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| Photo credit: Say It Aint SO! on Flickr |
Before I go on, I’d like to establish something.
First and foremost, I love John Green. I think TFiOS is a wonderful book and I’ve been a fan of vlogbrothers for a while, and I am so very happy to see how successful he’s been. It’s always wonderful when there’s a big success in books, and when it’s a YA success, I’m even happier. So go John Green. You’re awesome.
What I’m not loving so much, is this idea being perpetuated by the media lately that John Green’s books are worth so much more than the other YA trash out there like Hunger Games and Twilight and maybe now some real value will come out of YA because Green’s been so successful.
Ugh.
I’m not going to link to the article that basically said as much, because it doesn’t deserve the traffic. But there are so many things wrong with that message, and it makes me rather ragey.
To start, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but no one book is worth more than another. Twilight and Hunger Games are not garbage, nor are any other books out there, regardless of whether or not you read them or enjoyed them. It’s perfectly okay if one, or all of those books aren’t your thing, but that by no means indicates that they’re somehow worth less than TFiOS or any other book out there.
Secondly, the insinuation that there isn’t any value in what’s been published in YA thus far just tells me that someone hasn’t been reading very much YA. Some of the most powerful books I’ve read about love, sacrifice, betrayal, responsibility, power and self-discovery were YA novels. YA is showing teenagers that they’re not alone, that what they’re feeling and experiencing isn’t just them, that it’s wonderful to love and live and yes, sometimes life is hard and yes, sometimes loss is horrible, but we move on and become better people for our experiences. And sometimes stories with those messages have vampires and fights to the death and magic and demons and princes and faeries, and you know what? That doesn’t make them less valid.
YA is a beautiful category. And John Green is certainly a part of that, and his work has spoken to loads of teens out there, but you know what? So has Stephanie Meyers’s work, and Suzanne Collins’s work, and Tahereh Mafi's and Veronica Roth’s and Beth Revis’s and Cassandra Clare’s and Julie Kagawa’s and Lauren Oliver’s books. So have countless other YA authors, both male and female, writing in genres across the board from Paranormal to High Fantasy to Dystopia to Sci-Fi to Urban Fantasy to Thriller to Horror to Magical Realism and yes, even to Contemporary.
They're all equally wonderful, so rather than insinuating one book is worth more than the others, let’s celebrate the wonderful category that is YA equally and leave it at that.
*ragequits*
Twitter-sized bites:
Writer @Ava_Jae says no one book is worth more than another. What do you think? (Click to tweet)
"Some of the most powerful books I've read about love, sacrifice, betrayal...& self-discovery were YA." (Click to tweet)
