Critical Approaches to Young Adult Literature

It is fun to hold informal book club discussions with young adults and the literature they are enjoying letting them lead the discussion wherever, but Latrobe and Drury take us to a different level where we are challenging young adults on a much higher level of metacognition and pushing them as substantive critics of what they read. The librarians of the past mostly came from languae arts backgrounds, so they were steeped in literary criticism from their undergraduate years. However, we have a new crop of teacher librarians who come from a variety of fields and for whom literary criticism is not a focal point. This volume could well be used as a text in advanced course of young adult literature, but it is also an excellent read for show more teacher librarians who want to insert in book discussions those kinds of questions that stimulate thinking while at the same time keeping the popular enjoyment front and center. We will leave it to language arts teachers the dissection of literature. We can push enjoyment but slyly introduce those thinking probes. The excellent chapters of this book provide a structure for probing in four key areas: the text itself, the author, context/milieu, and the readers themselves. After reading this book, you should have gained a variety of sound strategies for pushing up thinking about YA Lit. Highly recommended for pushing thinking in literature just like we do so in every one of the other academic disciplines teens are thinking through. show less

This text provides a solid introductory foundation for the study of Young Adult literature. Its breadth is more impressive than its depth, but as an introductory text, it’s quite good.

The authors organize the book into three sections: the first addresses young adults and young adult literacy as theoretical concepts; the second section contains an overview of various YA genres such as historical fiction, mysteries, and speculative fiction; and the final section contains chapter-length analyses of various critical approaches such as New Criticism, Psychological Criticism, Gender Criticism, Reader Response Theory, etc. What makes this text especially useful are the clear guides that the authors provide (each outlining insightful show more questions that students can use to examine a YA text from a given critical perspective), the sample analyses of YA texts that follow the discussion of each critical perspective, and the annotated bibliographies of YA texts that conclude each chapter—each one focused on texts that would be particularly appropriate to examine from the critical perspective being addressed in the chapter.

For preservice teachers studying YA lit, this book should provide a valuable starting point. show less