YA Fiction Debate Featured on NPR

From NPR, June 6, 2011:

Seeing Teenagers As We Wish They Were: The Debate Over YA Fiction

Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece claiming that fiction at least nominally aimed at readers under 18 — young adult or "YA" fiction, that is — is entirely too dark. Calling out the books about kids who cut themselves or suffer abuse right alongside the books with abundant profanity in them, it laments the fact that young readers will be "surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds."

Unsurprisingly, the commentary has come under intense criticism — it's not in any way a new complaint, and every response to it points that out, along with plenty of other problems.

Read the rest of the article here.