Kids
Happy Mother's Day to all who mother. Today's post is Adults who loved young adult literature--why, what suggestions do you have?
I'd like to flush some recommendations out of the woodwork besides highly publicized urban fantasy series, but on the other hand, if people want to talk about those, fine!
I've been using Kindle to explore YA of a century ago and more. One of the reasons why I can't read the 'steampunk Victorian' series is because the Victorian veneer is so thin. There is a huge audience who loves modern people in historical dress up novels. I tend to reach for the ones that try to evoke the worldview as well as the details of a different time, so of course the Real McCoy is going to do that. With all its warts.
The thing is that Victoriana is not all repressive conformity. It's such a variety, from the cheerful crudities of Jorrocks (extremely popular at the height of the period) to Kipling (much later, but very difficult to peg into any hole) to the sharp insight of George Eliot.
The YA of the later years seems to have flourished around the school story. And a writer almost unheard of now, who wrote a tremendous amount for girls, was L. T. Meade. Her stuff was impossible to find except at high prices in this country. I still haven't seen a print copy of any of her books. But these, like those of Talbot Baines Reed, are surprisingly good reading. The latter is a strong influence on Wodehouse, with mostly funny school stories for boys. L.T. Meade also wrote school stories, but the interesting thing about hers is that she began writing when schools for girls were becoming more common.
They'd been around for a long time--we have Jane Eyre as evidence for that.Ditto finishing schools. But general education for females seems to have taken off latterly in the century, and what Meade writes about are all kinds of schools. She never sets anything at Girton (which was a new experiment when she was writing, and it gets referred to it that way in a couple of her novels.) She makes up schools--from bigger ones to small schools run out of a home by either widows or by wives of indigent professors.
There are patterns in her stories, as one tends to find in writers who turned out a lot. The most frequent pattern is the "bad" or "wild" girl who won't be tamed. There's one in almost every single book. The main thing I noted is that the so-called bad girl, except I think in one, always has a good heart. And she isn't always tamed. Her adversary in many of these is the perfect Victorian girl, what we would call deeply repressed. And a lot of these don't get a happy ending, unless they learn to relent. Though in most respects the manners and mores are what one expects for the time (but oh, the details of daily living, manners everyone understood, etc!)this thread of breaking free is a constant, and these books were apparently very popular.
The best school stories are a rich fund of Victoriana, full of interesting characters, but scrupulously divided by gender. I guess that kept them safe for kids. (Also, these writers weren't great with adult stuff. I only read one of Meade's romances. It was drippy, dreary, a Grand Misunderstanding that should have been wrapped up by chapter two dragged out for an entire book.)
I'd like to flush some recommendations out of the woodwork besides highly publicized urban fantasy series, but on the other hand, if people want to talk about those, fine!
I've been using Kindle to explore YA of a century ago and more. One of the reasons why I can't read the 'steampunk Victorian' series is because the Victorian veneer is so thin. There is a huge audience who loves modern people in historical dress up novels. I tend to reach for the ones that try to evoke the worldview as well as the details of a different time, so of course the Real McCoy is going to do that. With all its warts.
The thing is that Victoriana is not all repressive conformity. It's such a variety, from the cheerful crudities of Jorrocks (extremely popular at the height of the period) to Kipling (much later, but very difficult to peg into any hole) to the sharp insight of George Eliot.
The YA of the later years seems to have flourished around the school story. And a writer almost unheard of now, who wrote a tremendous amount for girls, was L. T. Meade. Her stuff was impossible to find except at high prices in this country. I still haven't seen a print copy of any of her books. But these, like those of Talbot Baines Reed, are surprisingly good reading. The latter is a strong influence on Wodehouse, with mostly funny school stories for boys. L.T. Meade also wrote school stories, but the interesting thing about hers is that she began writing when schools for girls were becoming more common.
They'd been around for a long time--we have Jane Eyre as evidence for that.Ditto finishing schools. But general education for females seems to have taken off latterly in the century, and what Meade writes about are all kinds of schools. She never sets anything at Girton (which was a new experiment when she was writing, and it gets referred to it that way in a couple of her novels.) She makes up schools--from bigger ones to small schools run out of a home by either widows or by wives of indigent professors.
There are patterns in her stories, as one tends to find in writers who turned out a lot. The most frequent pattern is the "bad" or "wild" girl who won't be tamed. There's one in almost every single book. The main thing I noted is that the so-called bad girl, except I think in one, always has a good heart. And she isn't always tamed. Her adversary in many of these is the perfect Victorian girl, what we would call deeply repressed. And a lot of these don't get a happy ending, unless they learn to relent. Though in most respects the manners and mores are what one expects for the time (but oh, the details of daily living, manners everyone understood, etc!)this thread of breaking free is a constant, and these books were apparently very popular.
The best school stories are a rich fund of Victoriana, full of interesting characters, but scrupulously divided by gender. I guess that kept them safe for kids. (Also, these writers weren't great with adult stuff. I only read one of Meade's romances. It was drippy, dreary, a Grand Misunderstanding that should have been wrapped up by chapter two dragged out for an entire book.)