I love people who are industrious. I especially like having a few of them for friends when I am trying to have a summer break that includes a trip to Disneyland, a family reunion--that I was theoretically in charge of--(any of you who are the oldest child with younger siblings no what i am talking about.), helping with aging parents, and trying to take a week of so that Dana and I can take a golf retreat at Bear Lake, Utah. Okay, enough of my whining.

Enter Diane Scrofano. Diane was one of the presenters at the YA Summit in Las Vegas and prepared a blog post on the topic of her presentation. It focused on YA connections to Hamilton and you can find it here.

Like I said, she is industrious and awhile I was wondering what to do earlier this week, Diane sent me this post and asked if I was interested. It goes back to her interest in YA and mental illness, an interest she shares with her new friend,  colleague, and fellow summit presenter Kia Richmond (Kia has a blog post on a parallel topic and about a year ago--look for the book soon.) It many ways these two post are great companion pieces for a class. Diane reminds us that July is National Minority Mental Illness Awareness Month. The following post explores titles that if you don't know them they should soon be added to your "to be read" list. I know I added a couple of titles to mine.

​In the fall of 2014, I was a new mother who had recently completed a sabbatical during which I had gestated both a baby and a considerable amount of research on mental illness in young adult fiction. Eager to prove that I could be both a mother and a scholar, I got myself and my breast pump on a plane and headed across the country to the National Council of English Teachers (NCTE) Conference in Washington, D.C., to give a poster session. The conference was so big that I got lost within the hotel where it was held and nearly missed the window of time during which I was supposed to stand in a small cubicle in the exhibit hall and pin up my 8.5x10” Power Point slide print-outs for people to view. I quickly realized that the hordes were more interested in the free books than in my annotated bibliography, so I took a proactive approach, foisting my handouts on anyone who happened by. It all was worth it, though, when I saw my former professor, YA library history legend, Michael Cart, strolling down the aisle in a humble baseball cap. I effused to him how he might not remember me from UCLA, but here was this work I had done on YA novels of mental illness, and so on and so on, and, at one point, I proclaimed “there’s a lack of diversity in these mental illness novels!” Admittedly, this wasn’t a huge scholarly bombshell, but I was excited. Michael smiled warmly and knowingly, and replied, “Surprise, surprise.”  

I was surprised by the obvious again, this time more recently, when I found out that July is Minority Mental Health Awareness Month and that it has been since the U.S. House of Representatives declared it so in 2008. As a NAMI volunteer and a co-advisor of my community college’s chapter of NAMI on Campus, I knew about the annual May Mental Health Awareness Month and the Mental Health Awareness Week which happens annually in October—most NAMI Walks across the country happen in either May or October for this reason—, but Minority Mental Health Month gets less attention. As Michael Cart might say, “Surprise, surprise.” So, to do my little part this July to help build awareness of Minority Mental Health Month, I’d like to consider my research on YA novels of mental illness in terms of diversity—ethnic and otherwise.  As NAMI says, “Mental health conditions do not discriminate based on race, color, gender or identity. Anyone can experience the challenges of mental illness regardless of their background….In many communities, these problems are increased by less access to care, cultural stigma and lower quality care.” It’s important that teens of color and teens of varying sexual orientation and gender identity see themselves represented in the YA literature of mental illness. So that you can recommend such books to teens, I’d like to provide an overview of some of the titles featuring diverse characters with mental illness and what gaps in coverage will hopefully be filled by promising YA authors of the near future! 

​Serendipitously, the idea of Minority Mental Health Awareness Month comes to us from the literary community! The inspiration for the annual July awareness campaign is renowned African American author Bebe Moore Campbell, whose 2004 novel, 72 Hour Hold, remains one of the few portrayals of a non-white person’s experience with mental illness. While not marketed as a YA novel, probably because it is narrated by the mother, it chronicles the experiences of an African-American teen suffering from bipolar disorder. Campbell’s narrator draws interesting parallels between mental illness and slavery—they both inflict wanton violence on whole families. Of the few other mental illness novels with African-American characters, none really referenced the African-American heritage the way that Campbell did. (The only exception might be in Karen Fortunati’s The Weight of Zero, in which Catherine, of Polish ancestry, is inspired to fight her mental illness as she researches a female African-American World War II soldier’s life in a museum directed by her best friend’s mother. Best friend Krystal and her mother are African-American, and Kristal has an eating disorder.) Furthermore, 72 Hour Hold was the only novel I found in which characters went beyond treatment and also got involved in mental illness advocacy. Campbell, herself the loved one of a family member with mental illness, founded the NAMI Urban Los Angeles chapter and was active in the national organization until her death in 2006. 

​In Brandy Colbert’s Little and Lion, white teen Lionel suffers from bipolar disorder. His step-sister, Suzette, is African-American and bisexual. The whole family is Jewish. While I was worried that this novel was trying too hard to feature diversity, the novel is set in Los Angeles and the whole thing felt organic, not tokenistic. Mental illness figures into the plot because Lionel has gone off his medication and Suzette doesn’t want to rat him out to their parents. So, while the non-white character doesn’t have mental illness, she is definitely affected by it as a family member struggling to provide the right kind of support to her brother. Overall, Suzette struggles with whether to be honest about both Lionel’s medication non-compliance and her sexuality. 

​In I Will Save You, Matt de la Peña alludes to his main character’s dark skin without naming any ethnicity specifically. Protagonist Kidd has recently run away from a treatment facility and his schizophrenia symptoms begin to threaten his relationship with a wealthy white girl whose family vacations at the California beach campsite where Kidd works. In Ball Don’t Lie, de la Peña’s main character, Sticky, who has OCD, is a white foster child living in an urban African-American community. Because disadvantaged Sticky wouldn’t have a name for his condition, the diagnostic term “obsessive-compulsive disorder” never appears in the narrative; one can find it only in the Library of Congress subject classification terms listed on the verso page of the novel. 

​In John Green’s most recent novel, white, middle-class Aza struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder and medication noncompliance. Aza lives in a modest single-family home with her mother. Her best friend, Daisy, a Latina, lives with her parents and siblings in an apartment. Initially fascinated by the local news story of a voracious businessman who has disappeared after charges filed against him, Daisy and Aza befriend the business tycoon’s son, Davis, at first hoping to solve the mystery and collect the reward money. When the friendship turns real, Davis gives Aza and Daisy $100,000, an amount equal to the reward money, so that, as the friendship continues, Davis can be sure they stay around because of him and not because of the prospect of gaining the reward money. However, Daisy and Aza’s use of their $50,000 each brings up a curious intertwining of mental illness and social class. Part of OCD can be scrupulosity, and Aza immediately feels guilty about taking the money because all of the businessman’s assets were supposed to have been seized by police (Davis has given them the money out of a hidden stash). Daisy can sense this, and she tells Aza off, implying that Aza’s scrupulosity is made possible by privilege, as Aza’s single mother always planned to send Aza to college while Daisy can go only if she keeps this money. Daisy also immediately buys a car and a laptop, for which Aza chides her and cautions her to save her money instead. Daisy resents this as well and points out that Aza already had her own car and laptop while Daisy writes her trademark fanfiction on her cell phone. The fanfiction is another source of contention between them. Aza, often consumed with her own problems, does not read Daisy’s years’-worth of fiction, and so there’s an unlikeable character just like Aza floating around cyberspace in these stories. Aza must learn to overcome the self-centeredness which sometimes results from mental illness. 

​The Memory of Light, by Francisco X. Stork, is unique in that it doesn’t just have one ethnic-minority character but rather features a cast of almost entirely Latino characters near Austin, Texas, with varying life experiences reflective of the multidimensional Latino community in the U.S. Vicky Cruz, whose grief at the loss of her mother to cancer has turned to depression, struggles to fit into her ambitious, upwardly mobile family. Her successful real estate mogul father, Miguel, and Harvard-student sister, provide a stark contrast in social class to Gabriel, a gardener’s son, who Vicky meets in the hospital after her suicide attempt. Thoughtful and well read, Gabriel is in the early stages of schizophrenia. Vicky feels defeated by her parents’ plan to send her aging nanny to retire in Mexico while Gabriel worries about who will take care of his aging grandparents if he becomes permanently unable to work. Emilio, another blue-collar patient staying in the psych ward with Vicky and Gabriel, introduces himself by calling Vicky out as weak and privileged since she couldn’t deal with her problems and tried to kill herself. Vicky struggles whether to tell on Mona, a recovering addict who has stopped her medication for bipolar disorder.
 
Mona was one of the few characters I found in YA novels of mental illness who had the quite common “dual diagnosis” of mental illness and substance abuse. To find more dual diagnosis stories, I suspect that I’ll have to search the YA novels of drug abuse. The problem novel about drug use has been a widely acknowledged subgenre in YA fiction since the 1970s’ Go Ask Alice, and I wonder if many books marketed as stories of drug abuse will also include a character trying to self-medicate for mental illness. The possibility that a book about a mentally ill person who self-medicates with illegal drugs would be marketed as a drug novel instead of a mental illness novel brings up a variety of interesting questions: is drug use more socially acceptable, even glamorized in the media, and less stigmatized than mental illness is? Will a drug book sell better than a mental illness book? (If this turns out to be the case, then it’s probably significant that Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, which I will bring up again later, focuses on the anxious nerdy character rather than the party girl. Wren, who has a drinking problem, takes a back-seat in the narrative to protagonist Cath, who suffers from anxiety.)
 
Or does the separation of the drug subgenre from the mental illness subgenre stem from a bias in the other direction, against the drug user? Does the reading public, who publishers are marketing to, still see drug use as a lifestyle choice more than a mental illness? Are characters with genetic predisposition to mental illness more sympathetic than those who are genetically predisposed to addiction but nevertheless must make a choice to try illegal drugs?
 
Getting back to The Memory of Light, a kindly psychiatrist, Dr. Desai, helps Vicky see that she can make a place for herself and take an active role in solving seemingly insurmountable problems. We find another Indian mental health professional in Matthew Quick’s Silver Linings Playbook. Pat, white, is less than sensitive or politically correct when he’s surprised to see his Indian therapist and several friends at the Philadelphia Eagles football games. The therapist and his friends know they might be looked at askance, so they flaunt their differences by painting their bus to say “Asian Invasion.” The American Psychological Association reports that, although the psychologists of the U.S. are over 80% white, according to 2016 data, (Lin et al., 2018), the profession has been diversifying over recent years (2015). The psychiatrist in Teresa Toten’s The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B wears dread-locks and has a Caribbean-sounding last name. So, perhaps the ethnic representation of psychiatrists in fiction is starting to mirror the increased diversity in the profession, and non-white psychiatrist characters in fiction can also underscore the importance of cultural sensitivity in medicine, which can often be achieved when a young patient of color is able to see a therapist of color. 

Another Latino-focused novel of mental illness is Erika L. Sanchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. Julia is the ambitious daughter of Mexican immigrants living in urban Chicago. Julia’s parents are nervous about her plans to move out of state to go to college; can’t she be more like her “perfect” older sister Olga, who works as a receptionist, dabbles in community college, and spends lots of free time with their parents? The accidental death of Olga exacerbates Julia’s preexisting depression and anxiety, resulting in a suicide attempt halfway through the novel. At the hospital, Julia is educated about mental illness: “I’m not surprised—I always knew something was wrong; I just didn’t know what it was, that it had an official name” (219). While Julia is the daughter of a factory worker and a housecleaner, they have “insurance through the state” (218), so Julia gets quality care and continues to see her expensively attired psychologist after her release from the hospital. In addition, Julia’s parents send her to stay for a few weeks with relatives in Mexico to recuperate, though times are tense with drug traffickers’ presence constantly hovering in the village. Despite the hardships she witnesses in Mexico, Julia wonders if her family’s cramped Chicago apartment and her parents’ dead-end jobs were worth the dangerous, illegal journey to the U.S., especially after she learns that her mother was raped along the way. On the other hand, knowledge of her parents’ hardship, that the U.S. “isn’t the promised land for everyone” (339) is, in part, what drives Julia’s ambition, the ambition that is ironically misunderstood by her parents. Julia says of her desire to leave her family to go to New York: “What a waste their journey would be if I settled for a dull, mediocre life” (339). Over time, Julia comes to understand that her parents’ overprotectiveness results from their desire not only to maintain their family-centric Mexican culture but also from their fear that they will not be able to guide or protect her in this new country. By the end of the novel, Julia’s parents become more at peace with her independent personality and allow her to go when NYU offers her a full scholarship.
 
Also on the topic of Latino characters in novels of mental illness, it may also be worth noting that two of the boyfriends in Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl are Latino. In that novel, sisters Cath and Wren struggle with anxiety and alcoholism, respectively. Rowell points out, though, that there is a sizable Mexican population in Nebraska, where the sisters grew up and went to college. Realistic setting details or token minor characters of color? You decide. 

​Wild Awake was the only novel I found featuring an Asian protagonist with bipolar disorder. Kiri seeks to solve the murder of her older sister, an artist struggling with addiction. Along the way, Kiri develops a relationship with a young man with schizophrenia. She’s ok with him taking medication, but she’s not sure she’s ready to go that route. 

​In this novel, Lily (formerly Tim) is transgender while Dunkin (Norbert’s nickname, after the donuts) has bipolar disorder, as probably did his father who recently committed suicide, prompting Dunkin and his mother to move to Lily’s neighborhood in Florida to stay with his Jewish grandmother. So, while we have mental illness and gender identity in one book, they do not reside in the same character. There seem to be fewer stories where one character has multiple conditions that make him/her different from the mainstream than stories where multiple characters are each assigned some single quality that makes them different. In real life, a person can differ from the majority in more ways than one at the same time, and that should be reflected in fiction. One possible example of a book with a gay and depressed character is Fans of the Impossible Life, by Kate Scelsa. 

​In this novel, Sebastian (Sebby) and Miranda (Mira) have stayed best friends after their release from the psychiatric ward. Both had made suicide attempts. Mira’s mother and father are an interracial couple, with her mother being white and Jewish and her father being black. With both of them being lawyers, they have enough money to get Mira the care she needs and also to transfer her from her public school to a private one. Yet it is made clear early on that Mira’s house is “the one holdover on the street from an age before people in the neighborhood started building faux mansions that went up to the edge of their property lines” (19).
 
While Mira’s depression seems more biologically originated, Sebby’s has been triggered by the trauma of a hate crime. Sebby was severely beaten for being gay. Sebby is a white foster kid living with an Evangelical Christian woman and struggling with drug addiction. Mira and Sebby befriend Jeremy, who has been the subject of bullying for having two dads. Jeremy and Sebby raise the question as to whether mental illness, when presented in novels whose characters have trouble fitting in, should be presented as a result of circumstances and the struggle to fit in socially or whether that mental illness should be presented as genetic and inherited as well. This issue raises some interesting questions: is a story of mental illness caused by trauma necessarily a different story than a story of mental illness that is not? Is a character who is depressed because they’ve been bullied for being gay or transgender significantly different from a story of a straight kid who wakes up one morning not wanting to get out of bed for no apparent reason? According to Michael Cart (2016), gay teens are two to five times more likely to attempt suicide than straight ones. Is the depression a result of a lack of social acceptance or did a chemical predisposition to depression cause the suicidal teen to react to bullying in that particular way? What came first: the chicken or the egg? Does it matter?
 
In John Green and David Levithan’s Will Grayson, Will Grayson, depression is the first issue that the character struggles with and is treated for, and he figures out that he is gay afterward; the novel seems to be much more about struggling with low mood than struggling to accept sexuality. Often, we expect the reverse to happen: the character struggles with sexuality and therefore becomes depressed. 

Similar questions about nature versus nurture are raised when autism co-occurs with mental illness. Do the brain differences of autism predispose those on the spectrum to have the anxiety and depression that are so often co-morbid with autism (Autism Speaks, 2018), or are anxiety and depression simply the result of the social setbacks that result from a communication/developmental disorder? In Maybe in Paris, the case is complicated by the fact that the mental illness is schizophrenia. One organization suggests that overlapping symptoms often cause misdiagnosis of mental illness when people simply have autism alone (Kaim, 2018). Maybe in Paris was also the only novel I found in which the mentally ill character was also diagnosed with autism, probably because I was looking for YA novels classified by “mental illness” as a subject term; I suspect if one searched for YA novels under the subject term “autism,” some of these books would feature autistic characters with depression and anxiety since these mental illnesses often occur in individuals with autism. Again, the question arises: Do brain structure and chemistry differences cause the depression and anxiety of autistic people, or are depression and anxiety caused by the trauma of bullying or some other manifestation of the lack of acceptance? Does it matter? Can a teen with genetic mental illness relate to and learn from a character who has trauma-induced mental illness?  

Overall, then, there are plenty of fruitful discussions for us and our students to have when we consider YA novels of mental illness in light of ethnic, religious, and/or gender/sexuality diversity. I’m not surprised by that at all. 

References
 
 Kaim, Nomi. (2018). “Autism spectrum and mental illness: Misdiagnosis or co-occurring condition? Asperger/Autism Network. Retrieved from https://www.aane.org/misdiagnosis-co-occurring-condition/

American Psychological Association. (15 Sept. 2015). “New APA report analyzes demographics of the US psychology workforce.” Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/pubs/newsletters/access/2015/09-15/psychology-workforce.aspx

Autism Speaks. (2018). “Autism's associated medical and mental-health conditions.” Retrieved from https://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/learn-more-autism/associated-health-conditions
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Cart, Michael. (2016). Young adult literature: From romance to realism. 3rd ed. American Library Association.
Lin, Luona, Karen Stamm, and Peggy Christidis. (2018). “2007-16: demographics of the U.S. psychology workforce.” American Psychological Association Center for Workforce Studies. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/workforce/publications/16-demographics/index.aspx
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National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). (2018). “Minority mental health awareness month.” Retrieved from https://www.nami.org/Get-Involved/Awareness-Events/Minority-Mental-Health-Awareness-Month

Thanks to Shelly Shaffer for writing this post during her vacation so I could enjoy a bit more of mine. Oh! Shelly has contributed in the past and you can find her earlier posts here and here. Check them out. They are both worth a click.

​I’ve been traveling around in an RV for the past 30 days, visiting Yellowstone, San Antonio, the Black Hills, and numerous other places, along with various family members. It’s been the road trip of a lifetime, as Johnny Cash said, “I’ve been everywhere, man!” (Mack, 1959) 

We live near Spokane, Washington, and between June 20-July 16, we drove a 5000 mile loop through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, and then back through Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, back home to Washington. (Note: I did not drive even one mile of the trip…. All of the driving is thanks to my husband, Jeff, who doesn’t mind driving!). In Yellowstone National Park, we got in an hour-long traffic jam—because three buffalo were walking down the road. Old Faithful spouted its stinky wonderfulness. In Wyoming, our RV had to grind its brakes to get down the 11% grade into Jackson Hole, which is nestled in a beautiful valley. After Jackson Hole, we hoped not to get blown over while driving toward Laramie. Fort Collins and Loveland, Colorado brought its own adventure. At Carter Lake, we saw a tiny deer with its mother (so cute!) and rode our mountain bikes around the lake—getting our first sunburn of the year. Texas was hot! We planned to stay in Amarillo at Palo Duro Canyon, the “Grand Canyon of Texas,” but it was too hot for our two bulldogs, and we ended up driving straight over to Livingston, to my in-law’s house. My husband and I detoured to San Antonio, where we visited the Alamo, the Riverwalk, and several of the missions of San Antonio, which are all still functioning churches, hosting mass almost every day of the week.

In Livingston, Texas, my two little grandchildren, my mother-in-law, and I went to the public library for a Fourth of July event and our pictures were featured in the local paper. After one of the best fireworks shows I’ve seen (put on at my in-law’s house), we headed out to visit the backwoods of Missouri and Arkansas where my parents are building a house. We actually had lunch in a restaurant called “The Cave,” which is located in an actual cave carved into a mountainside in Lanagan, Missouri.
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I was born in a small town in Iowa, and my husband had never been there although we’ve been together for more than twenty years. He’s been there now! Lake Ikaria and Corning, Iowa were unchanged: humid and stifling, but homey and picturesque. After one night of visiting family and old friends, we headed toward Sioux Falls, South Dakota to visit my niece. Falls Park, in downtown Sioux Falls, rivals some of the prettiest waterfalls I’ve seen. The Black Hills and Mount Rushmore did not disappoint. Even though we only had one full day in the Black Hills, our experience included a bike ride down the Mickelson trail, a visit to Mount Rushmore, and a drive through Custer State Park. (I couldn’t help but think of the YA book, Give Me Some Truth by Eric Gansworth (2018), where the main character, a Native American youth, lives on a reservation near a town where a restaurant own has named his place “Custer’s Last Stand.” Although not the main focus of the book, Gansworth writes of the insult celebrating Custer is the Native Americans. So, for me, entering Custer State Park felt wrong and disrespectful.)

As a new professor, I have figured out that most of my traveling can be a combination of business and pleasure. So, this entire trip revolved around my acceptance to present at a conference. After learning that my colleague and I were accepted to present in San Antonio at the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) annual conference.  I planned the rest of the trip accordingly. And, this is one of the ways that Young Adult literature fits into this column. Our presentation focused on the Intersectionality of Comfort and Conflict in LatinX Literature. We examined children’s, intermediate, and Young Adult books to discover the ways that authors treated culture and conflict in children’s and YA books. What we found was that picture books, such as Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match (Brown, 2011), often featured “comfortable” conflict. For example, I Love Saturdays y Domingos (Ada, 2002) features a character who goes to grandma’s house on Saturdays and goes to Abuela’s house on Domingos . Everything is comfortable and the character’s two cultures don’t conflict.

​In René has Two Last Names (Colato Laínez, 2009) the main character goes to school in the U.S. and that teacher only uses one of his surnames. He struggles because he feels like half of his family is being forgotten because the last name isn’t there. When he gets the chance to create a family tree, he takes this opportunity to educate his class and his teacher why his two last names are equally important and the conflict resolves nicely by the teacher saying she’ll always use his two last names from then on. For the most part, children’s picture books featuring LatinX main characters had comfortable conflicts that were resolved easily without too much discomfort for the characters or the audience. Even in the book Antonio’s Card (Gonzalez, 2005) where the main character lives in a less traditional family, with two mothers, the conflict that could have occurred does not. The issues that could have been discussed are not. 

However, a few books pushed the boundaries on this, such as Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan and Crossing the Wire by Will Hobbs  which begin to explore conflict in more realistic ways; however, most teachers would view both of these books as “safe” choices to include in the curriculum. Although Ryan’s book has been challenged, the way immigration and Esperanza’s experiences are presented are not nearly as gritty as the way some YA novels approach the same topic.

I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter Sánchez (2017) explores LatinX identity and experience in a more uncomfortable way. Exposing the ways Julia (hoo-lia) gets frustrated when her name is mispronounced, is expected to act by her parents—especially after her sister’s untimely death, hides her crush with a White boy from her family, and struggles with depression and anxiety. The way the author writes about each of the conflicts that Julia experiences are uncomfortable and realistic, which is a contrast to the safer exploration of similar topics in intermediate and picture books. Similarly, one of my favorite books, Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero (2014) explores multiple difficult topics, as Gabi goes through her senior year. In this novel, Gabi’s best friend gets pregnant, her best friend comes out to his parents and is kicked out of the house, her dad is on drugs, her mom doesn’t want her to attend college, and she also struggles with body image and self-esteem. Each of these issues could affect real-LatinX teens, and because of this, this book crosses into uncomfortable territory. In the end, Gabi’s dad is still on drugs, her friends still face their own struggles, and Gabi still struggles with the expectations she has for herself versus her family’s expectations. It’s not comfortable, but that’s okay. This presentation, in the heart of Texas, at a time when immigration and children’s separation from their families was being protested, felt raw and emotional. 

But, San Antonio was not the only place where YA was a part of my road trip. In many of the places we traveled, there was little or no cell service or Internet access. We get spoiled. We’re used to being able to get online to check our social media or send an email. However, in my RV, I have a bookshelf, and on that shelf are several Young Adult books that have been on my “to read” list this year. On this shelf were: Wrecked by Maria Padian , The Cruel Prince by Holly Black , The Inexplicable Logic of my Life by Benjamin Alire Seanz, and When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon . What can be better than sitting by a lake, relaxing in the shade with a book you’ve been wanting to read? 

​This trip reminded me to appreciate the different experiences and lives of people throughout this vast country. This trip reminded me how grateful I am for my husband and my life. What other job allows so much time out of the office and the schedule to have a trip like this in the first place? I’m lucky. 

Shelly can be reached at: sshaffer1@ewu.edu
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Ok, so it isn’t my birthday until July 12. Nevertheless, you should try to make me happy. Come on, its my birthday and I want to think positive thoughts on my way to Denny's.

If you are reader, a writer, a teacher and you just might be one of those people who would donate to We Need Diverse Books consider doing so this week and help me celebrate my birthday. Here is the link.

Since the summit I have been trying to catch up with several projects, finish a few new novels, planning blog post so I can vacation a bit, entertain grandkids, and plan for fall classes. In the midst of all of that, I keep thinking about YA literature and the classics and if the classification of YA has developed its own classics. (I think it has and at the same time I think there are so many great new things that people don’t many “new” readers aren’t reading those classic YA texts.) Crag Hill and Victor Malo-Juvera seem to think so as well. See their call for chapters in a book with the working title: Canonical Young Adult Literature: Criticism & Critique. I hope you consider submitting a chapter. See the file below.

In the back of my mind I still have a nagging question; maybe not a question, but a concern. In the last fifty years, there has been a ton of good work about the value and the use of YA literature in the classroom. Granted, much of it has been advocacy or cheerleading, but still, there have been excellent works of criticism, pedagogical suggestions, and conversations about the role of choice in the reading lives of adolescents. Every one of those ideas could be its own blog post (any takers?) or for that matter, its own article or book topic. The specific concern is that I still find teachers and other educators who are unaware of the value of YA literature, or ignore it as a fad, or consider it of little value for “true” students of literature. Why would we spend our time teaching this when we have the classics? More specifically, the suggestion is that YA just isn’t quality literature.

Let’s talk about quality YA literature and why perhaps we have a focus on the classics instead of exploring YA. I think there are many novels that are exemplars of quality literature, novels that could be taught at many levels and usher students into quality literature while allowing them to master any standard. Is that the goal? In reality, most of our honors classes seems to focus on instruction as if their students are going to be English teachers. Well, they aren’t. In fact, in honors classes, we know that many of our students read cliff’s notes or some other summary sources instead of reading the book. I think those students in love with literature will take care of themselves. Some students will become English teachers, college professors, writers, or just great readers. We should probably encourage them, give a bit of direction, and then stay out of their way. What percentage of our students make up that small group? Not many.  I believe we need to be more diligent about nurturing and developing all of the others. All of the students who can’t figure out what we are talking about when we focus on theme, symbols, or theory. Those who just can’t figure out why we just don’t enjoy the story? Well, we do—enjoy the story--don’t we? 

Many of us spend time with what we might call “beach reads” or “mind candy” and we really like them. We know we aren’t reading William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, James Baldwin, Henry James, Herman Melville, George Eliot, or Mark Twain. At the same time, we run in to a contemporary author who hit the bestseller list-- John Irving, Anne Tyler, or Colson Whitehead, E. Annie Proulx, Alice Walker, or Louise Erdrich and as we read them, we occasionally pause and think—“Wow! This person can write. Indeed, some of them win awards and probably will be part of serious, classical literature in the future. So, we don’t abandon them, we keep reading. Granted, some don’t make the cut, but we keep reading and trying to figure it out.

Just as we keep reading, we hope that our students read and keep reading. We hope they become life-long readers.
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Adolescents need the chance to fall in love with reading, but will they do it if we force feed books that don’t interest them, don’t meet their needs, or don’t reflect their lives and experiences. I get it. The classics are great. People should read them, but let’s get them reading first. I believe that happens when we are better readers when we are more widely read.
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​I want to suggest seven titles that I believe are examples of quality young adult literature. I believe they are seven books that will begin to persuade you that YA should be part of your reading and teaching repertoire. Don’t get mad, if I have picked your favorite old or new YA title. I still love the old ones Judy Blume, Robert Lipsyte, M. E. Kerr, Paul Zindell, Virginia Hamilton, Mildred Taylor and S. E. Hinton. Some new authors I love are A. S. King, Jeff Zetner, Peter Brown Hoffmeister, Jason Reynolds, Nic Stone, Meg Medina, Brendan Kiely, Laurie Halse Anderson, Matt de la Peña and Jo Knowles. I could have chosen a book by any of these authors; but, again, it is my birthday and I get to choose the ones that I really like. The ones that stay with me. Most have been featured in the blog as part of a different post at one time or another. I hope you browse around, maybe even look more carefully at the weekend picks.   

​The seven books that follow are listed in publication order from oldest to newest. (It looks like I thought that 2014 was a pretty good year.)

This book has it all, mystery, government intrusion, point of view, and a complicated narrative. Cormier's sophisticated writing at its best.

Hesse provides a history lesson through a verse novel that is not to be missed. What have we done? Who do we care about? How do we face adversity? These are questions that remain today.

Monster by Walter Dean Myers dominated YA courses for at least 10 years and maybe it still does. Inventive narrative structure, point of view, the court system, and question of what is true about ourselves and others haunt this tale. Who are we? What do we think about ourselves, let alone what others might be thinking about us.

Like all of these authors Andrew Smith has more than one book that is to be embraced, relished, and admired. This is one that doesn't leave me. I heard Smith compared to Vonnegut and that thought never leaves me while I read his work. You can start anywhere with Smith's novels, but do yourself a favor and read this one right away.

People tell me okay, but what about Shakespeare. Yeah, well what about Shakespeare? He was a thief that stole stories and reshaped them. In We Were Liars, E. Lockhart uses fairy tales, Shakespeare and her own voice to create a modern day story of family and conflict that is here to stay.

Refugees and immigrants are in the news. They should be and we should do more. Sepetys' Salt to the Sea reminds us that, at times, we have the opportunity to do the right thing and, well, we don't always do it. Who are we? Contemporary issues, current events, history, compelling narrative, what more can you ask of any novel. You don't believe me, give it a try.

Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming is just beautiful. It is gift to readers everywhere. I just love it. I have written about it here Second Reaction: More Dominant than the First: The Power of Memory in Brown Girl Dreaming.

​This list isn’t perfect, but these are books I love. These are books that have strong literary quality. They represent a variety of themes, characters, styles, issues of diversity, and all of them could be taught in an honors class without apology. A student writing the AP literature exam could write about one of these books and have every confidence that they are writing about a book that is of similar literary quality.

Thanks for tuning in on a holiday or over the holiday week. This week, the contributors are students from the University of Central Florida and are graduates students who were in a class with Dr. Elsie Olan. Elsie is fantastic and I had the joy of attending their class through a Skype session. They were kind enough to use this blog as part of their class and they had great questions. In the following post they share some of their reactions to teaching and reacting to Young Adult Literature.  I am issuing a brief trigger warning. One of the presenters mentions the work of Sherman Alexie. Many of us have used his work and I suppose some us might continue to do so with qualifications and broader conversations. Just, remember, when this work was done, their study was well underway before we knew about the situation. The situation deserves our attention and our firm, but calm academic response as we consider how we study art.

The following students contribute: Jessica Margaret Adams, ​Ashley Antoniette Gecewicz, Duaa Lutfi, Jessica Mary Kirton, and Carly Mae Cravotta 

Scenes, motifs,
New ideas unfurled,
Use young adult literature
To experience the world.
 
Improve, inform
Understand your surroundings.
Society and culture
Knowledge is abounding.
 
See through the eyes
Of someone unknown
Let your thoughts take flight
And your dreams to roam.
 
Affect change you want
Don’t allow the past
To darken our future
And hatred to last.
 
Find what you enjoy
Always keep searching
So many opportunities
Are forever emerging.
 
Once upon a time
In a classroom on my own
I began to read YA novels
And I found my home.
 
Suzanne Collins created
A place, simply serene
A place I could find myself
My own self-identity.
 
This place that was created
Where I felt I could be
Nothing else, no one else
Just be me
Was only because
The author’s own life
Was spent understanding history
And looking back in time
 
Into crime, hatred, war
And how it can transform,
Change, hurt, maim
And also can inform.
 
This story reflects the author
And her own personal journey
With her family and her Dad
With their moving and their learning.
 
Battlefields and monuments
Places Collins knew well
Places she formed ideas
Experiences that would compel
 
The formation of her characters
The plot and the theme
The timing and the reactions
The creation of the scene.
 
The courage, the stamina
Of Katniss, my hero
The sheer rebel nature
My alter ego.

​Her name was Katniss
Katniss Everdeen
So many similarities
Finally could be seen
 
Between my life
And the girl in the book.
She made me think
Take a deeper look
 
At what I believed
And who I thought I’d be
All shifting, changing,
Into what worked for me.
All shifting, changing,
Into what worked for me.
 
As Katniss ventured
out on her own
She stated, “Some walks
you have to take alone” (Collins 2010).
 
Truth and many parallels
Between the character and me
Between the inner struggles
Of her self-identity.
 
The struggle to understand
Where we fit in
How our frame of reference changes
From where we are and where we’ve been.
 
Suzanne Collins was an author
Who changed my frame of mind
Transformed my way of thinking
And my sense of self it refined.
 
Another novel
That inspired me
Island of the Blue Dolphins
Which truly set me free.
 
Scott O’ Dell created
A place I could escape
Where I could find myself
Allow my beliefs to take shape.
 
Push the boundaries, the norms,
Find what I believe,
Karana’s life as my guide
Her determination as my reprieve.
 
As she decided
What she would believe
How she would live
All she would achieve

 
I began to see
So much of myself
In the girl in the book
That had sat upon the shelf
 
The pages came to life
As I learned of true courage
To question what is true
 Free thought encouraged.
 
I realized then
I could choose on my own
I did not have to follow
What I had always known
 
I could decide something different
Something not the same
As those who were before me
I could affect change
 
I could stand up for those
Who deserve a place
No matter where they come from
No matter what their race
 
No matter what their color
nationality or creed
All that mattered
Was that we all have a need[1] 
 
To connect to be
An equal part of this earth
To be given a chance
From the instant we are birthed.
 
To be able to connect
To thrive on our own
But work together
To cultivate this place we call home.
 
Karana and Katniss
Showed me something strange
I could have courage, love, and hope
I could be the change.

Back in the summer of 2009, my mother and I started to listen to an audiobook together on a long car ride. This was no big deal, it was something we frequently did. However, in that ride, little me had no idea what this book was about and was soon brought into a new world of heroes, monsters, and adventure. The book was an infamous young adult novel by the name of Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan and I became obsessed with the lore of Greek Mythology. It was unbeknownst to me that in a couple of months when I started ninth grade, I would actually be reading a little tale that some may know. The Odyssey. The connection I had was surreal. I knew ins-and-outs of the Gods and Goddess presented to me in my English 1 classroom, all because I happened to have picked up a book that was about a young 13 year old boy and his other 13 year old friends and became enthralled in the knowledge that surrounded me. This book took me to another realm and it made me want to be able to spread my knowledge of the literature that complimented Greek Mythology. This book alone was what sparked me to become a English teacher, all those years ago, and the fire still burns inside my soul today. 

As a young reader, I wanted adventure, of course, but I also wanted relatability in my readings. Yes, I knew that it was Fiction, but the characters were so real. The feelings the characters had were so raw and they were just like me. And that’s one of the most important aspects of Young Adult Literature. A student can read a book and look at a character and say “Hey! They’re just like me!” Young Adult Literature comes in many different genres and has many different themes, but the characters are the age of our teens, and they can relate to them and say that “They’re just like me!” and if that is not impactful, I don’t know what is.
           
Little did I know, I was pairing a young adult novel with a classical text, something that later in my life would become my focus of study in my academic career.
           
​Pairing young adult literature and classical text could have the same effect on students as it did on myself and that is data that is necessary. Not to focus just on their scores of tests but the effects on their personality growth and how their thinking changes through the course of said pairing. Students have the ability to understand the relation between texts, it’s one of the main things we, as teachers, teach them to do. 

For students to see how people of the past saw a concept and compare it to how those of today see it can enhance their understanding. For example, pairing 1984 (George Orwell, 1949) with The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, 2008) to discuss dystopian literature or Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Sea of Monsters (Rick Riordan, 2006) with Odyssey (Homer, 8th century B.C.) in discussion of Greek mythology. YAL can be more interesting for students due to them being more recent and relatable than the original concepts written as classics. It will broaden their resources and understanding of the controversial topics that are addressed and bring them into the light to be discussed how the topics were seen in the past and present. The students of today do not live in the past, from social media presence to life in the classroom, they are about the here and now, so we should be adapting our techniques to adhere to the new age of students. However, when doing so, we should still be teaching them the past and where the original thoughts were retrieved; that’s how a pairing of classical literature and young adult literature would make due. Both in educational means, by teaching of the past and present, as well as the influence that there will be on student growth, pairings would be beneficial for all.

Do you ever seem frustrated when you are connected to the WiFi, but your media is not loading? How about when you don’t have the WiFi password and you sit there hoping someone would mention it or display it? In both instances, you emotionally feel disconnected and physically detached to what is going on around you. Feelings consisting of impatience, frustration, panic, isolation, and fear of being shut out or left behind are starting to surface. What do you do?

​Now imagine that scenario above in a classroom of about 20-25 students, all with distinct emotional and behavioral abilities. Some students may confidently voice their concerns, others may silently sit there while hoping and praying they had magical abilities to disappear at that very instant. How can the teacher provide the necessary resources for ALL students to feel connected? How do we bridge the gap between students real life and the world they live in? How do we make learning substantial?

Teachers, educators, anyone relevant to the educational realm should come to the realization that we have diverse students with diverse learning needs and interests and we need to  utilize engaging, relevant instructional resources. We need to position ourselves to refrain from marginalizing our students in our classroom practices, mannerisms, and “all-inclusive” curriculums. We need to shift the status quo by teaching students how to fall in love with learning again and to become well-versed in the world around them. In order for us educators to do that, we need to invite the students to safe environments that are relevant to their lives; where all funds of knowledge are welcomed and appreciated. Now, where do we start?

Existing literature and numerous field notes have demonstrated the impact and power of Young Adult Literature novels or YAL and their merit in the field of education, classrooms, and students personal lives. These canonical and modern day novels have been seamlessly integrated across content area curriculums and have deemed paramount results among student emotional, cognitive, and behavioral levels, as well as, language acquisition. While the integration of YAL is critical in a classroom, it is imperative to note that these novels should be aligned with the cultures and relevant to the diverse learning backgrounds existing within a classroom. It is equally important to note the accessibility of these culturally relevant texts for students so that it becomes “…easier to bridge the students’ worlds with the world of the text” (Alsup, 2010, pg. 147). Teachers at times fail to validate our students’ cultures by not providing culturally relevant texts, which in return affects their abilities to be engrossed in the reading material and associated learning performances (Alsup, 2010, Hayn, 2017). If the students are not able to see the connections between the themes salient in these novels and their real worlds, these novels will not have the potential to change their lives (Alsup, 2010, pg. 13). These relevant novels can feed into students’ funds of knowledge about the world, society, their personal identities and journeys, etc. When students read about the stories of others, they are better able to make sense of the world around them and be more equipped in handling issues from different angles. Each canonical young adult literature novel has various cultures, societal pressures or issues, character structures, etc. that can be conduits to meaningful dialogical interactions among students. As the students read about different cultures through a lens other than themselves, they are able to properly question other cultures (motives, taboos, religion, etc.) and clear misconceptions in a safe setting. Literacy performances in conjunction with proper discourse and action yield to real world implications, where students voluntarily want to get up and correct the issues at hand (Alsup, 2010, pg. 58).  Teaching Young Adult Literature Today: Insights, Considerations, and Perspectives for the Classroom Teachers (2017) by Judith Hayn and co-authors, Jeffrey S. Kaplan, and Karina R. Clemmons, bring forth ideas of the educators Barbara A. Wards, Deanna Day-Wiff, and Terrell A. Young in their chapter on Civil Rights and Social Justice. These authors further rationalize that teachers “...need to promote students to be upstanders rather than bystanders…” and as a result of reading being an interactive process, ‘meaningful action’ takes place (pg. 144). Not only do students need to be involved in culturally relevant novels and materials, the concept of critical reflectivity is also significant (Alsup, 2010). Students need to gain the expertise of expanding the novel themes and character experiences beyond their scope and being able to “...see the similarities in a seemingly dissimilar situation” (Alsup, 2010, pg. 213). Essentially, the goals of [culturally relevant] YAL should successfully “...help teen readers work through problems in positive, life-affirming ways” (Alsup, 2010,  pg. 210). Now, how do we implement such rich resources?

There are numerous strategies to successfully  integrate YAL in an English Language Arts classroom. In this case, I will use The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo as an example to demonstrate possible implications.  The Alchemist is about a young shepherd boy named Santiago who has a dream of a hidden treasure. Throughout the novel, he goes on an adventure to seek his treasure and discover his True Legend or calling. Along the way, he meets some interesting characters and learns a few valuable lessons. One excellent way to teach this novel is by closely examining each character by deconstructing and problematizing their attitudes and beliefs, diverse cultures and mannerisms, perceptions and experiences, and/or influences upon the novel’s protagonist. Another example would be to model and practice Wonder Talk, consisting of reflective questions such as I wonder...? What if...? Have you ever...? (Hayn, 2017). Following this Wonder Talk, it would be essential to transition students lens from self to world and allow them to critically analyze the actions of the characters or events occurring in the novel.  In these examples, students are reading, writing, and discussing the text, hence actively transacting with the text, instigating their cognitive and emotional intelligences.

​Teachers should always find ways to motivate and excite their students; to instigate their thirsts for learning every day. Integrating YAL is a multifaceted avenue worth exploring, implementing, and creating in order to yield productive, self-autonomous students.  

“Good reads.” “Page-turners.” Books you simply cannot put down. What are these mystical reading experiences everyone buzzes about, and where are these magical books? As a child, I observed that my family loved books and my teachers did too. Oh, I how I wanted a glimpse into this wonderful world of storybooks! Oh how I tried to taste it for myself! But, my experiences were always the same: Reading was boring. Apparently, I was locked out of this wonderful book-world. And, eventually I accepted it.

Despite my ability and eagerness for reading, I never read more than I absolutely had to. Then, in my early twenties, I finally had a different experience after a friend told me about a “memoir” she was reading. A biography? No. A memoir. My friend described an author who wrote a personal story, a real account of something that actually happened to him. How fascinating, I thought! Renewed in the hope of finally discovering a good book, I set out to read this memoir, A Boy Called It. It was my first discovery of an actual “page-turner.” I read in the bathroom. At stoplights. Even while pumping gas! It was all so elusive before, but I finally found a book I could not “put down.” To this day, the only books I willingly and happily commit myself to are memoirs.

As a new teacher, personal reflection is an important part of my reading identity. Not only to stimulate self-awareness, but with the larger view of sharing literature with young adults as a way to help them overcome barriers. Consider the results of a national survey: Reading capability does not necessarily lead to engaged reading. In other words, just because students are good at reading does not mean they will enjoy and look for opportunities to read. To connect my personal reading experiences with my research on Young Adult literature, I ask:  How do my personal reading experiences shape me as an English teacher, and what does my literacy research tell me about adolescent student readers?

Three essential beliefs present from both my lived experiences and my research.

1) The simplest observation: I avoided reading because I flat-out did not enjoy it. This fact is so simple it hardly seems worth stating, but the implication is: If we want students to read, they ought to read for enjoyment and not just to get information. 

2) My long awaited “discovery” of reading was a matter of genre. It follows then, students should be exposed to a variety of different kinds of books and have the freedom to make choices about what to read.

3) It is important to consider how I learned about my favorite genre. Not through a book report, no! At long last, my renewed motivation sprung from a conversation I had with a friend. It follows then that students need the opportunity to talk about what they are reading in class. 

The hope of students being able to make real connections with in-school reading assignments means sharing selective power about the texts themselves. As teachers, we know which students are struggling to find a book or which ones are only pretending to be engaged.

One memoir novel proving to reach thousands of adolescent readers is The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Alexie, 2009). This is a coming of age, autobiographical fiction novel by Sherman Alexie and includes illustrations by Ellen Forney. The story is told in the form of a diary and is narrated by the protagonist, Arnold Spirit Junior, or “Junior,” a Spokane Indian. Junior goes to school and lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation near the town of Reardan in Washington State. He was born with water on the brain, survived a life threatening brain surgery at six months of age, and was plagued by many secondary health conditions due to the resulting brain damage; nevertheless, against all odds, Junior develops into an intelligent and ambitious young man.

But, growing up on the Spokane Reservation, or “the “Rez,” is an incredible struggle for Junior due to his family’s poverty, alcoholism, and general prejudice toward whiteness. The crux of his dramatic story centers on his powerful decision to leave his high school on the Rez at age fourteen and commute to an all-white high school in a neighboring town twenty-two miles from the Rez. Although a brave choice, it proves to make life even more difficult as Junior struggles to find acceptance at his new school and to win the support and validation from his community on the Rez. While Jr. lives on the Rez and goes to high school at Reardan, he is torn between two different worlds, two separate identities, and worse- he is an outcast in both circles. Through friendship, Junior finds at least some answers to his dilemma in a surprising insight about his own identity and that of “others.”  
       
In an article published by the Wall Street Journal, Sherman Alexie (2011), true to his honest form, responds to those concerns:
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And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing every-day and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed (p. 4).

Every teacher’s goal is to reach each and every single student sitting in their classroom. Every teacher yearns to hear the string of words, “I love reading” or “This novel is good,” or even, “I checked out a book from the library.”  Every teacher’s ideal day consists of captivating their most reluctant readers through relevant curriculum entangled in an engaging lesson. But how can educators entice even the most detached students, begging for something authentic and raw to reel them back in? The most marginalized and disenfranchised students’ education can be salvaged through the relevancy and applicability found in young adult literature (YAL). All American Boys, co-authored by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, embodies an exemplar young adult (YA) novel to implement in a high school English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. With the ever-changing demographics of the United States, classrooms across the country are pleading for a diverse book like this that can be advantageous for students’ achievement.
*insert Carly image (a) & (b) here

The chapters toggle between the perspectives of the two protagonists, Rashad and Quinn, as they grapple with a single act of police brutality from different perspectives, from different races. The dualistic and authentic nature of the voices afford this novel to simultaneously function as both a mirror and window text for students. Students can either see themselves in one of the characters or are learning the idiosyncrasies of a person from an unfamiliar background. Powerful and contemporary themes attract even reluctant readers: providing authentic learning opportunities to explore social justice issues. Readers are then propelled out of the classroom and back into the real world, connecting their unprecedented experiences with the novel to their own lived experiences. The interaction with the text builds upon their perceptions and corrects any misconceptions of people from different backgrounds.
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As the United States remains a polarized nation, the classroom discussions and activities infused with this novel could evolve the divisive discourse surrounding the themes of police brutality and racism to a more unifying forum. Since these issues in the novel are prevalent in current society, teachers can incorporate authentic writing experiences and texts pairings to connect the novel to the real world.