Last week, Ruth Graham over at Slate wrote the ultimate literary click-bait article, complete with inflammatory headline, "Against YA: Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you're reading was written for children." Read it if you dare; I especially like the parts where she confuses children with teens (i.e. The Hunger Games Trilogy is decidedly not for children), and when she blames adult consumption of YA literature on millenials, because their young adulthood extends into the 30s. The timing was either deliberate or fortuitous, as the article dropped amid the week-long "Fault in Our Stars" movie premier hoopla. Naturally, bloggers and writers from NPR, NPR again, the Atlantic, the Hairpin, etc. etc responded mostly in the form of strong disagreement.
I was an avid consumer of YA fiction when I was in that age bracket, specifically the contemporary books of Francesca Lia Block, Megan McCafferty, and Meg Cabot, along with all the standalone classics like The Giver, Tuck Everlasting, The Westing Game, and so forth. I also read plenty of adult books, and even occasionally indulged in books well-below my reading level that I had already read and loved, for the sole purpose of escape and nostalgia.
YA fiction in general has been very top of mind for me lately because my book club just finished our discussion of Eleanor and Park, one of the most popular contemporary YA novels, and our first ever YA selection. The group was divided, but those who enjoyed it weren't defending its literary merits-- instead they focused on its evocative and nostalgic nature. I would be hard-pressed to think of another novel that better captures the feelings of a crush, in YA or adult literature.
The problem I have with Ruth Graham's takeaway is her assumption that adults are indulging in YA fiction as an alternative to adult literary fiction. There are plenty of sophisticated readers I know who read the occasional YA novel to take a break from the serious literary fiction they normally consume; in these instances, YA literature serves as an alternative to other escapist literature, like genre fiction or "beach reads." And anyone I know who reads YA literature on the regular is not someone who reads adult literary fiction at all-- more likely YA fiction for them is a substitute for the adult genre fiction they normally read. So in that way, YA literature is not even remotely competing with literary fiction for readership, and I would argue that reading the best YA literature is a better use of your time than reading the worst adult fiction. Eleanor and Park is flawed and cliched and heavy-handed, but it is better than anything Nora Roberts ever wrote.
Finally, Ruth Graham's assertion that reading YA literature should be a source of shame or embarrassment is ridiculous. No one should ever be embarrassed about reading or pleasure reading. Fans of A Fault in Our Stars deserve some very gentle mocking for their enthusiasm; fans of Twilight deserve a firm hand directing them to the Bronte sisters; no fans of any YA literature deserve to be called out and publicly shamed. We don't shame adults for enjoying the movie "Frozen" or for watching Cartoon Network's "Adventure Time," so why is YA literature any different?