Kid's lit and post-apoc

[mindstalk]

So I keep hearing there's a huge trend to dystopian YA or other kid's books. Mostly recently in this thread. Either blow things up, so the kids can be protagonists without parents getting in the way, or make a fascist dystopia, so they can acceptably rebel against authority without ruffling the feathers of the moral gatekeepers.

Sometimes this sort of thing makes me come up with examples or counter-examples from my own life, which I've been advised can be annoying, but I can do whatever I want in my LJ, haha. Mind you, I didn't have a huge concept of children's books let alone YA as a kid, and was doing things like reading Mallory at 7 and Moby Dick at 8, but anyway, here's what I can remember, in order of my digging them out of memory:



Beverly Cleary books like Ramona
Encyclopedia Brown
The Black Stallion series (I totally wanted to be a jockey, until I saw Feynman on Nova at age 8 and wanted to be a physicist instead.)
Narnia
The Hobbit
Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books
Lloyd Alexander's The Illyrian Adventure
Charlotte's Web
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Heidi
The Secret Garden
Adventures of Remi (reportedly not actually written as YA)
that other book I can't recall anything of but cosy and with some fairies in
Jane Yolen's intergalactic dragon books
Harper Hall of Pern
Wind in the Willows (YA?)
Curious George
Toad and Frog
My Side of the Mountain
The Blue Sword (the book I forgot having read... twice.)
Book of the Dun Cow
Redwall (almost too late to count)

I'm sure there's more and I may find myself adding to this, but I think I've stalled out. At any rate, we can see a total lack of post-apocalypse, unless one is snarky about Middle-Earth and Pern. Of course, many don't even feature young protagonists. Those that do achieve separation from adults by fantasy portal to another world, focusing on kids' concerns, being orphans, standing on a desert island, running away, kidnapping, or not at all because the adults are an integral part of the story. Sometimes the child is in dystopian circumstances (Remi, Yolen) but there's no need to mess up the whole world.

Book of the Dun Cow does feature apocalypse -- Apocalypse, even. OTOH, it stars a rooster, not a kid. (I also wasn't at all sure whether to include it, but it got a Children's Book award. I suspect under the rule that anything with animal characters other than _Animal Farm_ must be for chidren. Hey, the book is rooted in Chaucer.)

There are some apocalyptic books I read, but none are YA: Alas Babylon, Childhood's End, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grill, Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys.



Side note: Wikipedia says of Alexander's Vesper Holly: "Vesper is young and wild; not at all the proper Victorian schoolgirl. Alexander describes her as having "the digestive talents of a goat and the mind of a chess master. She is familiar with half a dozen languages and can swear in all of them."[2]" I should go re-read it, especially since anima_mecanique liked it a lot as a kid. I remember jack-all.

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

I did read a lot of dystopian stuff when I was 11-14, but they weren't YA, they were 1970s New Wave SF. I did after all turn 11 in 1975.