What am I reading now? The Tree Girl by Darlene Twerdochlib
The New York Times‘ Maria Tatar published an article entitled “No More Adventures in Wonderland” on Sunday, October 9, 2011. The premise of the piece is the prevalence of darkness in children’s literature. Tatar contends that “[c]hildren today get an unprecedented dose of adult reality in their books, sometimes without the redemptive beauty, cathartic humor and healing magic of an earlier time.”
My issue with Tatar’s article is not her vehemence against darkness; I made my thoughts clear on the subject with my post Darkness Too Visible. Instead, my issue springs from the books she calls upon to give validity to her argument: J.K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter, Philip Pullman‘s “His Dark Materials” and Suzanne Collins‘ The Hunger Games. Tatar uses these books to exhibit that “the savagery we offer children today is more unforgiving than it once was … we have stories about children who struggle to survive.” The truth is, these books are detrimental to her argument because they do not fall under the genre of children’s literature. They come under the umbrella of young adult literature.
The book industry is a business like any other and the aforementioned books wouldn’t be published if there wasn’t a market for them. So, perhaps, the issue isn’t the existence of darkness in children’s literature but rather why it is so prevalent in young adult literature.
