With YA Power Comes YA Responsibility?

At the CBC Diversity blog, author and digi-editor Daniel Nayeri shared an essay on an apparent double standard in discussions of Young Adult books:

These days every book festival has a YA panel, and every panel has a moment when a well-meaning attendee will stand up and ask: Are YA novels becoming more perverse? . . .

several times I’ve heard authors say, “Well, we can’t take responsibility for what a reader will take from a book. It could be anything.”

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris could have been reading Judy Moody just as easily as The Catcher in the Rye.

It’s a tempting idea for anyone who has ever written anything. You write what you write. Readers take whatever they want from it. . . .

ten minutes later—still at this hypothetical YA panel—a different panelist will mention all the good that their book might have done. A young fan wrote in with news of recovery, and the author glows with pride. . . .

We believe in the power of writing, and we accept the good it can cause in the lives of young readers, but we reject even the notion that it can also do harm.

In fact, the CBC Diversity blog itself is based in part on the idea that books can harm young readers by not portraying a diverse set of people or by portraying certain people in insulting or stereotypical ways. That acknowledges the power of writing. 

Judging MGM’s Wizard of Oz as an Adaptation

Last week I quoted a Salon article collecting thoughts by a bunch of writers about their favorite and least favorite adaptations of children’s books. Several had interesting (and varied) things to say about the most famous Oz movies.

Gregory Maguire, author lately of Out of Oz:

I would insist that the 1939 film of “The Wizard of Oz” is better constructed than the 1900 novel on which it is based, and that “Return to Oz” is an overlooked masterpiece much better than the several Baum novels upon which it is based.

(More to come on the contrast between Baum’s and Maguire’s approaches to Oz. I need to get my notes together.)

Jane Yolen, author of so much:

I think the Judy Garland “Wizard of Oz” is better than the book, which, while wildly inventive, has such flat affect and overly simplistic prose that it makes my teeth ache.

(More of Yolen’s thoughts on the book, and my response to that assessment, back here.)

Daniel Nayeri, editor and author:

I don’t think “The Wizard of Oz” can rightly be called a “good” adaptation. It might be a good movie, but it didn’t do the world of Oz any favors (aside from keeping it in print for so long).

While the MGM Wizard of Oz does a lot of things right, it also gets a lot about Oz wrong. The need to add a valuable lesson about life to the story—“She had to learn it for herself”—both brings absolute jibberjabber out of Judy Garland’s mouth and turns her whole trip to Oz into a punishment. I think that’s even more off the mark than making Dorothy a wimp and making Oz a dream.