Week 3: YA Firsts - Seminar Reading

This week is class will be our first round of seminars. To prepare for them, our classmates assigned us some readings to do our their topic (our two topics this week are 'Finding Out About YA Material' and 'Trends in Contemporary YA Lit'). One of the seminar readings in particular stood out to me: Karen McCoy's "What Teens Are Really Reading." In this article, McCoy tries to peg which YA novels among the slew that are published every year are going to have "staying power." To do this, she turned to school and public librarians.

This article peaked my interest for two reasons. First off, I am curious why McCoy would turn solely to school and public librarians for her survey. On the one hand, I do understand that she is trying to decipher which YA books are likely to pass the test of time so that they can be incorporated in library collections, but I still wonder why she decided to disregard the audience these books are aimed to. One could argue that teens are more susceptible to current and hot trends and that librarians may have more foresight in what will remain popular or become staples of YA. But do librarians really know that much better? I'm still undecided.



I also wondered how librarians are to balance the line between choosing materials that are popular and follow current publishing trends versus 'important' works that may continue to impact YA. The top 20 list that McCoy presented at the end of the article did not seem representative of 'important' YA to me, despite her initial claim that she was looking for books with 'staying power.' This is merely my own personal opinion, but it looked to me like the list comprised solely of books that were popular at the time. I am not opposed to commercial fiction and I do not think that a YA book has to be an award winner to be deemed 'good' to pass the test of time, but this list was still lacking, for me, in books that are and have been made staples in YA. The only book I would argue that will potentially pass the test of time is The Hunger Games.

All in all, I wasn't particularly impressed with McCoy's efforts. I understand what she was trying to do, but I don't think she managed to accomplish it. Her survey completely disregarded teens and the list she compiled only seems to be comprised of 'popular' and 'commercial' fiction which I doubt will have staying power. I said earlier that it could be argued that librarians may have more foresight in disseminating what will be 'important' in YA fiction, but McCoy's list only showed me that librarians are just as susceptible to trends as anyone else.


McCoy, Karen. What Teens Are Really Reading. School Library Journal, 58(1): 32-34