Why I Love YA

One of my sisters (who is the reason I went Zeta, but that's another story for another day) blogged about her love of YA, and it resonates so fully with me and is articulated in a way that I never really found for myself. Her post was on TFiOS and my favorite author, John Green.

There is an ugly part of me that wants to play the hipster and remind all these tweens how I loved John Green before they knew who he was, and that I have loved him since Looking for Alaska. But that comes from years of being defensive that my favorite author was YA, and now I don't have to defend it, I have to share it. And Gina, in her perfect way, has helped me find peace without even knowing how much I needed to hear what she had to say:

First and foremost, John Green is my favorite author. If you know anything about me, you know that this is a huge assertion, considering I have hidden behind answers like Jane Austen and Fanny Fern and even Kurt Vonnegut my whole life. I’ve given the answers that will make me sound well-read and sophisticated, the answers that tell a certain story about me. But they’re not real. I do love Jane Austen and Fanny Fern and Kurt Vonnegut, but when I’m home alone and all I want to do is soak into a book, I don’t go for classics. No. I go for Young Adult. I go for stories written for an audience that loves stories. I go for John Green. 

And seeing this movie today justified my love of YA fiction. It made me proud of all the times I found the courage to admit that I read YA fiction in a room full of Literature majors and received that you-don’t-read-real-fiction scowl in return. Today, I sat in a movie theater full of people who unabashedly cried. During those two hours, we were a community.

I believe that novels should create community.