@ The Hogwarts Professor
I post this link not for the recommendations contained within but for the claim it makes about the appeal of YA science fiction and fantasy:
Adult fiction has been overtaken by what I call The Jodi Picoult Syndrome (Picoult writes bestsellers - I’ve read two—that are literary, compelling, and... vastly depressing). This Syndrome means that a novel will plunge me into a gloomy, psychological story, full of angst, dysfunction, family secrets, rocky and wrecked marriages, creepy people, disturbed or damaged children, tragedy, forbidden love, and an ending that can’t possibly have an edifying or uplifting resolution, given the whopping freight of human misery leading up to it. Last fall I tried to read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge for a book club and the unpleasant narrator drove me away by page three.
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I’ve been raiding the library’s Young Adult bookshelves this summer, where I think the best storytelling is to be found these days. Fellow All Pro Jenna St. Hilaire agrees. “There’s less pressure to be pretentious and more freedom to hope in that genre,” she says. Unlimited by contemporary adult literary constraints, YA novels range widely in subject and genre (and combinations of genres), and are heavy on good story and characters; they entertain, move, amuse, and uplift me.
While it is true that I consider it a professional duty to compile a good list of books that I can recommend to my students - particularly my reluctant readers - I think I also read and review YA for the above-stated reason. There is a certain creativity - a "crackiness", if you will - in YA that is noticeably absent in contemporary "adult" fiction. And, with some exceptions, YA fiction is more morally centered. Today, "adult" fiction is often ponderous and off-putting; YA fiction more closely embodies Tolkien and Lewis' conception of the "fairy story."
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