Just Us Girls: The Contemporary African American Young Adult Novel (review)

Wendy Rountree's Just Us Girls helps to fill a significant gap in young adult literary criticism. In this onehundred page, accessible analytical work, Rountree offers an engaging examination of the novels of a number of African American women who write young adult fiction. In the introduction she asserts that African American women writers tend to write about many of the same issues whether they're writing for adults or for young adults. She justifies this overlap by arguing that

Perhaps, because the root causes of these primary issues such as racism and sexism are so deeply entrenched in social, political, and economic institutions and society in general, these issues are never "solved" in literature or real life but are psychologically "managed" by African Americans . . . The function of African American children's and young adult literature is to teach young African Americans how to deal with these issues, not necessarily solve them, so that racism and sexism do not hinder their lives irrevocably.

(2)

Ultimately, Rountree claims that the role of African American young adult literature has not changed markedly since its inception; what's more, she suggests that black female identity is much more conflicted and complex than that of white teens, an idea that strongly influences this genre designed with black teens in mind. She quotes from Virginia Henderson's 1991 book Multicolored Mirror: Cultural Substance in Literature for Children and Young Adults, in which Henderson writes that "an African-American child born today will greet a world where racism, sexism, classism, handicapism, and a variety of other '-isms' continue to be subtly and blatantly at work" (3). In fact, if we consider the first magazine specifically designed for African American youth, or "Children of the Sun," as the editors labeled them—the Brownies' Book Magazine—we find a number of principles that also underpin black young adult fiction, perhaps the most relevant of these being "to make colored children realize that being colored is a normal, beautiful thing" (103). Though much has changed since 1920–21 when the Brownies' Book Magazine was published, Rountree's argument emphasizes that African American girls still need to be affirmed.

Though Rountree argues that the contemporary genre serves a similar function now as it did more than eighty years ago, she also effectively argues that African American young adult literature has transformed other literary forms—namely, the Bildungsroman, a genre that traditionally featured a white male character. In the seven chapters of this volume, Rountree demonstrates just how that transformation has materialized in specific works by Mildred Pitts Walter, Rita Williams-Garcia, Rosa Guy, Virginia Hamilton, Candy Dawson Boyd, and Deborah Gregory, and in three different chapters Rountree focuses on works by Jacqueline Woodson.

Chapter 1 takes as its critical lens Robert Stepto's idea of the "ritual grounds" to analyze the relationship of African Americans to their community. "Ritual grounds," sites that stand apart from the dominant society, tend to be safe spaces for black young people, but they can also be undermined by the dominant society of which they are a (generally marginalized) part (10). Using these ideas, Rountree examines the ways that Martha, the protagonist of Mildred Pitts Walter's Trouble's Child, finds strength but also oppression in her rural, African American island culture off the coast of Louisiana. Even though Martha identifies with her culture, she envisions a different life for herself than that ascribed by the traditions of her community. In this chapter Rountree offers an extensive comparison between Martha's situation and that of Janie, the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, which provides some excellent historical and literary contextualization for the contemporary work and further strengthens Rountree's argument that African American women writers tend to cover some of the same thematic ground whether they're writing for adults or for young adults. In fact, Rountree's use of "adult" African American literature as comparative touchstones several times...