Breathlessly Awaiting the Next Installment: Revealing the Complexity of Young Adult Literature

In 1996, Michael Cart noted that “even to try to define the phrase ‘young adult (or adolescent) literature’ can be migraine inducing” (8; emphasis in original). Although the academic field has expanded in the ensuing years since Cart published these words, attempts to define this literature remain inevitably fraught. Amy Pattee’s Sweet Valley High companion to Janice Radway’s groundbreaking 1984 study, Reading the Romance, and David Cappella’s special Studies in the Novel double issue on young adult literature do not provide a definition per se, but rather gesture toward new ways of contemplating young adult literature.

While New Critical analyses continue to dominate these texts, the range of topics, theories, and methodologies suggests that current criticism of young adult literature is consciously seeking new paths of analysis. The effect of reading these texts together is thus one of hopeful optimism; if we continue to explore new ways of interpreting young adult literature, we may find an even greater diversity of subjects, methodological issues, and social implications, all of which work together to, as Cappella suggests, “reveal the genre’s complexity” (9).

That complexity is quickly apparent in Pattee’s study. The strength of her argument lies in her careful weaving together and contextualization of historical and ideological backgrounds with textual analysis and readers’ reactions. Chapters one and two, which focus respectively on a historical background to the Sweet Valley High series in relation to the evolution of young adult fiction, and on the political and ideological contextualization surrounding the series’ publication during the “moral panic” of the Reagan era, are to my mind the most provocative elements of Reading the Adolescent Romance, and I will return to them shortly. The remaining chapters collectively support many of the ideas proposed in the first section by focusing on textual analysis of the series (chapter three) in relation to its readership (chapter four), its spin-off, SVH: Senior Year (chapter five), and its legacy (chapter six). These four latter portions articulate a carefully constructed feminist overview of the series’ use of adult and young adult romance conventions, while also focusing on its initial readers’ remembered experiences and interpretations as well as those of online “anti-fans.” Together, the six chapters demonstrate not only the importance of a critical investigation of Sweet Valley High, but the necessity for it.

Chapter one, “Now Entering Sweet Valley, California: The Evolution of Young Adult Literature and the ‘Sweet Valley High’ Series,” provides the historical background to the emergence of these novels. Although Pattee’s analysis may feel a bit glossed at times—and perhaps necessarily so—she does an admirable job of articulating myriad changes in both the content and the marketing of young adult literature from the 1940s through the 1980s. First came the mid-century “junior novels,” those heavily gendered texts of dating and popularity (for girls) or sports and teen racing culture (for boys). Since Pattee alludes throughout her text to the similarities between the new teen romance novels of the 1980s and the junior novels of the 1940s (including Maureen Daly’s wellspring text, Seventeenth Summer), I would be interested in a further exploration of the connections between these texts, particularly in terms of those written by such authors as Betty Cavanna, Rosamond du Jardin, and Janet Lambert, whose texts—like Pascal’s—continue to be often criticized as “inferior” literature because of their

Saturday Evening Post world of white faces and white picket fences surrounding small-town, middle-class lives where the worst thing that could happen would be a misunderstanding that threatened to leave someone dateless for the junior prom.

(Cart 21)

Pattee’s brief concentration on Daly, John Tunis, and Henry Felson is entirely appropriate, however, since these three authors ushered in not only the junior novel genre, but, with their...