The Critical Merits of Young Adult Literature: Coming of Age ed. by Crag Hill (review)

In the preface to this critical study, editor Crag Hill succinctly summarizes the chapters that follow as “interrogat[ing] one or more YA novels in a conceptual framework . . . [and] offer[ing] a springboard in secondary and college classrooms for substantive critical discussion of these (and many other) novels” (xiv). With a target audience of teachers and librarians, this text establishes the scholars’ conceptual and pragmatic concerns regarding young adult literature, beginning with Hill’s first chapter, in which he discusses multiple definitions of literature for this age group before outlining the three fronts on which he argues that the literature’s profile can be heightened. Hill describes each front, the first of which pertains to finding relevant books for all kinds of readers and the second to designing strong pedagogical strategies, but it is the third front, “build[ing] and aggressively present[ing] the critical merit of the field,” that is identified as the primary focus of this text (8). The former two fronts are definitely not overlooked by the scholars included in this collection, however, as not only does the final chapter function solely as a thirty-page annotated bibliography of both young adult literature studies and complementary young adult texts for classroom use, but the analyses contained in the critical essays that precede this resource often include discussions of adolescent readers and/ or pedagogical suggestions for teachers of various grade levels.

Robust considerations of identity are evident throughout each of the seven essays included in this volume. In the first essay (chapter 2), Janet Alsup argues that through reading young adult literature, adolescent readers—who due to their biological and cultural circumstances are “experiencing rapid emotional, social, and cognitive growth”—can gain a better understanding of their own and their peers’ “multiple and ever-changing” identities (35, 33). In chapter 3, Mark A. Lewis and E. Sybil Durand use a “Youth Lens” to a) analyze how literary themes in four young adult texts reify and complicate normative views of adolescents’ sexualities, and b) examine how “adolescence and adolescents serve as metaphorical commentary on larger society meanings and concerns” (41). Lewis and Durand advocate for the incorporation of adolescent literature into middle and high school classrooms, arguing that doing so offers students a pathway to critically examining texts and exploring how these portrayals inform their own experiences. The benefits of increasing this literature’s presence in the classroom become of further interest in chapter 4, with sj Miller’s argument—grounded in Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performance—emphasizing the need for teachers to move away from a binary understanding of gender in order to “catch up to where our students are in their embodied and lived identities” (69). Through Miller’s analysis of Liar, this chapter strikingly showcases how the inclusion of nonbinary ideas in the classroom can lead students not only to question normative views of gender, but also to “challenge power differentials, deconstruct and reconstruct ideas . . . develop agency and social action . . . and provide space for the unpredictable to emerge” (69).

Janine Darragh and Hill provide a bleak but necessary interrogation of adolescent literature in chapter 5, as their analysis of four young adult texts brings to light the troubling realization that “while in some ways YA literature is mirroring the face of poverty in the United States today, in other ways it may be fostering negative stereotypes about poverty, particularly in terms of how women in general, and mothers in particular, are portrayed” (88). While the focal subjects in this collection’s other chapters are often encountered inside and outside the classroom (with the possible exception of chapter 7’s ecocriticism focus), this spotlight on the issue of poverty and its connections to gender and mental illness creates a strong springboard for a classroom discussion on a daunting societal issue that is not often included in the curriculum. The potential for instigating critical analysis and discourse seen in this chapter and...