He is anyway
Salon.com’s Life section has an article about young adult novels, taking as its starting point a book that argues many of them have too much “gloom & doom.” It then goes on to counter that position by pointing out that such books can do much (or at least something) to prepare kids for life.
I’m inclined to support the latter position, and say whatever problems I may have had, I’m pretty sure the books I read when I was a child have nothing to do with them.
On the other hand, though, I did read a lot of books (still do), and I’m not sure how much they prepared me for life. But that’s hardly the books fault, is it? Even if I’d read nothing but “happy ending” books, they still wouldn’t have prepared me for life.
Because in my life, one of the biggest, and still continuing, disappointments is feeling like I’m living in a play in which nobody else knows their lines (why do you think I write em?)
In books people know what to do, they know what to say, they know how to help. In life, as most of us know, that’s so often not true. The world is full of people with the best intentions in the world and no idea what to do.
I know one thing, though. They’ll get my memories of “Harriet the Spy” and Judy Blume, and “The Outsiders” and “Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes”–which I actually read as an adult and still pull down occasionally–and “Bridge to Terabithia,” when they pry them from my cold, dead, heart.
