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YA fiction is too dark

I just don't see the harm in letting kids read YA books about "serious" issues. Those books have a good chance of helping more than harming readers.
 
ya needs to be dark in my opinion, a lot of the time I feel like the authors are too afraid to go where they need to go to make the book good. Like they will have a great warrior that never kills, two lovers that never make love, ect..
 
YA fiction is a mixed bag of stuff. Like anything, there will always be good stuff and utter rubbish mixed in. Gotta be careful what you read. I try to avoid too much dark material, but my experience with YA has been mostly pleasant.
 
I think it depends on the genre. I have also found with my students if it borders the line between what is "age appropriate" and what is an "adult" novel, they want to read more!
 
OK, for every "Go Ask Alice" book there is a Harry Potter series or a Protector of the Small series. Wee Free Men even leaps to mind. I get frustrated when folks see only one small part of an ever growing genre. Its like saying "fiction" is too dark. What a sad and irritating article that was.
 
Realistic doesn't necessarily mean bad, but there are some parts of reality that it's nicer to skip, even for YA.
 
The Guardian: Are Children's Books Darker Than They Used To Be?

The truth is that much of children's fiction, even when dressed up as an adventure, is about navigating emotionally or physically difficult times. While we often remember books from our childhood for their action adventure or the rosy glow of their ending, the truth is that they frequently hold sadness or tragedy at their core.
In 19th-century classics such as Frances Hodgson Burnett's two most fondly remembered titles, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, the characters have to deal with extremely tough times. In the first, Sara Crewe goes from riches to rags after the death of her father and the loss of his money. As a result, she becomes the victim of a particularly nasty kind of cruelty when she is forced to become a servant to the very people who once so admired her. In the second, much has gone wrong for Mary Lennox before she comes to Yorkshire and discovers the healing powers of the garden. E Nesbit, too, predicated her stories on calamity; everything that happens in The Railway Children is a result of the children's father's imprisonment.
Favourite 20th-century classics such as EB White's Charlotte's Web and Michelle Magorian's Goodnight Mister Tom both include death, one as a pervasive theme, the other in unexpected and shocking moments. But both are also touching and emotionally charged stories of great tenderness and neither is seen as an "issue" novel.
Click to expand...
 
I think however the way they are written has changed. I personally find a lot of YA fiction waay too dark even to read now. Having said that, there is a place for fiction dealing with real life issues that helps educate, but there is a light way of doing it and a heavy dark way of doing it. If I could try to put my finger on the essential ingredient - the difference would be hope. Good YA fiction that offers hope and way out regardless of the difficulty of the circumstances reads completely differently to those that don't.

Yes Charlotte's Web deals with death - but it's the threat of death and ultimately death overcome in a book that is a celebration of life rather than one that deals with all the heaviness of death.

Ditto The Little Princess and The Secret Garden, in each the child concerned discovers a source of light, hope and comfort that ultimately helps them transcend the difficulties.

Not all modern YA fiction manages to do that.
 
Dark within the context of learning or a moral story can be a good thing. Dark within a framework of a stable environment, ditto. A solution here in search of a problem IMHO.
 
There's good YA and bad YA...true for any genre, so just choose the specific books you read wisely. And don't be afraid to put something down if you don't like it.
 
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