Spirituality in Young Adult Literature: The Last Taboo by Patty Campbell (review)

Patty Campbell’s book assuredly proves her wide and close reading and knowledge of young adult novels, principally of the twenty-first century, that deal with major aspects of religion. As the book progresses, though, the distinction between religious practice and spirituality per se is often cloudy or nonexistent.

In her introduction, Campbell explores probable reasons why authors of young adult literature have not written about the spiritual questions that often trouble teens. While acknowledging that some current and past authors “have dealt with the spiritual struggle with honesty and integrity,” she laments that “there are so few writers” who deal with teenagers’ struggle with God and who have “the religious literacy for the task.” Consequently, she concludes, “a huge gap [exists in adolescent literature] where God-consciousness, or at least spiritual search, might be” (xvi). The question that she seeks, not always successfully, to answer is this: “What authors have had the conviction and the theological literacy to struggle with those spiritual questions that are so intensely troubling and important to teens?” (xviii–ix).

Campbell divides Spirituality into eight chapters and includes a ninth by Crowe. She begins each one with a brief overview of its topic, usually following with a short summary of a few titles and then a more in-depth discussion of two or more books, often (but often not) overtly connecting the content with the spiritual struggle of a character. For example, in chapter 1, “Church and Clergy: Mostly Negative,” Campbell discusses Helen Hemphill’s Long Gone Daddy, in which Warren, a Zen hippie and the son of a fundamentalist preacher, is “putting together a stew of spiritual concepts and practices that suit his quest” (5). His attitude is thus “I want to decide on my own about God and faith,” but it was his father’s way “or the highway. And . . . the highway looked pretty good” (qtd. in 6). In that same chapter, however, the young teen Pete in Cynthia Rylant’s A Fine White Dust smashes his ceramic cross, believing that it symbolizes the itinerant Preacher Man who has abandoned him. Campbell’s interpretation: Pete is “disillusioned about his faith” (2). She fails to note that this is but the beginning of his spiritual quest. He collects the pieces and dust in a paper bag, and a year later still cannot throw them away because “They’re me and God and all the powerful feelings I still have about Him. . . . I’m just ready for something whole” (Rylant 106). A Fine White Dust does in fact end according to Campbell’s dictum that “a book must end with the young person still growing, albeit with new energy and direction, still seeking answers for the Godsearch” (167), yet the meaning of that novel’s ending escapes her.

Chapter 2, “Bible Stories in Young Adult Books,” a fascinating summary both of contemporary midrashim and of novels based on stories such as those of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, and Jacob and Esau from the Old Testament, and of Mary Magdalene and Jesus’s imagined childhood from the New. But this reader was hard pressed to find any expression of overt connections with the spiritual journey of most of the protagonists. Perhaps the assumption is that the Bible stories themselves are well enough understood to be religious that any additional comment is superfluous.

To quote Campbell’s introduction once more: “In the adolescent experience, there are many turning points in the form of a conversation with a friend, a teacher, or a parent, or a book, a line of poetry, a song lyric, or a moment of realization of truth or self-knowledge where the divine breaks through. These moments are inherently spiritual, and such turning points are at the heart of many YA novels” (xviii). In subsequent chapters, Campbell quotes such passages from young adult novels, but rarely if ever does she tie them to this revelatory statement in her introduction. In...