yes, YA gets a spot on my shelf (duh)
Eight books written for children that I’m not embarrassed to have read this year, with or without my five year-old:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo
Legends of Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke
Herman and Rosie by Gus Gordon
On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr
Freckles by Gene Stratton Porter
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
I’d rather not engage the silliness of that months-old Ruth Graham article at Slate {“Against YA”} because -really- how can anybody take it seriously when someone makes a blanket statement like “Adults should be embarrassed to read books written for children.” That’s just silly. What a total lack of nuance! Why are we even still talking about this?
But apparently the world takes it seriously. So here we go.
My friend Christiana is running a short series of guest posts about YA books we’re not ashamed to read. I wrote about Rainbow Rowell’s beautiful Eleanor & Park -and why it might qualify as “literary fiction” even more than Romeo and Juliet does. Let me convince you...