Declarations of Independence: Empowered Girls in Young Adult Literature, 1990‐2001

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2003), "Declarations of Independence: Empowered Girls in Young Adult Literature, 1990‐2001", Library Review, Vol. 52 No. 1, pp. 43-44. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530310457031

Empowered girls are girls who take charge of their own lives. In children’s and young adult literature long ago, spirited heroines appeared, as we know from works like Little Women, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Anne of Green Gables. That was then, and girls were expected to be, and portrayed as, selfless and understanding and subordinate to boys. Social and cultural values account for this, and we can go back historically to Pamela and others in the eighteenth century for their archetypes. What about now? Brown (Associate Professor of English at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa) and St Clair (Associate Professor of English at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa) have both written on women’s studies and young adult literature, and they use current young adult fiction to develop an argument that girls in literature today do really take charge of their own lives. They use examples of modern fiction published in the USA to make the case, providing a lit‐crit approach to develop the ideas, and supporting each chapter with further reading recommendations.

The target market is teachers and librarians and others involved in resourcing for middle school and high/secondary school reading, as well as librarians and lecturers developing collections for the study of young adult literature. After that was then and this is now, we get four sections on empowered girls: in historical fiction (where heroines are usually vulnerable, so it is good to read works like Karen Cushman’s The Midwife’s Apprentice and Kathryn Lasky’s True North, where they are not), in the contemporary world (of the social realism of Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade, set in a violent inner‐city, of the American girl transplanted into the racial powder‐keg of Jerusalem in Naomi Shibib Nye’s Habibi, and lesbian themes in Nancy Garden’s The Year They Burned the Books), in fantasy (Annette Curtis Klause’s trilogy about vampires and space travel), and in (auto)biography or memoir (not just Anne Frank and Holocaust writing but the African‐American heritage in the USA in Melba Pattillo Beals’ Warriors Don’t Cry, and links between being an American and sexual awareness in Almost a Woman by Esmeralda Santiago).

This is one of the more thoughtful (less commercial) of the series, which has included a perceptive study of historian Ann Rinaldi, a plain‐speaking study of R.L. Stine (“Goosebumps” series), and an off‐the‐wall postmodern meditation on Daniel Pinkwater (as well as studies of Norma Fox Mazer and Caroline Cooney). Brown and St Clair use literature in order to develop their case, and this may disappoint readers who expect (and they’ve been given more than a clue) to get more on female adolescence and more on feminist writing as such (very little of either). They conclude that we have now reached equality in young adult literature, and girls can benefit from reading such fiction: OK, but the case would have been better made with more sociological and book trade evidence, a context of feminist writing, less overlap between the chapters, and more differentiation between the readership (readers have to infer levels and applications). Very US emphasis, bibliographically and culturally, so bear that in mind if buying.