Fall Semester Highlights: Part II, the Books!

YA Insights!

I love teaching YA literature. I should note that I structured the class this semester so that students led the discussion on Tuesdays before I said anything about the books. And though it was really hard, I kept my mouth shut those days, allowing them to dig in to what they cared about. Here are some of the insights gleaned from different books:

This Side of Home: So much love for this book. My students (in particular the drunk ones—see above) really appreciated the dialogism of this novel. We had talked about “the dangers of a single story” as we compared the ideologies of X-Indian Chronicles with Absolutely True Diary, but they noted how this single novel manages to present multiple views on gentrification, which set us up for…

Shadowshaper: The discussion leader in one of my classes is from a Latinx neighborhood in Chicago called Pilsen, so he gave us a virtual tour of the beautiful murals that are in danger of being destroyed because of gentrification. Contrasting this book to This Side of Home, we considered how Older’s use of horror as a genre strongly but subtly develops and reinforces a single perspective on gentrification and cultural appropriation (it’s bad), unlike the embrace of change balanced with Sankofa in Watson’s text.

Kids Like Us: My big-hearted students loved this character, and wanted to talk about ways that “we” could stop othering “them,” that is, neurodiverse kids. Stop it—their unreflective irony was coming from a very compassionate place! So I designed a group assignment that helped them see how much “we” are like “them,” not to minimize differences, but to expand their “we” and shrink their “thems.” They called it: TMW we realized how much we are like Martin.

Bull: They figured out how the poetry worked before reading the author’s note about how the poetry worked, and were so proud of themselves. I was proud of them too, especially when their insights were developed than those in the author’s note. But then they asked what makes this a YA book, and what makes the myth relevant for today. So I went very carefully through the minotaur’s poems as they chart his development from a three-year-old to a teenager. And I tried the teaching method I suggest in the forthcoming Options for Teaching YA Literature on how to teach verse novels—borrowing Donald Hall’s technique of reading a book backwards, we were able to understand that Pasiphae’s madness came about because of a misunderstanding about consent. Poseidon made her lust after the white bull. At first she thinks she did give consent to their union, and tries to make the best of things, but as she falls apart, the word she never got to say becomes the dominant word in her poems: NO. Fifteen-year-old Ariadne offers another perspective on consent: she does freely fall for Theseus, but she places her trust in him too completely, and he betrays her. So there is a cautionary tale here about youth and consent that is hard to swallow, but that grounds our contemporary laws about statutory rape. So, we discovered why this book, which most students counted as their favorite of the semester, is deeply relevant to contemporary young adults.

All the Bright Places: When I first read this book, I thought, Niven is trying to do for mental illness what John Green did for cancer in The Fault in our Stars. That message really came through for my students. As one of my students noted: Finch didn’t kill himself; his bipolar disease killed him. But then one of my students noticed that his name was Finch, and went from Finch to Darwin to survival of the fittest, and that made us all just stop and cry a little.