Teens and the New Religious Landscape: Essays on Contemporary Young Adult Fiction ed. by Jacob Stratman (review)

Teens and the New Religious Landscape is a welcome collection of essays addressing a topic that has often been excluded by academic scholars—religion—and its reemergence in contemporary young adult literature. Jacob Stratman is well qualified to lead the effort: not only has he edited a previous collection of essays, Lessons in Disability: Essays on Teaching with Young Adult Literature (2016), but he has also written about the Christian tradition in American literature, as in "Harriet Beecher Stowe's Preachers of the Swamp: Dred and the Jeremiad" in Christianity and Literature (2008), and is supported by "administrators, my colleagues, and my students" at his home institution, John Brown University, a private Christian college in northwestern Arkansas ("Acknowledgments").

This volume is not celebrating the reemergence of religion in YA texts, however, as much as it is complicating that reemergence. Collectively, the essays interrogate the concept of postsecularism itself and the various contemporary YA novels that promote a religion even as they acknowledge that such a religion may be secularized beyond any orthodox creed. Beginning with a useful introduction by Stratman exploring the landscape of YA fiction in general, the collection turns next to the opening chapter ("Postsecular Young Adult Literature; or, Harry Potter and the New Religious Landscape") by Paul T. Corrigan, who investigates scholars' heterogeneous characterizations of postsecularism. Corrigan concludes that "Concepts of the postsecular emerge out of, and in an attempt to understand, the new, messy religious landscape in which we find ourselves … consistent with its understanding that pluralism, science, and other facets of modernism would exert an effect, the world is not always religious in the traditional ways. Post-secular theory works to make sense of all this…. postsecular literature doesn't just explore the postsecular; it also enacts it" (16).

True to this last statement, the rest of the thirteen essays probe the complex approaches of contemporary YA fiction writers from both traditional and nontraditional religious perspectives, with impressive coverage of both YA literature and religious plurality. Focusing on traditional religions of all types, and in no particular order, the essay authors cover YA literature's engagement with Islam (Fatema Johera Ahmed's "Young Adult Fiction, Diaspora and the 'Muslim' Question: A Study of Faith and Feminism in Randa Abdel-Fattah's Novels"), Judaism (Patricia F. D'Ascoli's "Learning to Be Jewish in The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah and Confessions of a Closet Catholic), Quakerism (Katelyn R. Browne's "'Stick up for these crazy stupid things': Emily Horner's Queer Quaker Road Trip Novel"), Hinduism (Rizia Begum Lakskar's "Performing God: Kiran and Krishna in Rakesh Satyal's Blue Boy), Taoism (David S. Hogsette's "The Way of the Fantasist: Ethical Complexities in the Taoist Mythopoeic Fantasy of Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea), and Christianity (Erin Wyble Newcomb's "The Language of Magic and Prayer: Intercession in the Works of Merrie Haskell" and Susan Leigh Brooks's "The Book Worlds of Nikki Grimes: An Invitation to Dialogic Reading"). Other essays investigate religious extremism (Carissa Turner Smith's "Postsecular Cosplay, Fundamentalism and Martyrdom in Gene Luen Yang's Boxers and Saints) and self-made spirituality outside mainstream religion (Stratman's "The Customized Religion: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, American Teenagers and Pete Hautman's Godless). Essays on the novels of N. D. Wilson (by Jeremy Larson), Brian Meehl (by Carrie Myers) and Gene Luen Yang (by Shih-Wen Sue Chen) round out the volume. The coverage is impressive and immerses the reader in a plethora of literary texts, religious perspectives, and engaging arguments.

Furthermore, despite the large number of essays there is a common approach to every essay and engagement with postsecular theory at some level, a unity not always found in such collections. This is because Stratman guided contributors through three or four common questions (2) to achieve an impressive concord of conversation despite the variety of topics. The contributors' backgrounds are almost as richly diverse as the...