Young adult literature (YAL) is an ever-growing, hugely popular genre that plays an immensely important part in teenage lives and thus, in school libraries. The imaginative storylines combined with the exploration of emotions that feature in our everyday lives has meant that YAL is a fantastic tool to discover the complex, and occasionally daunting, world that we live in.

YAL is well known for confronting hard-hitting and occasionally taboo subjects such as mental health, LGBT, drug use, sex and pregnancy, bullying, death and terminal illness… the list goes on. Our collections Minding Your Mental Health and LGBTQ+ contain the best of current publishing on these subjects including No Big Deal by Bethany Rutter and Proud which is a collection compiled by Juno Dawson. Experiencing these complexities of life vicariously through literature is a safe way for the reader to gain knowledge of new experiences that could play an important role later on in their lives. It also invites the reader to empathise with individuals who are unlike themselves. By engaging with YAL they become exposed to characters that they may not have come across in real life. Instead of remaining a strange concept, these people are embraced and celebrated and an excellent example of this can be seen in Rose, Interrupted by Patrice Lawrence from our Celebrating Ethnic Diversity collection.

Readers can identify similarities between themselves and characters which gives the reader comfort to know that they are not alone in their situation. Young adults generally feel the need to belong, but through YAL, they can be reassured that being different is not abnormal and that they can accept themselves as they are. Encapsulating this theme brilliantly is Dear Evan Hansen by Val Emmich which can be found in our Minding Your Mental Health collection. Furthermore, Gibbons, Dail and Stallworth found through a teacher survey that ‘when students can generate personal responses to texts, their memory and comprehension of literary works improve’. This is why YAL is important and relevant; it mirrors the attitudes, issues and fears of today’s teenagers and guides them through those tough experiences.

YAL can also tackle political themes and actively ask the reader to determine between right and wrong. After the popularity of ‘The Hunger Games’ we frequently see plots where the main objective is to rally against oppression and triumph over adversity. Exploring these themes can allow the reader to develop new beliefs and even challenge their own current opinions. Dystopias make us question our morals that we hold and encourage us to see the world beyond ourselves.  Dry by Neal Shusterman captures this idea brilliantly and can be found in our No Planet B book collection which brings together the best writing on youth activism, particularly relevant with the concerns sparked by reports of the climate emergency which have been highlighted so spectacularly well by Greta Thunberg and the school strike movement. Generation Hope is our collection of non-fiction which has been designed to inspire students to engage with societal isues and provide ideas on how and why they can influence goverment policies.

Overall, it is hard to ignore the immense success of YAL and the reasons behind it. YA fiction is more than a story to the reader, it challenges their perception of the world and offers the opportunity of self-discovery from the security of a book, answering questions such as ‘What do I believe in?’ and ‘What type of person do I want to be?’ It ultimately prepares them for entry into the adult world as well as encourages enthusiasm for, and a love of reading. For these reasons, YAL is an indispensable part of a high school library.

To view our complete range of YA book collections then click here.

Interesting Articles

Death in YA Literature – http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/aug/18/death-important-young-adult-fiction-rupert-wallis

Young Adult Literature in the English Curriculum – https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v33n3/gibbons.pdf

 

Written by Sarah Capon, Book Collections Developer