I’m standing in the Teens corner of my local library, searching for something, anything that would be worth reading, but not a single title appeals to me. This is a situation that many East students are probably familiar with. Welcome to young adult fiction. YA fiction wasn’t popularized until the 60s and 70s, when the first books targeting teenagers started popping up. The mid-1970s to 1980s was what many call the “Golden Age” of YA. It was all downhill from there.
The Hunger Games is the clearest precursor to what I like to call the “Dark Ages” of YA. When it was released, The Hunger Games was a refreshing and creative concept: a teenage girl forced through extenuating circumstances to represent her district, find love while doing it and ultimately defy the stereotypes of that group. This would be the groundwork of another book series released 2 ½ years later called Divergent. In Divergent, a teenage girl forced through extenuating circumstances to represent her district, find love while doing it and ultimately defy the stereotypes of that group. These two series’ similarities and archetypes are the most classic example of the current state of YA. Honestly, I would be lying if I said that comparing these two books wasn’t a tired and overused point.
After these books, the floodgates opened. Book upon book on zombie apocalypses, tribes, stereotypes coming of age (preferably on road-trips), love triangles, the four elements and unrealistic kindergarten-through-college romance followed. Teenagers devoured them and writers profited heavily. All of this to say, there have been a few gems since the Dark Ages have started, but they’re buried in piles and piles of garbage.
Gone were the days of fantastical epics like Eragon or space sagas wrapped in analysis of the human mind like Ender’s Game. Now we have The Cursed Child, one of J.K. Rowling’s latest attempts at profiting off of the Potterverse, and shallow, ghostwritten YouTuber books like Girl Online. There have been 38 books in the Percy Jackson universe, including series centered around Egyptian Mythology and Norse Mythology. This all points to a problem that surpasses simple complaints about formulaic content. There’s no depth, no deeper meaning to it. Writers seem to have forgotten that teenagers can appreciate a complex story and instead have oversimplified everything. In their pursuit of following trends to make money while doing the thing they love, they seem to have missed the point of writing: to paint a picture of the world and tell an original story.
