Ok, so there’s a lot of dark YA lit because teens want to read it — both the Literature and the popcorn. There’s also tons of light YA lit. (And if the mother at the beginning of Gurdon’s column couldn’t find any, perhaps she should have asked an experienced professional — at an indie bookstore or library if she couldn’t find one at Barnes & Noble — rather than fumbling through the YA section on her own.) Sure, there are trends, but YA is no more one-note than adult lit is.

But there is an awful lot of dark, heavy stuff on the recommended lists — the books we as educators assign and give awards to. In the last few years of Printz winners there’s abject poverty, environmental apocalypse, child labor, abusive parents, children as murderers, terminal illness, child abandonment, suicide, terrorism, and teen pregnancy, just to name a few. These are excellent, deserving books and I adore many of them, as do my students. But the darkness seems over-represented. (Note: tone is important, obviously, and I don’t want to make this all about a context-free list of content markers. But I would argue that while every one has some form of “happy ending,” the tone of most of these books is just as dark as their content implies.)

There are plenty of exceptions, obviously, but there is a general belief in our culture that “dark and heavy” = quality. This reaches far beyond YA lit; for instance, how often does a romantic comedy win Best Picture? Every year our high school students look at the summer reading list and say, “Is there anything on here that’s not depressing?” And the list is mostly adult books! (The answer, by the way, is definitely yes, but we had to add some lighter books deliberately for that reason, and they often aren’t “canon.”) Do we believe that it requires more skill to make someone cry than laugh? Is it more worthy to address painful subjects? Do we feel that stories have more truth if they end tragically with a touch of uplift? I’m asking these questions honestly; my mind’s not set here and I hope you’ll tell me what you think about my premise or the reasons behind it.

It does seem worth taking a look at our instinct, as gatekeepers, to recommend the intense Holocaust novel as “Literature” over the love story with a happy ending. If some kids at some moments need dark YA to save them (and I do believe that they do), they also sometimes need to be saved by a light or funny book about people whose lives aren’t perfect but mostly turn out all right. I know I do.

First of all, could the ALA website be any more embarrassing? Seriously, people, we’re supposed to be information professionals. How ’bout some sensible organization of content? When I click on the Youth Media Awards page, there should be a big damn list of the award winners. I don’t want to scroll through your tweets, I don’t want to go to your Facebook page, I don’t want to know about the live webcast that already happened, I want to know who won the freaking awards! I should not have to scroll down half the page and click on a tiny press release link to do so.

Hmph. Moving on.

Moon Over Manifest: train tracks, overalls… there’s a Newbery-ready cover if ever I saw one. When I have some spare time, I want to run some numbers on how many Newberys have been historical fiction.

Ship Breaker won the Printz! *Does dance of joy* I am sorry that Chaos Walking never got any little medals, though.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder lifetime achievement award goes to Tomie dePaola! I’ll admit that Strega Nona stressed me the heck out — all that spaghetti everywhere! (I told my students the other day that, even as a kid, I was the fish.) But I heart Tomie dePaola, and he absolutely deserves this award.

My beloved True Meaning of Smekday won the Odyssey for best audiobook. I’ll take what I can get.

And Guardian of the Dead was a William C. Morris first-time author finalist! Between that and Ship Breaker, they got 2 out of 3 of my favorites this year. If 8th Grade Superzero had gotten some love (a Coretta Scott King? no?), I’d be all set.

I haven’t read any of the Stonewall winners or honors (yet), but huge thumbs-up to the ALA for adding an award celebrating “works for children and teens of exceptional merit relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered experience.”

My friend Deborah Kaplan has a fascinating discussion going on over at her blog about the Margaret A. Edwards lifetime achievement award. (That’s the one that so controversially went to Orson Scott Card a couple of years ago; this year it’s Terry Pratchett’s.) Go join the conversation! Who do you think is missing from the list of award winners?

John Newbery Medal for children’s lit: When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead (eeee!!!)
Michael L. Printz Award for YA lit: Going Bovine, by Libba Bray

Schneider Family Book Award for a YA “artistic expression of the disability experience”: Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork (yay!!)
Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award: The Rock and the River, by Kekla Magoon
Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement by an African-American author: Walter Dean Myers
Margaret A. Edwards Award for “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature”: Jim Murphy, a non-fiction writer with whom I am not familiar, but who will no doubt be less controversial than Orson Scott Card was last year
May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture: Lois Lowry
YALSA Excellence in Non-Fiction: Charles and Emma: the Darwin’s Leap of Faith, by Deborah Heiligman
Pura Belpre Award for a YA novel by a Latino/a author: Return to Sender, by Julia Alvarez
William C. Morris Award for YA by a first-time author: Flash Burnout, by L. K. Madigan
Mildred L. Batchelder Award for children’s lit translated from another language: A Faraway Island, by Annika Thor (Sweden)

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I’m too cranky to re-write the whole thing or to be “fair and balanced,” so you’ll have to make due with the snarky summary version:

Like everyone in her family (including both her grandparents, even though this is apparently genetic), Mibs finds out her special talent, her “savvy,” on her 13th birthday. But her dad ends up in a coma, and her birthday is a whole big roadtripping misadventure with her siblings and the preacher’s kids and a dude who drives a Bible delivery van.

It’s so sweet it’ll make your teeth hurt, there are 14 overwritten similes in the first 11 pages, and everyone loves it but me. Including a lot of kids: it has a loving family and no real danger, so it’s good for the sort of kids who hate problem novels or anything “edgy.” If you have a market for Christian-friendly books, this is probably a good choice. But then, I’m a northeastern liberal atheist Jew, so you might not want to take my word for it.

The end.

(Man, that took like eight minutes. I should write all my reviews this way!)

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The Arrival, Shaun Tan: I almost never say this, but you must all go find this book and “read” it now. (Is it reading if there are no words? Parse it? Consume it? Anyway…) My friend Alison of the Wellesley Booksmith showed this off at a teachers-and-librarians event last fall, and I’ve been longing to spend more time with it ever since.

Ok, shut up with the vague kvelling, already. This is the story of a man who escapes his threatened home to start a new life on foreign shores, leaving his wife and daughter behind until he has enough money to send for them. It’s told entirely in rich sepia-toned pencil drawings (click that link to look at more pictures, but don’t read the text — the book is more powerful if you let it unfold slowly).

I normally have trouble without words, but The Arrival was perfectly clear. The story is not about immigrating from or to a particular place at a particular time. Words would have tied the story down to specifics — the fantasy images immerse the reader in the mystifying immigrant experience in general.

The Adventure of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick: This year’s Caldecott Medal winner isn’t a “picture book” in the usual sense. It’s more of a YA novel, told half in words and half in pictures, “evok[ing] the flickering images of the silent films to which the book pays homage” (as the Caldecott blurb says).

I didn’t know about the silent movie angle when I started it, and from the title and the drawings and the mysterious automaton that is the Invention, I expected a story with a touch of magic and fantasy. It was a bit of a let-down for me to find the story tied to a real person, Georges Melies, a director of silent films who invented the early versions of many of the special effects we use today. It shouldn’t have been a let-down, though, because Melies’s work is every bit as fantastic as my imagined magical automaton. So now you know to expect it and won’t be unfairly disappointed!

Being introduced to Melies turned out to be the best part of the book for me. I found the story overly simplistic, and the characters constantly keep pointless secrets from each other just to draw out the story. But the pictures are lovely, and the technique of telling chunks of story with film-scene-like drawings is a neat trick. Certainly worth a look if you’re into creative storytelling devices.