Young adult novels are dark and amoral

The argument

The case begins with a pattern in the awarding of the Carnegie medal, whose judges and winners have often come under attack for giving the prestigious prize to novels deemed amoral. Underlying the complaint is a premise about the readership: that young people are impressionable and vulnerable to psychological harm from what they read, and that a book's literary merit does not cancel the effect its content has on the reader it was written for. Two of the prize's winners are cited as illustrations. Melvin Burgess's "Junk", which won the Carnegie in 1997, portrays heroin addicts, teen runaways, squatters, sexual awakening and teenage prostitution; it was largely criticized by press who feared his novel might encourage drug abuse. Kevin Brook drew similar criticism on winning the medal in 2014 for "The Bunker Diary", a contentious exploration of heroin addiction, attempted rape, enforced imprisonment, murder, and physical and mental abuse. What sharpened the objection in that case was the book's refusal to entertain a happy ending like most young adult fiction: some critics claim it is too realistic and not suitable for children, labeling it vile and dangerous. A novel that withholds resolution, on this reading, leaves the young reader with the damage and none of the repair. The list, proponents note, does not end here — young adult authors are increasingly creating fiction of a bleaker or more disturbing nature, and the prizes have followed them. That trend is what turns individual complaints into a general one. If shock is what distinguishes a manuscript in a crowded market, then authors acquire a commercial reason to sensationalize sex, drugs and violence, and to aim that material at the readers least able to hold it at a distance. Young adult authors who use shock factors in this way to sell novels may be acting irresponsibly, and on this argument the resulting novels are not worth reading.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Young adult novels can be a reflection of the good and bad parts of society at any given time. Difficult or contentious topics can be seen as groundbreaking social commentary, and adolescents have the right to be educated on them. It is irrational to hide children from the adult world when they are already exposed to it. Young people have the right to understand the world they live in. Young adult novels help young people become vigilant and knowledgeable about situations they may encounter as they move from their teenage years into adulthood.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Treating young readers as uniformly impressionable understates their capacity to read critically, and they encounter addiction, violence and abuse in the world around them whether or not novels depict them, so a book is rarely the first exposure. [Rejecting P2] Depicting dark material is not endorsing it: a refusal to supply a happy ending can be the moral point of a book rather than the absence of one, which is why judges awarding a literary prize honoured these titles. [Rejecting P3] The premise's own evidence tells against it — a jury selecting for literary merit is not a commercial shock tactic, and even where an author does sensationalise, that indicts particular books rather than young adult fiction as a category.