Young Adult FictionWhile historians of children's literature do not always agree as to the precise origins of what today is called "young adult" fiction, no one denies the key position held by Judy Blume's 1975 novel, Forever, in the evolution of the genre.
Widely considered originally, particularly by adults, as shocking in its explicit treatment of teenage sexuality, it now seems dated and, certainly in terms of its frankness on sexual matters, quite tame when compared with much of the "young adult" fiction that has succeeded it. Its once infamous opening sentence - "Sybil Davison has a genius IQ and has been laid by at least six different guys" - seems measured and restrained when put side by side with some of the tactics nowadays employed to gain the teenager's attention.
It is significant that in the course of Laura Ruby's Good Girls there occurs a telling reference to the Blume novel. Good Girls' heroine, 16-year-old Audrey Porter, is relating to her best friend, Ash, the details of the sexual encounter in which she lost her virginity and in the process shed "four litres of blood". They may all have read Blume's Forever, we are reminded, but it had said nothing about this kind of possibility. Clearly, in the novels that currently explore the sexual mores of young, bright, white, middle-class Americans, "progress" is being made.
It is no doubt one manifestation of such growth that Ruby's novel comes complete with a wrap-around "Parental Advisory: Mature Content" warning, accompanied by the admonition "Do It. Don't Do It. You're Screwed Either Way . . . " and, on its back cover, by a "Contains Explicit Content" inscription.
Many motives, well-intentioned and otherwise, may lie behind such "warnings". In the case of Ruby's novel, however, they are probably meant to refer mainly to one precise form of sexual activity, oral sex, which gives the narrative its principal initial focus. Intense, passionate and graphic as the handling of this detail undoubtedly is, the real drama of the book lies in its delineation of events when Audrey's moment of sexual experience is caught - by whom? - on digital camera and the photograph subsequently passed around.
The reactions of Audrey, her friends and her parents to these developments provide Ruby with the opportunity to make readers question many assumptions about loyalty, friendship, reputation and the always tantalising line dividing young love and young lust. Free, in the main, from didacticism and moralising, and often very funny, this is a novel for the very mature teenager.
Undoubtedly, many adults will feel that the treatment of such a subject should be seen as inappropriate in any novel for teenagers, mature or otherwise. But, equally, many teenagers themselves will feel that such a theme merely reflects familiar areas of their own, or their contemporaries', lives. A detached view will probably argue that the significant point is less the subject matter than the method of its treatment; here, in the main, that treatment is responsible and non-sensational.
JOANNA NADIN'S NOVEL is, by contrast, recommended (by its publishers) for readers, especially girls, of "12+", a recommendation unlikely to find total favour with those responsible for directing books to young adolescents. Subtitled "The Tragically Normal Diary of Rachel Riley", this is a day-by-day first-person account of the year 2005 as lived by 13-year-old Essex girl Rachel, protesting against the "tragically normal" course of her life at home and school.
The prevailing tone becomes clear as early as the third page when, having been denied a mobile phone for Christmas, she comments that she will have to continue to use a public telephone box, "which is embarrassing, not to mention unhygienic. I know for a fact that Mark Lambert once got his thing sucked in there by Leanne Jones for £2.50 and a Westlife CD". (Rarely, one feels, has a CD, even one by Westlife, figured in such a barter.) The reader at ease with this sort of throwaway style and an almost total absorption in a world of casual under-age sex and adult weirdness, all set against sharp references to contemporary political developments in Blair's Britain, may find something diverting here.
How many such readers there are - and how great the diversion - is rather problematic.
Essays by Robert Dunbar on Irish children's literature have appeared in Divided Worlds, edited by Mary Shine Thompson and Valerie Coghlan (Four Courts Press), and Irish Children's Writers and Illustrators 1986-2006, edited by Valerie Coghlan and Siobhán Parkinson (Children's Books Ireland and Church of Ireland College of Education), both recently published
Good Girls By Laura Ruby HarperCollins, 302pp. £6.99 My So-Called Life By Joanna Nadin Oxford, 289pp. £5.99