You know, I was going to just chill out and go to bed before I got into this, but my curiosity overcame me. After reading this, I decided to go find the actual article it discusses and give a peruse myself.
So now is my response. Madame Writer:
GET OUT.
You not only insulted the adult community of YA readers by publishing this article, you've also insulted the teenage community reading YA by implying that what they were reading was not as in-depth and important as adult, classical literature. I've been reading YA books since I was eight, and since then, ten years have passed. I'll be moving away to college very soon, and the only way I'm keeping myself together at the seams is with the lessons I learned from YA fiction, about how to handle moving away from home and how to handle loss and loneliness and love. I'm still in one piece and not falling to the floor screaming out my every anxiety because I know that waiting up in my bedroom is a bookshelf full of advice and pseudo-realities that will promise me everything is okay, you'll be fine, you've got this. By demeaning that, you demean the methods that so many of us "young adults" use in order to cope with a world we know so little about. And I'm not even going to get into the implications laid upon those that write YA fiction, god forbid, because I can imagine that many of them might be duly terrified to hear that they shouldn't be reading what they're writing and, as a result, shouldn't be writing it at all. It's really hard to write for an audience when you can't read their focuses.
By taking the stance of the "all-knowing adult", you've severed yourself from not just the adult community, but from the community of people who are using YA to sustain themselves into the "real world". And I believe you owe everybody an apology.
You are entitled to your own opinions. You are not entitled to shove them down others throats with the excuse "I'm an adult, I know better".
If you really want to read the article, it's here.
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