Adult Voices on Adult Content in YA Books

 When I was sixteen, I read a dystopian book with a sexual assault scene. The teen girl protagonist was in a prison-type environment where she had to trade sexual favors for prison perks. After a “mild” assault scene, the guard character told her he’d be back for more later.That bothered me enough that I returned the book to the library. I didn’t want to read a book with repeated assault scenes. 

Conversations about what teenagers should be reading-and by should, I mean should, not shouldn’t-always seems to center around what adults want teenagers to learn. Adult women want young girls to be educated about sexual assault, so they write and promote those books. The summer before my senior year of high school (2014), I recall a sudden explosion of dialogue about sexual assault in all my online spaces. All the book review and writing websites I followed wanted to talk about the importance of understanding assault. Sometimes that centered on books with rape and assault scenes, but more often, it was a general dialogue.

Did I learn about sexual assault, rape, and consent as a teenager? Yes, from reading blog posts, tweets, and formal articles, most of them authored by women in the writing/general geekery community. Not from reading novels. Books didn’t need to “teach” me about sexual assault because I lived in a broader world where those dialogues were already happening. I read some YA contemporary books, issue books, with assault scenes and didn’t mind them, since that’s a hallmark of the issue book subgenre. But I didn’t want that kind of content in my dystopian fiction. It seemed gratuitous. 

My senior year of high school, in response to all the online dialogue about sexual assault, I wrote a rape book. I published a one-page excerpt from it in my high school’s literary magazine, but I have no plans to publish the rest of the story. Its purpose was for me to learn and grow as a writer and explore topics that were dominating my internet landscape. Every edgy scene was, I believed, essential rather than gratuitous because the point of an issue book is to showcase difficult content.  

When I was 22, I wrote a fantasy book with an assault scene. Two male critique partners gave me the feedback that that scene seemed contrived, that it didn’t fit within the overall context of the story. I ignored them because, y’know, men were the patriarchy. When I was 24, I looked back over that scene and realized they were right. In my previous book, several sexual scenes were necessary, but in this book, even one was too much. I wrote that scene as An Agenda Moment, to make a point about how Sexual Assault Is Bad. But most people know sexual assault is bad already and reading that scene is unlikely to be anybody’s personal revolution. I could articulate why I put that scene in there-”This helps explain a theme”-but I didn’t have a good explanation for why that character was committing assault. And I know sixteen year old me wouldn’t have liked it, so why am I giving that scene to other sixteen year olds?

As an adult, I’m less bothered by books with sexual assault scenes. I read one just this weekend, and the affected character was a teenager, though the book was meant for adults. There’s plenty of space for adult authors and adult readers to read and write scenes like that, but they can do it away from teenagers. Adult voices have always dominated the YA landscape and dialogues about what’s right for YA tend to center adult interests rather than that of young people. When adults talk about why gritty content is okay in YA fiction, the two main talking points are:

1. This type of content is realistic to teen life

2. It is important for teenagers to learn about difficult issues

The first is valid. There are, of course, teenagers who seek out books about gritty issues, either because they see their own lives represented in darker fiction or because they want to learn about gritty topics. But I’m uncomfortable with adult authors trying to make their books teaching tools rather than avenues of entertainment. The question at the heart of the debate surrounding content in teen books shouldn’t be “Is this an important issue?” but “What benefit will teenagers derive from seeing this important issue explored in novel form, as opposed to reading about this topic in an informational article?” Do you, as an adult author, have a legitimate story reason for including this content, or are you just getting on a soapbox? Teenagers who read tend to read a wide variety of material, not just novels, and will learn about dark issues through their own study, without seeing characters they love placed in harm’s way to prove a point. 

Interview with Jenna Evans Welch on Love & Olives

The island of Santorini, where the story takes place

Olive Varanakis loved her dad-until he ditched her and her mom and ran off to Greece in search of a city that doesn't exist. Now in high school, she's reinvented herself as Liv, and disavowed all connection to her dad. Except when she nurses her ever-lingering fascination with the city of Atlantis. When her father reenters her life and calls her to the sunny Grecian island of Santorini, Olive reluctantly takes the chance to hunt for the city-and father-she gave up on long ago. 

Here's author Jenna Evans Welch on the characters and world of Love and Olives. 

 1. The main character of Love and Olives is a girl named Olive whose love interest delights in telling her unnecessary olive fun facts. What led you to pick this name? Are you an olive lover?

I do love olives, but I think I originally chose the name just because I thought it was cute. As I researched for the book, I realized that olives have very interesting historical and cultural significance and I loved the layers that brought to her name's significance. Plus, Theo pelting her with all those annoying facts was fun!

2. What are some of your favorite pieces of your trip to Greece that made it into the story? Which came first, trip or story ideas?

The setting always comes first for me, I found the real Atlantis Books on a google search and went there looking for a story. It took me a couple of tries, but when I found it I ended up writing it rather quickly. 

Atlantis Books, the real-life bookstore with a secret bunkroom where Liv stays during her time in Greece.

3. Any fun trip moments that didn't make it into the book?

Cliff jumping in Amoudi Bay! My last day in Santorini I went down to the beach where Liv/Olive spends some of her time and had an incredible morning swimming around and jumping off a huge rock just off of the coast.  

4. You've mentioned online before that your next Love Abroad book will be set in Iceland. Can you tell us anything about that one? 

This was an idea I was playing with but I have actually pivoted to another idea! It is a contemporary YA, but I haven't disclosed the setting yet. I will say I am FASCINATED by the town where it takes place .

Awesome! I love how rich your settings always are and how deeply they inform the story. 

5. What captured your interest in Atlantis and why did you choose to include it in the story? Thank you so much Jenna!

I am not a person who is terribly interested by fantasy or sci-fi, so I was shocked when Atlantis swallowed me whole! The island of Santorini is full of references to Atlantis, and as I began to research the lost city I was amazed by how long this story has been around and how many people have dedicated their lives to finding it. It felt like the perfect metaphor for things we have lost and gave me such a great character--I'm always rooting for the person who is out there trying, and I loved the idea of Liv's father being so flawed yet so loveable. 

6. Olive keeps a list of objects her father left behind when he moved to Greece, ranging from a pack of gum to a map to the lost city of Atlantis. Each chapter in Love and Olives starts out with a description of one of these items and gives us insight to her relationship with her absentee father. These were some of my favorite parts of the book because they're really good short fiction in their own right, give us more insight to her dad's backstory, and having a paragraph or two at the beginning of a chapter put me in "I can read a little more, it's not like I'm starting a new chapter" mode (and then I'd read the rest of the chapter anyway). What was your writing process like for these chapter starters? How did you pick the items?

Aww, I love that insight into your reading experience! The list was one of the first ideas that came to me for this story, and I was really captivated by the idea of ordinary objects having so much meaning when they belong to people we love. I spent time thinking about the father figure and what someone like him would own (and leave behind) and the items were fairly easy to pinpoint. 

Love and Olives is a companion novel to Love and Luck (set in Ireland) and Love and Gelato (set in Italy). Gelato and Luck share some characters and are best read Gelato first, Luck second. Olives is a sister in spirit to the other two books but can absolutely be read as a standalone. 

Images courtesy of Jenna Evans Welch

Do Books Actually Teach Life Lessons?

When I was 21, I went to see a production of Les Miserables. That story is all about poor people, and specifically, poor French people. When I walked out of the theater, I saw a woman begging for change on the sidewalk. I thought, "Hey, I just watched a show about helping poor people, I can spare a little change." I sat and talked to her for about ten minutes after and learned that she was French. Hundreds of people flowing past us on the sidewalk had given a lot of money to buy tickets to watch Jean Valjean help poor French people, but no one else was helping the actually French woman outside.

Charles Dickens's classic A Christmas Carol ends with the miserly Scrooge buying an enormous Christmas turkey for Tiny Tim and his family. There are two calls to action you can pick from that:

1. Give money to the poor on Christmas

2. Buy a turkey

Scrooge's choice to pay for a turkey is a significant one. Before A Christmas Carol, families celebrated the holiday with a Christmas goose. The year after the book was published, goose sales took a hit because everyone wanted turkeys instead. Two centuries later, turkeys are the bird of choice for the Christmas season. It's impossible to make it through the Christmas season without running into Barbie's Christmas Carol, Mickey Mouse's Christmas Carol, The Smurfs' Christmas Carol, etc. And yet, not everyone gives to the poor on Christmas. There certainly is a wide and lucrative tradition of Christmas philanthropy, but not everyone who consumes A Christmas Carol adaptations joins in. It is enough to feel Christmasy by watching a movie or by eating a turkey. Audiences feel no pressure to make Christmas happen for someone else. 

I'm always skeptical when I hear it said that consuming media about people of another culture or people from disadvantaged backgrounds can make audiences more empathetic. I can think of times a book had a direct result of inspiring me to do something in my own life, like taking gymnastics lessons after I read a book about a gymnast. But I think for the most part, books produce feelings rather than actions.

Where book do have power is in introducing ideas. In fifth grade, my teacher read the class Or Give Me Death by Ann Rinaldi, a historical fiction novel narrated first by Patsy Henry, oldest daughter of Patrick Henry, and later by Patsy's little sister, Anne. In Patsy's section, Anne is shown to be a brat. In Anne's section,  Patsy is tyrannical. I couldn't reconcile the two sisters' images of each other. It showed me, for the first time, that it was possible for more than one person to be right.  

And, of course, books have the power to introduce knowledge. If you know nothing about Nepal, a book about Nepal can give you a basic working knowledge of the culture. If you know nothing about the fifteenth century, you can learn about the fifteenth century.  

My freshman year of college, my roommate and I took a class where we were given a reading on slavery. I watched her look up from her textbook and say to the whole apartment, "I'm reading about how awful slavery was and I keep wondering, would've I have done something to help if I'd been alive then? Would I have been a conductor on the underground railroad?"

"Did you vote in this last election?" I asked.

"No. I'm not registered to vote. And there aren't any important issues anymore." 

People have this idea that they'd be crusaders if they lived in different times, different places, different worlds. But most people are too busy living their lives to do anything.

While one single book probably won't make an impact, it's possible for dozens of books on the same theme to drive a point home. If you read a story about forgiveness, will you go out and forgive those who've wronged you? Probably not. But read twenty forgiveness plots in the span of a few years and forgiveness starts to feel like an inevitability. I largely credit movies and books for deromanticizing communication. There's something thrilling, supposedly, about two people looking at each other and silently deciding the other person wants to be kissed. They never guess wrong in this, somehow. Sometimes this happens in the middle of a fight or other heated moment. Obviously there are a lot of ways for that to go wrong if you try that out in real life.

If there were more stories about people asking, "Can I give you a kiss?" dating couples might prioritize communication. In extreme circumstances, that might prevent situations where one person feels they were assaulted while the other thinks they were making a wanted romantic move. All around, it would save everybody involved from the awkwardness. But because fictional lovers practice pseudo-telepathy, people have picked up that silent romance is a social norm. 

While some rare books change minds and hearts, producing broad and sweeping social impact, I'm skeptical of most books' ability to change the mind of even one person for as much of an afternoon. People largely don't seek out books pushing agendas they disagree with, so if a person lives the values of a book after reading it, that's more indicate of values they held before reading it than something new that grew out of the reading experience. Overall, readers are good at feeling the message of a book rather than living it outside the pages.