Introduction to Focus: YA Fiction, The Vital Pulse of Today’s Fiction

If I’m being honest, I read more so-called young adult fiction than, well, adult fiction. And this not because I’m looking for insight to understand better the broody teen living under my roof. It’s the YA shelf at our local library that holds the most consistently exciting characters and storyworlds.

I’m not talking here of the usual trilogy suspects: those teen vamps and lupines of the Twilight series, those slick warrior teens of the Divergent or Hunger Games series. I think we might all still suffer fatigue — no, hangovers — from these straight-romance, violent, and seemingly dated and out of touch fictions. No. I’m thinking of the complex ways that our brains are stimulated and made creative by the works of authors such as Hanna Alkaf, Becky Albertalli, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Jason Reynolds, Meg Medina, Ashley Hope Pérez, Lila Quintero Weaver, Julie Anne Peters, Alex Sánchez, Francisco X. Stork, Sara Fariazn, Kristin Elizabeth Clark, Jenny Torres Sanchez, Matt de la Peña, Samantha Mabry, Kwame Mbalia, Rebecca Roanhorse, Cherie Dimaline, Erika T. Wurth, Aisha Saeed, Kathryn Gonzales and Karen Rayne, David Yoon, and Jacqueline Woodson. These authors create absorbing and intellectually rich teen protagonists whose intersectional identities and experiences vitally disrupt racial, sexual, gender, cognitive, physical, class, cultural, and geographic stereotypes. They create teen protagonists without condescension or the high ground of an adult author. They create intersectional-identifying protagonists who are teens, and not afterthoughts or appendages. Their storyworlds don’t reek of tokenism. Their storyworlds don’t kowtow to mainstream feigned simplicity. They do what great fiction does: open new vistas, stimulate new thoughts, sharpen affects, and challenge and subvert in often uncomfortable ways the actual and the potential ways that we exist in the world.

What is this YA fiction category anyway? I mean, if it’s meant to be fiction that features a teen protagonist or central character who approaches the world from a teen’s perspective, emotions, and thoughts, well, then most of my fave authors would fit into this groove: Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chávez, J. D. Salinger, Gautam Malkani, Hanif Kureishi, Stendhal, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Zadie Smith, André Gide, Salman Rushdie, Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Fernando del Paso, Toni Morrison, and so many more. So, I ask, does YA fiction share a certain style, form, subject matter, viewpoint? Again, a quick visit to my library and the sections where the YA fiction sits and one sees that there’s no uniform or unifying style, form, subject matter or point of view. Adding to this proliferation of categories devoid of explanatory power we now have the “New Adult” fiction category, focusing on the Gen Z, tech-savvy, hip, sexually exploratory and explicit 18-15 reader. Whether YA or NA or Whatever A, perhaps, these all simply function as convenient ways to make visible what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a “family resemblance?” This would be a rather generous explanation, for the classificatory impulse here seems more driven by marketing considerations than by theoretical or scientific concerns. In any case, what is certain is that all good YA fiction has one thing really in common: it is good literature.

Frederick Luis Aldama, Focus Editor

Another thing we can say for a certainty is that not all YA fiction is made alike. Indeed, as happens in all fiction generally, there are a rather small number of novels that we return again and again to, enjoying intellectually and emotionally the specific ways a specific author has managed to make excitingly new our perceptions, thoughts, and

feelings about the world. And, on the other hand, there are those novels we experience as largely inconsequential but that we are happy to consume and absorb as a fleeting pleasure, like we might a bucket of popcorn at a blockbuster film. In terms of the latter, and there’s no judgment being made here, there is an abundance of popcorn YA fiction out there. I think of some of the YA novels created at the interactive writing platform, Wattapp — the YouTube of...