January 3, 2011
9:37PM
Here's an essay written by Casandra Clare (author of Mortal Instruments and Infernal Devices Series) about teenagers' fascination and love for Young Adult Fantasy Books.
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Between Platform 10 and Platform 9 in King’s Cross train station is Platform 9 ¾, which can be reached only by magic.
Somewhere near the town of Forks, Washington, the woods are full of vampires and werewolves.
Opening the door of an ordinary wardrobe takes you to a world where it is always winter and never Christmas.
Being a teenager is being caught between two worlds, occupying a liminal space where you’re not quite a child and not quite an adult. The concept of adolescence is a modern one — in earlier times, teenagers would be marrying, fighting and dying like adults, and today’s teens yearn for that adult power (making your own decisions!), while at the same time being afraid of it (enormous responsibilities come with adulthood). These days, adolescence is considered training wheels for adulthood, a time through which you must be guided and protected from too much autonomy.
But like any other training wheels, the training wheels of adolescence are irksome and teens can’t wait to get rid of them — to get on that bike and ride. The category of young adult fantasy books reflects that tension. In many YA fantasies, there is a hidden world, usually secret from ordinary people and most adults, where magic reigns and the kids are the ones with the power.
The idea that children and teenagers can see a world that adults can’t see has long been embraced as a symbol of the magic of childhood, but it’s also an expression of the embrace of adult power away from adults and their interference. There may be teachers at Hogwarts School, but they’re never the ones that save the day — Harry and his friends do that. In Narnia, Edmund, Lucy, Peter and Susan aren’t just children: they’re the fated Kings and Queens of Narnia, who alone can save it from endless winter. In fact, young adult fantasy books that contain adult presence are the exception, not the norm. Michael Grant’s bestselling “Gone” series is premised on exactly that — the story of a small town from which all the adults have mysteriously disappeared and the children rule. In Scott Westerfeld’s “Midnighters” only teenagers born at the hour of midnight have the ability to access a secret twenty-fifth hour, a time in which they walk the streets of their town while all the adults are, literally, frozen in place. My own series of “Shadowhunter” books opens with a teenage girl who witnesses a murder committed by other teenagers that no adult can see. Clary soon finds herself drawn into a magical world that exists alongside our own, where she discovers that she, like Harry Potter in his universe, is an infinitely powerful magician tasked with saving the world.
Saving the world is a pretty common endgame for YA fantasies of all stripes. (In fact, one of James Patterson’s bestselling “Maximum Ride” series books is entitled “Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports.”) When kids and teens dream, they dream big — it’s part of what makes them so much fun to write for. In Percy Jackson’s ordinary life, he’s a regular kid with ADHD; in the secret magical world in which he’s a demigod, he and his sword Riptide are all that stands between civilization and annihilation.
The whole world pivots on Percy’s actions, just like Harry Potter’s world pivots on his and Clary’s world pivots on hers. In young adult fantasy, your protagonist is never merely a bit player: the magical world,newly discovered, is created for them, and they shape the fate of it. From discovery, to confusion, to realization, to control — it’s a fast-track through adulthood, with none of adulthood’s mundane problems, like refinanced mortgages, taking out the trash, or taxes.
It’s no wonder that these stories don’t just draw teens in droves, they draw adults, too.
Courtesy of: The Wall Street Journal
