I have been reading a lot of YA books while I am over here in Thailand, partly as a way to get to know my niece Selma (she is an avid reader), and partly because I actually quite enjoy reading the genre.
Thus I entered the world of Cassandra Clare, where everyone is perpetually 17 and old people are hashtag gross. In her Mortal Instruments series the characters act and speak like mature adults.
For example:
"I feel like you can look inside me and see all the places I am odd or unusual and fit your heart around them, for you are odd and unusual in just the same way. We are the same.”
in teen would be......
Like.. um you be kinda wonky and sus but that be otay, we be samesies.
and
"It's all right to love someone who doesn't love you back, as long as they're worth you loving them. As long as they deserve it."
4rl it be aight to simp in the friend zone, if they Gucci.
The head of the Shadowhunter Institute is a 24 year old women married to a man whom I suppose is the same age but acts like a 60 year old - think of the actor James Fleet who always plays the bumbling stuttering slightly posh wit nitwit (I loathe him as an actor). Spoiler alert she is succeeded as head of the Institute by the 17 year old Will by the end of the series. (By the way Shadowhunters are immortal yet there does not seem to be all that many of them. The institute has literally hundreds of beds for visiting Shadowhunters yet only 9 people, all below the age of 24, occupy it??!!!).
In fact it got to the point where I simply imagined the characters as much older than they are just to be able to keep reading. Of course there is still a fair smattering of teenage angst and annoying impetuousness. And tons of canoodling and ......SEX.
Now I read a lot of books as a teenager including books in the YA genre and there was nary a kiss let alone full on rumpy-pumpy.
Nowadays they go at it like rabbits..... after pages and pages of fluttering hearts, longing gazes and "will they, won't they." They are also very tall; the girls are pretty, but the boys are beautiful; all corded muscle and testosterone.
Whilst conceding that these books are pure fantasy and very nearly the equivalent of Mills & Boon for teenagers, I wonder whether they set up an expectation for children that they will always be able to act wilfully and get their own way, and naturally will succeed at everything they do, seemingly with little graft, but rather because of their innate natural abilities. Spoiler alert- most of us are JUST not that naturally gifted!!!! To be fair, they do train a lot with swords and morning stars etc but us mere mortals also train (at sports etc) and remain stonkingly average.
I do applaud the fact that these books embrace diversity with LGBTI and non-Caucasian characters. I am not even censorious of the sex. What these books do have is copious amounts of extreme violence. They also encourage revenge narratives, in which death is the metered out justice. This is symptomatic of a larger problem in entertainment, where casual violence is often cartoonish and inserted for cheap laughs.
These are not bad books per se. They are highly appealing to the young reader and a great way to get kids interested in at least picking up a book. The real dividend however is for readers to realise in the end the inherent limitations of the genre, and to move onto more challenging reading material. For example Cassandra Clare very cleverly salts her books with copious references to classics in literature like Jane Eyre and direct quotes from great poets of the romantic age like Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Keats.
I remain hopeful that Selma will read Jane Eyre. Unfortunately Selma gave Pride and Prejudice a bad book rating but I am confident she will like Jane Eyre better.
That's it for now. Until next time. Toodle-pip or as the teenies say bubi!
POST SCRIPT
Selma says that the Shadow hunters are not immortal. Apparently they actually die early from fighting and stuff. They just have AWESOME powers. My bad.
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