Dark and Scary YA Lit Debate

I am not going to write a full post about this, but wanted to link to a recent debate (well, a recent iteration of a long-standing debate) about the "appropriateness" of YA lit for its intended audience.  There was a Wall Street Journal article by Meghan Gurdon last week that I mentioned to a few of you before class started the other day, called "Darkness Too Visible."  The article claimed that young adult literature today is "Darker than when you were a child, my dear," full of "Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, [which] are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail."  Looking back to the history of YA lit review articles I blogged about earlier, I can say that this just isn't true.  Those "new realism" novels of the 1970s were full of drugs and pregnancy, and subject to the same outcry.  There has been quite an outcry to this article, some of which I have linked to below:

Mary Elizabeth Williams's response at slate.com: "Oh jeez, do we really have to have to have this argument again?...Critics like Gurdon are forever holding the dregs of the present up against the best of the past, which is an unfair and highly loaded argument."

Liz B., librarian and blogger at School Library Journal, responds: "There's dark things in them there books!"

"The Book Whisperer" Donalyn Miller, blogger at Ed Week: "Ms. Gurdon thoughtfully provides a suggested list of more appropriate YA titles for young readers. In keeping with the antiquated stance of the article, she divides the list into sections for "Young Men" and "Young Women" including 4 titles that were written more than 38 years ago."

Linda Holmes, NPR blogger: "While the WSJ piece refers to the YA fiction view of the world as a funhouse mirror, I fear that what's distorted is the vision of being a teenager that suggests kids don't know pathologies like suicide or abuse unless they read about them in books.  Do you remember being 15?"