Recommend to me a "young adult" novel from your era

[koganbot]

Tell 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 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.

Comments

Emily sez

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Lots of people have written about Emily's already -- she remembers going into libraries and picking books out almost at random, reading because she could read and enjoying an independent interaction with language. And from there you build taste clusters -- Madeleine L'Engle to Susan Cooper to Ursula Le Guin.

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).