember any examples but all the "young adult fiction" I came into contact with seemed mildly patronising and/or excruciatingly offbase in what it thought teenagers were like (a lot of it felt dated, unsurprisingly, and then there was the usual of not actually being able to swear or talk about sex as much as we were doing - or indeed that OCD geekiness that's actually quite common to teenagers).
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Date: 2010-06-07 08:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 02:13 am (UTC)Looking at some of the other responses I do actually have a few examples - I'd classed all this stuff as "kids' books" rather than young adult/teenage fiction.
Brian Jacques' Redwall series
Colin Dann's The Animals Of Farthing Wood series
Mrs. Frisby & the Rats Of NIMH as recommended by Tal below.
It's probably true to say I was uninterested in books about human beings at that stage (I think a lot of this coincided with being given and subsequently collecting the somewhat epic Wildlife Factfile sets).
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Date: 2010-06-07 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-07 06:36 pm (UTC)I could read early and fast and so books were a breeze for me. I would like to heartily endorse R.L. Stine's Fear Street series, which are wildly violent and inappropriate for anyone under the age of 12, yet that is exactly to whom those books were marketed! When I was 11 or so, I fell pretty hard for Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, a bizarre yet imaginative tale of dimension-hopping, nausea, witches, and giant brains. Pretty much the closest thing I had to a book I treasured at that age. I should go back and re-read its sequels, though I have a vivid memory of them being enormous disappointments. The other book I was fond of was Mrs. Frisby & the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien.
If you haven't read it, Frank, I would suggest checking out For Better or For Worse. I read the books in child therapy, and I feel like they helped me gain a better understanding of how human beings interact with some degree of normalcy. Lynn Johnston has a unique ability to make the most difficult family situations funny and devastating at the same time. (One strip I remember quite well has to do with teenage alcoholism, which was the first time I ever realized that alcohol actually makes people drunk. Though it tried to convey it in a negative light, I was unreceptive.
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Date: 2010-06-07 09:02 pm (UTC)Not sure, I read a lot of books when I was younger, but they mostly seem to have left virtually no impression on me, as a whole.
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Date: 2010-06-08 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 01:31 pm (UTC)Emily sez
Date: 2010-06-08 01:18 am (UTC)C.S. Lewis (Narnia) is probably the most enduring, though -- Emily has all of them and insisted that I read them around the time we moved in together and combined our book collections. They didn't do a ton for me, though I enjoyed going along for the ride. Emily sez she liked the sense of things moving on; the idea that you can never really go back to the place that you love (there's no "back to the same adventures" in Narnia -- the characters and the places change a lot from book to book).
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 01:21 am (UTC)the puffin club
Date: 2010-06-08 03:01 pm (UTC)the puffin club was a very canny project developed by kaye webb, the chief editor of penguin paperbacks childrens' imprint, puffin, in the 60s and 70s: it bascially consisted of a quarterly magazine, full of competitions and reviews, and little articles about books and writers -- importantly, the reviews were of puffin books by their actual readers...
puffin during these decades covered the age-range 4-14 roughly (there was a teen imprint called peacock): and very asteuely gathered together handsome paperback editions of children's classics as well as new children's books -- the pay-off was that it inculcated immense pride and brand loyalty via childhood involvement in a project that was remarkably high quality (webb was a once--in-three-generations kind of a publisher i think)
for a long time puffin cornered the market in children's paperbacks: webb persuaded several rival hardback firms (allen lane being the hardback parent of penguin) that they would do better to licence the children's books they had in hardback to puffin, than start their own children's paperback imprint... by the late 70s i think this lock on the market was probably somewhat breaking down
so anyway: for me, "young adult" meant what puffin books told me it was -- their list was rich and long (see post to come for examples) and i was really quite sniffy about books from other paperback publishers (whose covers were garish and rubbishy; and whose books just never seemed as good)... the downside being that i found it incredibly difficult graduating onto slightly-less-young-adult fiction, and in a sense never quite did (i plunged into my dad's SF paperbacks; after that i was mainly reading music-writing)
Re: the puffin club
Date: 2010-06-08 03:22 pm (UTC)badges
Date: 2010-06-08 03:34 pm (UTC)the white was ordinary and the black longservice (i think three years), and i had both these; the gold was founder member -- the green i don't know
this stylised design of puffin was jill macdonald's, and her (to me irresistable) illustrations all over the puffin post (the magazine) and many of the books
Re: badges
Date: 2010-06-08 03:39 pm (UTC)Writers I would thus include (as result of puffindoctrination)
Date: 2010-06-08 04:13 pm (UTC)Leon Garfield: historical romances set in the 18th century, very pungent as regards the tension between rich and poor
Alan Garner: semi-supernatural fantasies, the clash-point between current (60s) social commentary and tolkienesque other worlds
Richard Hughes: here is Dr Vick discussing A High Wind in Jamaica with an actual real child
Tove Jansson: the moomin books, early ones aimed at younger readers but the last two especially (Moominpappa at Sea; Moominvalley in November) have an adult and an autumnal feel
William Mayne: died earlier this year, an utterly distinctive, prolific and very remarkable writer, with scores of excellent books to his name -- latterly disgraced by a horrible child abuse scandal :(
Re: Writers I would thus include (as result of puffindoctrination)
Date: 2010-06-08 06:39 pm (UTC)A few years later when I read William Faulkner's Sanctuary I thought it was very possible that he'd been thinking of Emily's testimony in High Wind when writing Temple's testimony in Sanctuary. Sanctuary has never been marketed as a children's book.
My guess is that if I had read High Wind at age 10 or so that I'd have stuck with it rather than abandoning it, and that it would have stuck with me as well, but that I'd not have enjoyed it nearly as much as the adventure and sports and SF books that I was generally reading - some of which had fairly serious themes, but none having the darkness or the insight of Hughes (though I don't assume that Hughes's darkness is necessarily more insightful than a lot of people's nondarkness).
By the way, I think marketing A High Wind In Jamaica, now, as a book for adults may be the only possibility, not because adults these days won't want their kids reading such a depiction of children, but because kids these days aren't going to read an old, not-acknowledged-as-a-classic nonadventure story, when they can choose vampires instead, or romances or - in old books - the thrills and fun of The Count Of Monte Cristo or Treasure Island.
One particularly important point: "young adult" and "juvenile" books of my time and the few decades earlier were not concerned with accurately probing and depicting what young are actually like, or could be like. They were adventure stories, or sports stories, or mysteries, or science fiction, usually featuring young men (or teens several years older than the targeted reader) engaging in daring and extraordinary behavior. The kids lit and young adult lit that comes along and actually starts to probe more accurately and imaginatively into young people's psyches - Fitzhugh, Cormier, Blume, Hinton, et al. - are just after my time. (Of course, they're surely foreshadowed by A Catcher In The Rye, which hadn't been written for the young adult market.)
The John Marsden Tomorrow series that inspired my livejournal post pushes two subgenres together: young people trying to come of age and dealing with their feelings and actual human imperfections and social uneasiness and they get to have adventures and engage in guerrilla warfare and blow things up!
Re: Writers I would thus include (as result of puffindoctrination)
Date: 2010-06-08 06:42 pm (UTC)depicting what the young are actually like
Hyphens
Date: 2010-06-08 06:48 pm (UTC)to answer the actual question
Date: 2010-06-08 09:07 pm (UTC)Leon Garfield: "Smith" -- an urchin pickpocket nabs an important document moments before his victim is knifed by sinister grown-up villains; he can't read; his idol is a highwayman -- set in early 18th century london
Alan Garner: "Elidor" -- kind of a kitchen sink version of a narnia story, set in late 50s manchester
Richard Hughes: "A High Wind in Jamaica" -- but you already read this
Tove Jansson: the late moomin books, as already advised (tho all her books are grebt); but also "the summer book", about a small child and a crabby granny on a tiny island in the finnish archipelago
William Mayne: "sand" if you can find it, about schoolkids in a small north-eastern coastal town being swallowed by the dunes; "earthfasts", about an 18th century drummerboy who falls through a timeslip into modern england, and what befalls him (also its sequels "cradlefasts" and "candlefasts"); he wrote for younger ("no more school" is terrific) but no books for grown-ups
"The Giant Under the Snow" and "The House on t5he Brink" are two terrific horror stories for teens by John Gordon
"A Hundred Million Francs" is a tremendous "gang of kids foils some crims" tale by Paul Berna
I am enomously fond of Erich Kästner, but he isn't exactly "my era"
faves
Date: 2010-06-14 07:02 pm (UTC)I'd recommend Ellen Raskin's "The Westing Game," an often hilarious murder mystery set in an apartment building. It's bitingly unsentimental in how it mocks its characters, but ultimately humane.
Also amazing is E.L. Konigsburg's "(George)", about a kid with a little man who lives inside him, which may or may not be a metaphor for a mental disorder. The conceit is played totally straight, though--as far as we're concerned, a little man lives inside the protagonist and that's that. Said kid starts going to a smart kids' school and has to deal with his teacher dating his mom. Along the way, some older kids start using him to improve their grades and they wind up manufacturing LSD (I think) in the science lab. Whenever I think about this book, I get chills and can't believe it exists. May be out of print.
Re: faves
Date: 2010-06-14 07:08 pm (UTC)My word, did I read ANY books written by men?
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 09:09 pm (UTC)http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/6/9/in-which-remember-when-is-the-lowest-form-of-conversation.html