A Confession

I have a confession to make. It’s not much of a confession, actually, if you know me very well. 

I love youth fiction. Love, love, love it.  

Two caveats. 1, no, I am not a creeper. I am, however, a youth minister and have been a teacher in some capacity for the last four years. I can’t help but get curious when I see my kids reading or hear them talking about a book. 2, I hate, hate, hate sparkly vampires and muscled werewolf men and anything that could possibly be labeled “Paranormal Teen Romance.” Ugh. That subset of youth fiction is antithetical to the whole reason that I love the wider genre.  

I spent the first half of this week grieving with and supporting one of my best friends and her family as they worked through the death of her father and all of the arrangements afterward. The majority of the second half of the week was spent at the hospital or with my dad back at home as he experienced inexplicable, excruciating pain in his right leg. When I wasn’t doing those things or trying desperately to pull together enough focus for the homework I brought with me, I was reading- for the fourth time- the Hunger Games trilogy. I’ll be the first to admit that, at least sometimes, the genre is attractive because it’s easy. It’s written to be engaging and accessible to an easily distracted demographic. It’s a good story told simply. This week it let me just relax my mind and be for a while in a world that wasn’t mine.  

The real reason that I love youth fiction, though, is because it opens the mind. It stretches the idealistic imagination. It challenges the reader and the world to be something more. I believe this wholeheartedly, and I am not alone. I have seen articles about it; a girl I knew in high school now has an entire blog devoted to it.  

Some of my favorite books fall into this category. The Hunger Games, obviously. I was one of the lucky generation that got to grow up alongside the Harry Potter series and it will always make the list of my top 10 books of all time. I got sucked into the Percy Jackson series thanks to a student of mine while I was in college. Then there are the older books like The Giver, The Phantom Tollbooth, the Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time (and all of its family of stories), The Little Prince, Ender's Game, and one book that no one but me seems to have read called The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles.

The thing that I love about these books, besides the fantastic stories and memorable characters, besides the incredible imagination behind each of them and that each of them encourages, is the way that they encourage us to take a look at the world around us. Just to notice it, first of all. To take the time to see the world in all of its strangeness, its beauty, and, yes, its pain. But it doesn’t stop there. The really beautiful thing about these books is that they challenge you to see the way the world could be, and to do something about it. 

Really great youth fiction teaches two things. First, the important things in life are not money and stuff; the important things are family, friends, kindness, love. And it teaches that you, no matter how young or how old or how small or unskilled or unimportant, you can change the world if you try. Maybe you can’t save it, but it isn’t always about saving the world. It’s about making your little corner of the world a better place to be, a place where there is peace and acceptance and hope.

Truly great youth fiction says to every reader, in the words of one of the greatest writers of children's books of all time, "Don't give up! I believe in you all. A person's a person, no matter how small!"