Passions and Pleasures: Essays and Speeches about Literature and Libraries (review)

Eclectic. Engaging. Accessible. Passionate. Pleasurable. Michael Cart's essays and speeches about literature and libraries are all these and more. Spanning nearly twenty years, these pieces taken separately offer individual snapshots of the issues, the challenges, the triumphs, and the individuals central to libraries and young adult literature during perhaps the most mutable decades of both fields. Taken together, Cart's collection sounds a clear call for action from advocates of both youth and young adult literature alike, for, in Cart's words, lives are at stake.

Michael Cart's passion for libraries and literature began in his small hometown of Logansport, Indiana, when, as an outcast and misfit child, he found sanctuary in the public library and the books it held. In a long career as variously the director of the Beverly Hills Public Library, a professor of young adult literature, a Booklist columnist and reviewer, a president of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), an author and editor, and a recipient of the Grolier Foundation Award for distinguished contributions to young people and literature, Cart has created, maintained, even demanded sanctuary for all library users and readers, but for young adults in particular. His thoughts and words on the subject form a unique addition to the titles in the Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature series. Dipping into a single relevant essay or reading the whole collection will prove equally fruitful to students of young adult literature and library science, while Cart's extensive reference lists, bibliographies, and detailed index point his readers toward further resources and research.

Cart groups his essays and speeches thematically, rather than strictly chronologically. The first section, "A New Golden Age: The Renaissance of Young Adult Literature," serves to review the evolution—even revolution—in young adult literature since the early 1990s. Three selections form the backbone for this section while the remaining flesh out his thoughts on this renaissance.

In a speech delivered at a 1994 YALSA preconference session, "Of Risk and Revelation: The Current State of Young Adult Literature," Cart explores the assertion that young adult literature is dead. He reviews its history and, drawing on his experience among librarians, book sellers, and publishers, recognizes that YA literature, like its readers, is at risk. In no uncertain terms Cart calls his listeners to action: "YA literature must continue to test those boundaries and to risk expanding them if it is to be relevant to the lives of the most at-risk generation of YAs in our history" (18). He has very definite ideas about YA books, which he believes "must constitute a realistic literature inhabited by complex characters whose lives, both exterior and interior, invite us not only to empathize but also to think" (19). He is passionate about the need for inclusiveness in this literature and he declares that it "must give faces to all YAs—straight and gay, white and black and brown, native born and newly immigrant, homeless, impoverished, endangered, afraid" (20).

Cart's declarations proved prophetic as his triumphant 2005 speech for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators' conference reveals. "Young Adult Literature: The State of a Restless Art" trumpets the new generation of writers who did emerge, writers who grappled with realistic issues and complex characters, characters who represent the whole spectrum of YA voices and faces. YA literature was not silenced. In that outspoken decade, Cart, as president of YALSA, made his particular contribution to a formal validation of young adult literature through the creation of the Michael L. Printz Award "to be presented annually by YALSA to the author of the best young adult book of the year, 'best' being defined solely by literary merit" (33). He outlines the gestation of this award in the workmanlike "Creating the Michael L. Printz Award: A New Book Prize for a New Millennium."

In the second section of Passions and Pleasures, "The Insiders Come Out: Gay and Lesbian Literature for Young Adults," Cart traces the relatively recent...