My Sister's Reading Young Adult...
My younger sister is ten years old, and she's a smart kid--it's not like, weird that she's reading Young Adult novels now. I don't know when I started reading Young Adult--I do know that there was a weird point in time when I was twelve, thirteen, where I was reading Stephen King but also Warrior cat books--but one thing that's hit me is just how casual she is about accepting the diversity in the books she's been reading.
As of now, she's read The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and most of Mockingjay before dropping it. She's read Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Moxie. Before I left to housesit for two weeks, she was working on Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda. While she was reading Aristotle & Dante, I went over to check up on her, see how she was doing, see how she was liking it, because it's a fantastic book and I wanted her to like it. She was maybe thirty pages in, and she looked up, and was like, "They end up together."
I may have inadvertently spoiled her at that point, because I'm pretty sure I said, "Did you read the last page?"
I didn't have a problem with diversity in fiction when I first started reading YA. I just never saw it coming. When I was my sister's age, it was 2008. I lived in rural North Dakota. I didn't know any gay people, and there were only two kids in my school who weren't 100% white--and they were siblings, and half-white. I remember the first time I read More Than This by Patrick Ness. I was absolutely blindsided by Gideon and Seth's relationship. That book came out in 2013, so that was only five years ago--and I know I didn't read it right when it came out, so I had to have been sixteen or seventeen. Goodreads says it was January 2015 when I read it, so I was six months away from being eighteen, and I didn't see it coming.
When my brother started with YA, he read the Gone series. When Edilio came out in book five, it changed his viewpoint on the issue. He was maybe ten, eleven, and he was homophobic because that's how the kids he was around acted. He also really liked Edilio (because, I mean, who even are you if you don't love Edilio). Edilio Escobar is not a stereotype. Edilio is a fantastically fleshed-out character, and no matter the controversy surrounding Michael Grant, I still love his books, and part of that is because of characters like Edilio.
But it still amazes me how nonchalant a ten-year-old growing up in 2018, even one growing up in the middle of actually nowhere, North Dakota, takes diversity, because I didn't. My brother didn't. But she's just like, "oh, yeah. They're gonna date." And she was right.
As of now, she's read The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and most of Mockingjay before dropping it. She's read Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Moxie. Before I left to housesit for two weeks, she was working on Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda. While she was reading Aristotle & Dante, I went over to check up on her, see how she was doing, see how she was liking it, because it's a fantastic book and I wanted her to like it. She was maybe thirty pages in, and she looked up, and was like, "They end up together."
I may have inadvertently spoiled her at that point, because I'm pretty sure I said, "Did you read the last page?"
I didn't have a problem with diversity in fiction when I first started reading YA. I just never saw it coming. When I was my sister's age, it was 2008. I lived in rural North Dakota. I didn't know any gay people, and there were only two kids in my school who weren't 100% white--and they were siblings, and half-white. I remember the first time I read More Than This by Patrick Ness. I was absolutely blindsided by Gideon and Seth's relationship. That book came out in 2013, so that was only five years ago--and I know I didn't read it right when it came out, so I had to have been sixteen or seventeen. Goodreads says it was January 2015 when I read it, so I was six months away from being eighteen, and I didn't see it coming.
When my brother started with YA, he read the Gone series. When Edilio came out in book five, it changed his viewpoint on the issue. He was maybe ten, eleven, and he was homophobic because that's how the kids he was around acted. He also really liked Edilio (because, I mean, who even are you if you don't love Edilio). Edilio Escobar is not a stereotype. Edilio is a fantastically fleshed-out character, and no matter the controversy surrounding Michael Grant, I still love his books, and part of that is because of characters like Edilio.
But it still amazes me how nonchalant a ten-year-old growing up in 2018, even one growing up in the middle of actually nowhere, North Dakota, takes diversity, because I didn't. My brother didn't. But she's just like, "oh, yeah. They're gonna date." And she was right.
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