Elodie Rose has a secret. Any day, she’ll become a wolf and succumb to the violence that’s cursed her family for centuries. For seventeen years she’s hidden who and what she is. But now someone knows the truth and is determined to exterminate her family line. Living on borrowed time in the midst of this dangerous game of hide and seek, the last thing Elodie needs to do is fall in love. But Sawyer is determined to protect her, and the brooding, angry boy is more than what he seems. Can they outsmart a madman? And if they survive, will they find a way to beat the curse for good?
Why Disneyfying Classic Fairy Tales Is An Injustice (Or Why YA Isn’t REALLY Too Dark For Teens)
Earlier this summer, in a now infamous article in the Wall Street Journal, a claim was made that the subject matter of most YA was, in fact, too dark for teens. Aside from the fact that the article lumps all YA into a range of 12-18 and neglects the fact that there are subsets for older and younger teens, the take-home message seemed to be that the subject matter was inappropriate for teens. It even went so far as to say that reading such graphic, dark material would give teens ideas (i.e. that reading about suicide might make a non-suicidal kid consider it).
Bollocks.
That’s a complete insult to teens everywhere and doesn’t acknowledge that they DO have brains of their own, thoughts of their own, and prefer to have them validated rather than ignored because, according to all those well-meaning adults, their lives are supposed to be simple and happy and moral. They’re still supposed to be children. Newsflash: They’re not.
Clearly those adults haven’t walked the halls of a modern high school any time in the last two decades. Or done something even more radical and talked to a teenager. I notice the article’s author didn’t bother to have any teenagers as sources or quotes.
I posit that this apparent appetite for the dark among teens is a backlash against the Disneyfication of young adult entertainment. Now, this is not intended as an insult in any way to Disney. I loved Disney movies as a kid. Still do. I’m that lone adult that’s watching Tangled in the theaters without a kid in tow. With my husband, who is also a closet sap. But there is a trend, one that’s been in place since I was a child, to present all these fairy tales in a very watered down, not too scary, happily ever after kind of way. Which, hey, kids eat up. I’m living proof. I can’t tell you the huge crush I had on Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid when I was in the fourth grade. But presenting kids with nothing but stories that always turn out in the end, no matter what, is a disservice.
Why?
Because that’s not how life works. Life is messy and dark and often doesn’t have a happy ending. And flooding kids with the expectation that it always should sets them up for nothing more than disappointment. Because life’s not fair. Sometimes it just plain sucks.
The original versions of many of these fairy tales we all grew up with are proof of that. Many of these stories are sometimes dark enough to curl your toes. The unsanitized versions were meant to teach a lesson and show the consequences of your actions.
Take the original Hans Christian Andersen version of The Little Mermaid. The little mermaid gives up her voice—the thing that makes her unique and who she is—to get legs to go after the prince. And you know what? He married someone else. Not almost, kinda, but the heroine and her friends rode in and stopped the sham wedding. He totally married somebody else (not the sea witch, I might add). Her sisters went back to the sea witch to make a deal for her to get her voice back. But she’d have to murder the prince and his new bride in exchange. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, so she and her sisters all died and became sea foam.
Creepy? Oh heck yeah. Do I prefer the happily ever after and the wedding and the reunion with Arial’s father? Of course. But there’s real value in the original story because it gives a good life lesson: Girls, it’s so not worth being anything but who you are to try to snag a guy.
Those universal truths and life lessons are the reason these stories have survived through centuries. They have great worth in what they can teach us. And so do the plethora of dark and terrible (and I mean terrible as in dealing with terrible truths, not as in badly written) books that line the shelves in the YA section. These books address real issues that teens face. We don’t live in a Leave It To Beaver world, and any parent that believes blocking their teen’s access to such books means they won’t be exposed to these issues is delusional. It’s real. It’s out there. It’s happening. They’re talking about it with their friends. Don’t you want in on that discussion? Read the book too and talk to your teen, find out her thoughts and answer her questions. Use it as a teaching opportunity. And if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll become one of the cool parents.