Destigmatizing Reading Young Adult Novels as an Adult
To many people’s surprise, I’ve never read the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. I know, I know, don’t get mad at me. When I was young, the series just really never interested me. As a young adult, I had better, more important things to read such as The Hunger Games trilogy or the Magic Tree House series. And in recent years, J.K. Rowling has become quite the problematic figure in popular culture. So up until recently, I felt no desire to pick up the massive book series and tackle it. More than anything, I saw it as a young adult series and now that I’m an “adult”, I felt like it was unnecessary to even consider reading it. Then, one day this summer, I began reading the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I was instantly brought back to being a little kid, feeling a sense of wonder and nostalgia in every page I read.
Kids Books Aren’t Just for Kids
After getting through about half the books in the series, I began to think, “Why didn’t I read these sooner?” While thinking about the nature of the series, the answer seemed to be: society tells us once we’re past a certain age, we shouldn’t read young adult books. For many with this opinion, they believe young adult literature gives people an excuse to not face real problems that are occurring in the world; stating that it is not an ambitious enough literature to read for someone who is no longer a kid. The articles I’ve come across with this opinion say things like, “… these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple” (slate.com). Society wants adults to face the real world in the literature they read, choosing upsetting, sometimes horrifying endings in the literature it reads instead of ones that teach us life lessons involving themes such as friendship, honesty, and personal identity.
Important Lessons from Young Adult Literature
To choose literature that doesn’t allow us to escape into a world where we can learn more about ourselves and the world around us is, in my opinion, denying our inner child of learning important lessons we may not have learned as kids or have pushed to the side since becoming adults. No matter how old we are, lessons we are taught as young adults, such as relationship, identity, and dealing with loss, will always be important to be reminded of. I recently read a blog post that stated it perfectly, “These books are about coming of age, and we’re still coming of age” (theatlantic.com).
Today, over half of the people who read young adult literature are over the age of 18 (theatlantic.com). Doesn’t this alone imply that older readers of young adult literature find the most important and impactful lessons we could ever learn hidden within young adult literature? One blogger from bookriot.com argued this exactly, saying:
“If we accept that the mark of a good story is a clearly defined arc demonstrating the growth of a character, then it follows that young adult novels, about young adults who are discovering their own selves and what it means to be in the world and so on, are uniquely posed to really dig into character development. This isn’t to say that characters in adult novels can’t learn and develop. Certainly they can, just as we continue to learn and grow in our own lives. But I think in many cases, the very human and important lessons we learn are those we learn in our teen years.”
Society Was, and Still is, Wrong about YA Books
Without young adult literature, many of the lessons that are weaved throughout those stories would be lost upon us: “These lessons may be learned or reinforced later in life, sure, but if we imagine—and I think we do—that these sorts of lessons are ones we ought to have learned by then, some of the shine of it in the context of an adult story is lost” (bookriot.com).
Ultimately, what I’ve learned from cracking open my first young adult novel in years is that it shouldn’t be a bad thing to want to read literature targeted towards a younger audience. The important lessons and themes come across more clearly and in a way that allows you to escape into a world, unlike any world that exists in reality. Who wouldn’t want to read something like that?