Category: YA Wallpaper

Starting The YA Wallpaper with Gretchen has been a lot of fun. We’re just getting going and I think we’re doing something different from what anyone else is doing when they engage the genre. We’re taking it on its own terms: YA is a serious genre taking on serious issues and expects more of its readers than most people expect when they hear the words “Young Adult Fiction.”

Our ethic isn’t just to review books, to give them stars or tell you what to read. We’re not a book club-style review vlog. Our review ethic is to assume that these writers are good craftsmen/women, skilled at storytelling. We believe that reading these books will be a good time in the story department and we gladly throw ourselves into wholehearted suspension of disbelief and enter the adventures of fictional worlds.

But we also assume that these authors are thoughtful people, writing to say something, hopefully not just writing to meet a book deal obligation. And we assume that authorial intent stops when the book hits the shelves and the author is responsible for what they’ve written, not what they meant to write.

We’re writers, too. This is painful to accept and so we expect everyone, including ourselves, to be thoughtful and respectful about this. We’re learning the ropes and we’re responsible for our words, too. Hold us to that.

But here’s the thing: young readers are significantly impacted by this genre. I remember being thirteen and earnestly believing that Anne Shirley’s love life actually represented a fraction of reality. I remember positioning myself socially as if I was Jo March, and I remember mentally breaking out of the cycle of gaslighting in my church because of Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Most authors aren’t Ray Bradbury or Margaret Atwood, I get it. One reason I love YA is because it’s not the constipated social world of NYC literati. But if YA is “a thing” now and if it’s going to be taken seriously and if it’s more than just a marketing label, then it’s appropriate to level serious literary criticism at the bestselling YA works and see how they stand up to the ideas they seem to espouse (namely, feminism and intersectionality).

The YA Wallpaper isn’t about singling out an author or a book. We still love a good story. None of our criticism is intended as a personal attack against any author.

Instead, it’s about taking account of the state of the genre and asking the questions we’d want to be asked if our fiction was published. The genre has turned a corner and has blossomed and matured in remarkable ways in the last few years, and we feel that not only is it ready to handle our questions, but it would be disrespectful to the craft and to the genre as a whole if we checked our critic’s hats at the front page.

So, let’s talk tropes. Let’s talk feminism. Let’s talk social norms. Let’s ask hard questions about the genre, since, after all, the genre is certainly daring to ask hard questions about its audience and its world. And we’re pretty excited about that.