What Publishing Gets Right (Finally)

The YA novels being produced in the past few years have taken the genre to the next level. They are unflinching, unapologetic, and honest to the core. It is all we can ask of literature and I believe that the conversations I hear everyday in the library need to be reflected in the literature that surrounds them.

The conversations I hear are about police shootings and school shootings. They are about how much we should respect transgender teens or what it means to be gay. The 12-17 year olds under my supervision create new material for jokes, they practice sharpening their tongues, and they challenge the status quo by challenging each other. They read their poetry aloud and spread their hearts out on the table to ask for relationship advice from their friends. Sometimes, that advice is unwanted. They are unflinchingly honest and, more often than not, brutal.

I run my teen room after school and I cannot help but wonder at the community that has developed over the past few months. When I first started, the teen room was where all the kids who had friends in detention waited for them to get out. As one kid who walked into the room noted, “This room is crazy black.”

I was the only white person in the room and I happened to be the one with power. When our most vocal student asked why I was wearing a suit, I turned around in my chair and said, “It’s because I’m the boss.”

But, instead of becoming the dictator, I listened. I took notes. I asked them what music they liked and what they needed out of the small space they had adopted as their second home. Why were they there? Because their home doesn’t have WiFi. Because they have to walk a mile home and want to do it with their friends. Because they need to decompress before going back to a home that is even more difficult than the drama that unfolds in the library.

I played music out loud that they wanted to hear. It needed to be censored, but I read the lyrics of every song name they wrote down. I became the person who would determine if water was wet or if somebody dating someone else who was transgender was gay. Because I listen to them, they listen to me. They know I will answer any question they ask me honestly no matter how uncomfortable it may be, and, if necessary, with sources or personal stories to back me up. They know I am on their side, even when I have to yell at them.

Over the past few months, I have seen the community change. Nerds sit at tables adjacent to the “hood” kids. The popular group, made up of all the AP or Honors kids, wear hijab or talk with exaggerated lisps or look just like me. But they still all talk about the same things: themselves, what stresses them out, and what’s wrong with the world.

So, when it comes to literature for teens, this new trend for brutal honesty with perspectives from the disenfranchised is, in my opinion, what we’ve needed all along. This is a generation that has been raised in the midst of a mental health crisis. This is a generation that knows they could be killed in class because of one idiot with a gun. They are judged more because they are young than any other generation I can think of in recent history. They are measured by social media statistics, Google searches, and video likes, cut and dried up for marketing gurus to assess. But they are rarely listened to.

They are ready for books that inspire, educate, and bite. And they are tired to death of Shakespeare.