Why I Can't Relate to YA: Celebrating 18 Years of Dreams and Displacement

Today, I turned 18.

This means a variety of things - one, I will face much harsher ramifications should I ever entangle myself in something on the wrong side of the law; two, I'm now able to buy things like scissors, razor blades and glue sticks that I was not considered responsible enough to wield yesterday; and three . . . I'm an adult.

In the eyes of society, the law, and the planet at large - I am an adult. And now that I am an adult, I must leave the world of childhood behind, embark the greater journey of life, fulfil conventional expectations of having a career, producing offspring, and entering into the slow biological breakdown that will eventually require legal documentation to prevent the aforementioned offspring fighting to the death over whatever possessions I may leave behind me.

I'm still waiting for the memo on that, but I'm pretty sure that's the gist of it.

However, during my ten-minute existential crisis upon waking up with this realisation in my head, I began to wonder what I left behind as the official constitution of my now complete "childhood".

Inevitably, my thoughts turned to books. The books I remembered from various stages of my life, the ones that had piqued interests and raised questions and shaped me into the person I am today.

And I realised something odd. There were not many "Young Adult" books on that list.

Admittedly, as the child whose reading age broke the scale at eight, I wasn't overmuch surprised by this, but it did get me thinking. I've read a lot of YA in my time - heck, I wrote and published a YA book! - but, for some reason, there aren't a lot of books from that range that have stuck with me.

Lying there in the dim pre-dawn of new adulthood, dwelling on this conundrum, I finally realised why.

The Young Adult demographic is very specific, and thus it is incredibly sensitive to the sort of themes and topics it will bring up to best engage with that age group. Taking a "young adult" to mean someone between fifteen and seventeen (just off the cuff, I'm not aware of any official figures), we're looking at people who don't yet have the life experience and range of possibilities that adults do, but are probably starting to develop an awareness and interest in those possibilities, as well as a keen-ness to explore them.

Thus it's no wonder that many YA novels feature themes that such people can relate to, and one of the biggest is a desire for elsewhere. I can't remember many YA protagonists who weren't interested in places and worlds beyond theirs, who wanted travel and experience, who faced challenges of displacement and adaptation to new places and people. There's a good reason every other hero or heroine is the "new boy/girl in town".

There, I realised, was my problem. These people yearned for things - travel, new places, new people - that I encountered regularly. Bi-annually, practically. I find it incredibly hard to find the romance and attraction in something that has been a part of my life since before I can properly remember it. What's worse, I have very little sympathy for those characters who make a big deal out of it - those wretched moody teens who spend the first week in a new place brooding in their room because they don't like the new place, all the neighbours are dweebs, no one understands them, nyeh nyeh nyeh, my life sucks, sympathise with me. Tough cookies, kid - get up and get on with it. I deal with it, why shouldn't you?

It's a little hard to engage with a story you've already lived out thirteen times.

I reckon this also explains another strange readerly quirk of mine - I find it hard to engage with younger characters. This issue wasn't so bad when I was younger, because the focus was usually on some other aspect, outside the 'coming of age' dynamic, but as I got older I became more and more aware of the fact that these characters were all aiming for things that I already knew about. Their subjects of fascination were my reality, their 'normality' that one thing I had never experienced for proper.

Perhaps that's why, to this day, I still find it easier to bond with adult characters. They don't focus as much on unfulfilled burning ambitions for a romanticised ideal of travel, and their stories don't, in turn, focus on a 'fish out of water', 'coming of age' arc. These characters had other concerns, many of which I  hadn't felt before, but at the same time their extra life-experience gave me extra grounds for sympathy - I could relate to and engage with someone for whom upheaval was a regular occurrence much better than I could with someone going through it for the first time, whining and all.

Now, that doesn't mean to say I feel deprived - I wouldn't trade my life for anyone else's, cardboard boxes, culture shocks and all - but nevertheless, I feel like I'm not the only oft-displaced youngster who's felt a similar disconnection to the multitudes of conventional 'everyday' narrators of YA. What's more, I think this is a silly oversight - kids like me who constantly face the loss of friends, unfamiliar environments, and horrifically long plane flights, will often be of a greater inclination to turn to books for familiarity and comfort. I can't name a town or country of origin, but I can tell you a hundred and one fictional worlds that remain just as much 'home' to me as my current postal address.

An unconventional background has, by no means, alienated me entirely from YA - and doubtless the same is true for the other countless battalions of others like me. Nevertheless, it just goes to show how much bearing one's life experience can have on one's relationship with such a demographic-specific grouping as YA.

What about all of you? What do you think of the relationship between life experience engagement with a narrative? Are there any themes that you, like me, avoid due to either apathy or over-familiarity? Leave a comment, and let me know!

Who knows - commenters might even get a share of my birthday cake.

~ Charley R

Hailsham and Humanity - Charley R Reviews "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.

And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.

A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.

***

If I'm honest, I doubt I would have picked this book up if it weren't on my set text list for the dystopian unit of our English Literature course next year (which, actually, I'm ridiculously excited about). While I found the tale's premise - a mysterious school, students who know they are different from their carers, but can't quite work out why, strange inconsistencies and little happenings that point to a darker undertone - intriguing, "Never Let Me Go" is not the sort of book I would usually pick up under my own steam.

With all the awards the book has won, I suppose I was probably being a little bit over-expectant. The sheer number of my schoolmates who have told me I simply have to read the book is somewhere beyond the reach of my fingers, and that's without mentioning my teachers harping on about it. 

I myself wasn't so sure. The opening sentences of the story look like the sort of thing I used to open a story with when I was about thirteen - a standard, rather uninteresting introduction to the character and their current situation. For me, one of the crucial things in a first person narrative, is the tone of the narrator, and how that helps me engage with them and their story. Kathy H, unfortunately, was not a character I was encouraged to be terribly interested in. I found her rather bland, uninteresting, and perhaps even a little self-absorbed. Though a few short divergents in the text indicate that she is writing as if someone is reading (things like "I don't know what it's like where you came from"), she doesn't seem particularly interested in engaging with us.

Kathy's recollections of her childhood and youth do not come to us in chronological order, which does save the uninspiring narrative voice somewhat - encouraging the reader to keep up with a stream of consciousness in your lead character is always a fun way of drawing them into a story. Learning about Kathy's life and world is interesting too, as a lot of the time we have to make our own links between the significance of certain events (Kathy, at least, seems to believe her readership has enough of a brain to follow where she's leading without needing a re-cap every three pages).

Hailsham itself is rather fascinating, although it may have been a little less so for me, as I happen to live in a boarding school instituation, and thus the novelty of such an environment had long since become normal. Little things seem to matter so much more to the characters there, and we find ourselves poking our noses through proverbial windows to wonder why. Unfortunately, the characters we follow were - I thought - rather uninspiring. Aside from Kathy, we only really meet two others in any great detail. While Tommy's childishly innocent approach to life is endearing at first, I very swiftly grew irritated with his cluelessness over even the most basic situations, and as for Ruth . . . maybe I saw too much of my own self-aggrandising side in her, because I spent more of the book than I would like to admit wishing to reach through the text and bash her face into a wall.

That said, however, the characters were very well presented, and realistic, given their circumstances. Even though I never grew fond of, or terribly interested in, any of the characters, it was fascinating to see how their sheltered, detached lifestyle altered their views on everything from food to clothes to more *ahem* intimate doings behind closed doors. Though the relationship that later develops between Kathy and Tommy was one of the most unrealistic romances I have ever read, their thought processes and background made the whole experience that bit more credible - not to mention creepy.

Overall, though, I would not rate this story as highly as many others might do - a three stars from a proverbial five, perhaps. While the setting and background is intriguing, the drab, unlikeable characters and hum-drum narrative style (there is never much sense of tension, or any emotion beyond the occasional unfriendly spat between the characters, thanks to Kathy's voice). This, coupled with the fact that the "alarming" plot twist at the end is presented in such an uninspiring way - not to mention the fact that most readers will probably have worked it all out by about ten chapters before we're supposed to - mean the story never quite achieves the shock and emotion it might otherwise have achieved.

"Never Let Me Go" is available from all major ebook and paper-book sources.

~Charley R

P.S. Don't forget to keep your "Writerly Tips" suggestions coming!

It All Ends Here ... Or Does It?

Last night marked the end of my childhood. Sitting in a squishy chair, with a pair of funny black glasses balanced on the end of my nose, an over-priced Pick 'n' Mix in my lap and with my stomach doing backflips in my belly, I watched as the story that has captivated thousands like me finally came to an end.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two.

The story has spanned seven books, eight films, fourteen years, and more money than I could hope to count in a lifetime. It's made household names of Radcliffe, Watson and Grint, and allowed me to convince every small child I babysit that, because I go to boarding school, I can - and will - turn them into frogs if they don't go to bed on time.

But it meant more than that to me. I grew up with these books, and one of my earliest memories is of sitting outside on a chilly evening in Germany, listening to my dad read to me about the odious Dursley family, and whispering the street name to myself. Number Four, Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.

To me, Harry, Ron and Hermione's world was more than just an entertaining story. Hogwarts, like Narnia, Middle Earth and countless other fantastic worlds, became my second home through a childhood that was not always as pleasant as one would like. Whenever I was sad, I would retreat inside the story, and comfort myself that, at least, I wasn't expected to keep my dignity when faced with Moaning Myrtle in a bubble bath.

But now, if the media hype is to be believed, it is all over. The last book is out, the last movie finished, and the actors and actresses who brought Rowling's marvelous creations to life are all moving on to bigger things in the outside world.

Harry Potter is over.

Or is it?

Can a story, really, end? Is one telling enough to exhaust it? Is it just a fad, like suspenders and mullet haircuts, that, having lived out its glory days, will fade away until nobody remembers it? Will I one day walk into a bookstore and have someone say to me "Harry who?"

I don't think so. Stories aren't that easy to get rid of. Stories aren't one-use goods, seen once and gone with a miserable puff of black smoke, vanishing faster than a house elf. Stories can come back time and time again and, whether it's the first, or the hundred-thousandth time you've heard it, the ones you love will always kindle that little spark inside your soul. They'll always be there, like an old friend or treasured toy from childhood, waiting to welcome you back into the world you have come to love so much, and take you on the travels with the characters who first enchanted you all that time ago, ready to vanish into adventures beyond your wildest dreams.

The last film be over, but, like every true classic - and yes, I think this is a true classic of children's literature - it will never, really, be gone. I, at least, will certainly make a point of reading the story of the green-eyed bespectacled teenage wizard to whatever children, god-children or any other form of young friend or relative I may come to know in future, and I know I'm not alone. That's what stories are for; for sharing and passing on the magic, for bringing people together in the shared love of a tale, whatever it may be.

The franchise has ended.
The story never will.