Facing graduation next semester, I’ve been steadily avoiding the big, scary idea of adulting. I have taken refuge in young adult, or YA, fiction, despite its reputation as a teenage genre. After all, I never moved on from “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.”
Young adult novels offer an abundance of perspectives that can contribute to our academic and personal learning experiences in college, yet they are often overlooked by the academic world and even by students as we have “grown out of” them. Despite this misconception, young adult novels still have a lot to offer students as they are easily accessible, offering consumable literature of different perspectives.
Young adult novels have shaped many of our childhoods, through both the actual novels and the TV adaptations of them. Series like “The Hunger Games,” “Harry Potter,” or “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” offer insight into politics, equality, social classes, mistreatment of others and diverse perspectives through a digestible way of writing. Yet, it’s still often dismissed and put behind us in college for other, more mature content.
“People still think that (YA novels) are not serious academic areas of study … (but) you can do extraordinary things, within comics, within YA fiction, within the constraints of those different, what we call ‘narrative affordances,’” said Frederick Luis Aldama, Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker chair in the humanities and young adult author. “Those narratives and their conceits afford us to do extraordinary things, just as you can with adult fiction or with serious, so-called high-brow art. It just depends on the intent of the creator.”
While not all young adult literature and media will resonate with an older audience, much of the young adult genre covers serious and mature topics in a way that can be easier to understand and connect with. This is more important than ever when students are now meant to educate themselves on a variety of topics to maintain media literacy. Young adult literature also offers an outlet outside of social media and online sources, allowing for a break from our screens.
“(YA novels) are marketed to a younger reader, and that’s important, especially with the distractions and the kind of temptations of social media,” Aldama said. “(For example), young people reading long-form fiction instead of just swiping and doing shallow, superficial engagement with information … (is) really important.”
Even if it’s just taking the time to reread novels you used to love, reading YA content can prove beneficial to college students. Many students have grown and changed since they last read their past favorite young adult novels, and they can learn so much more from reading them now. Different and diverse perspectives are always a topic that students can learn from as we mature and change.
“Even if you reread a book, your brain then versus your brain now is so much more developed, and you have more lived experience,” social work junior Mia Duarte said. “You can understand (a phrase) stylistically or just the true meaning behind it (that) you didn’t understand before (but) maybe do now. Sometimes, you’re closer to the age that the people in the book are than you were when you read it.”
Despite its applications to a broad audience, YA is often overlooked or misunderstood as immature. Recognizing the genre’s value to twenty-somethings and beyond allows students to garner newfound lessons in their favorite stories.
I encourage students to take a break from the stress and confusion of the world and read a young adult novel. Enjoy a story and maybe learn something new.
Rail is an English, anthropology and rhetoric and writing senior from El Paso, Texas.
