The Spectator.co.uk
A cynical look at the dark trend in YA literature. The piece blurs the line between YA and children’s lit, comparing Doing It to Peter Pan and Charlotte’s Web. Here is a good quote from an expert cited in the article:
“But according to Professor Nicholas Tucker, author of the Rough Guide to Children’s Literature, books have to be grim to explain difficult issues to children that parents shirk from discussing, especially with their pre-teens or tweenagers, and to compete with the grabby, pixillated storylines and images available onscreen.
“Look at adoption,” he says. “It’s better to have two books about it in the house than having a chat about it once a year at Christmas. Books provide some of this function and they probably do a lot of good. The only time to get scared is when fiction exists only as a way to teach social messages, but at the moment there are masses and masses of books that don’t deal with social issues at all. And with TV it’s too late to put the genie back into the bottle now. Books have got to be in some ways ahead of TV in terms of sophistication as a way of surviving.””