Today's Ypulse Author Spotlight is on Lizzie Skurnick and her love letter to a bygone era of YA fiction Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. A celebration of the vintage young adult novels near and dear to the hearts of Gen X and Gen Y, Shelf Discovery compiles all of Skurnick's retro book reports from her "Fine Lines" column on Jezebel alongside contributions from contemporary YA novelists like Cecily von Ziegesar and Meg Cabot. Not sure about Ypulse readers, but this sure makes us feel all giggly inside.

Shelf Discovery is out in bookstores now, but we're giving away free copies to the first three commenters to name and explain the classic teen novel they would most like to re-read.

Ypulse: What inspired the "Fine Line"s column? Do you remember the first YA book you felt compelled to re-read as an adult?

LS: The column really got inspired when the site Jezebel launched. It was as if I had been waiting for a place to review all these books, and the minute I heard there was website launching for women my age I knew. The internet was really the only place I could review books like this at that volume.

The first book I really thought of [for Fine Lines] was Summer of Fear by Lois Duncan. No one could ever remember its name because the book itself was so scary. It induced mass trauma on a generation of women, and it was always like, "what was the one with the girl and the sister who was a witch who tried to kill the parents?' That book was an inspiration because it had that funny type of persistence of books from that era.

And then I also wanted to do the Grounding of Group 6 by Julian F. Thompson because it seemed like the perfect embodiment of that period — it was this naughty mystery [about high school students sent away by their parents to be killed at boarding school],  at times schmaltzy as a Nora Roberts books and it's just bizarre that it's for children. You don't quite see that nowadays.

YP: What tropes stuck out to you as being characteristic of classic teen fiction?

LS: Really, I think it's more that there are tropes of various writers like with the "Sweet Valley High" books or RL Stine or "The Baby-sitter's Club" series. But it’s almost like a canon where there’s different strains in the canon. I wrote about the tropes of individual authors – one of them being the beautiful friend always dies, one of them being the girl with ESP — but the only real tropes I saw across all the books, is that the protagonist is often a reader.

YP: Do you think that reflected the perception of young readers and young people in general at the time? How, if at all, do you think that's changed?

LS: I do think reading was generally viewed as a more transgressive activity back then. Nowadays the idea of being the outsider has become cool. Now, you're supposed to be unique, supposed to stand up for yourself. Those things were really not true when I was growing up. If you had a funny haircut, if you said something different than what someone else said, you were put down. Now the culture has this idea of the outsider as secretly the best thing. You didn’t really have that in the era of Harriet the Spy. Children were meant to be children, and these books showed them learning to assert their independence in an adult world. In Paula Danzinger’s books, for instance, she talks about teens and children trying to assert their personality against these adults. No one ever gave children the responsibility to be well-rounded beings.

Today it's just the opposite. We focus on children so much, I think we have a tendency to optimize them. Back in the day you had these stories about how parents can’t reach or don't understand children. Now, parents are co-members of the narrative. We have to deconstruct their lives as well.

YP: How do you think the web has affected the sharing experience of reading for young people?

LS: I think children have always shared reading. The idea that these online communities have increased the amount of contact is just not true. We used to talk on the phone, pass notes, sit in diners and talk, write letters to our friends… even when they lived in the same town. Children have just always read to each other. We might have had a slumber party versus analyzing on Facebook, but we did it. Frankly, I think I prefer the way we did it then.

YP: Could you describe some of the realizations you've had from revisiting YA classics?

LS: Well, I certainly learned where I learned so much about feminism. Also, basic history. I could never pay attention to history when it was written in a non-fiction form. Looking back most of my cultural references came from those novels.. or from hearing about adults talk about them.

A lot of these teen books also teach the lesson that life doesn’t turn out how you expected. I don’t think they were ever explicitly making that point, but they show how you end up going in odd directions. This period in literature, in particular, seems to show that over and over again. Overall, they seem to have this certain sense of honesty that you don’t always find in other periods of literature. Maybe because the writers weren’t necessarily writing for a particular audience. A lot of them were just writing the story of their lives.

YP: Do you feel like the acceleration of the page-to-screen process has changed YA books today?

LS: Well, it happens with adults books, too. I think in the case of books like "Harry Potter" or "Twilight," knowing that their books are going to be made into movies, changes the way the authors write. Not to say that they’re better or worse, but just like how knowing that your books are going to be read millions of teenage girls or knowing they’ll be read by adults, it changes the process. Then again I think it doesn’t ruin it because it’s all a part of the whole.

When you take a book like Harriet the Spy and compare it to Harry Potter, [In Harry Potter] there's so much description and action. If someone says someone there's a green hat, that's easy to imagine. If they say the hat disappears, you can imagine that, too. When you take Harriet the Spy, so much of that occurs in Harriet's mind. So much also depends on Harriet having an internal realization and so much of that is hard to rework as a movie.

YP: So are some classic YA books better left alone?

LS: It's really a testament to the ownership you feel over these books. We talk about the integrity of the novel, the reason you don't want to see a movie is because you see a particular thing in your brain, and the one who makes the movie is the "wrong one." Everybody sees a different thing. Sometimes you see a filmmakers’ homage, and it seems like so much fun. If they take the version of Pride and Prejudice they see in their brain and put that on screen, I think it works. If they try to take a novelist's version, it doesn't work.

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Categorized under: Author Spotlight, Books & Print

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