Hi, this is Lisa Goldstein, another guest blogger. I work as a young adult librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library.
The Michael L. Printz Award is given to a book that “exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature,” and I heard some terrific speeches at the Printz Awards ceremony on Monday night.
M.T. Anderson, who won an honor for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II, The Kingdom on the Waves and E. Lockhart, who won an honor for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, had especially provocative things to say. Both wrote sophisticated books that some teen librarians, intent on getting their teen patrons to read, may dismiss as too complex to have much teen appeal. (As much as I love Octavian, I have not found a teen to recommend it to yet.) M.T. Anderson noted how often he and others “underestimate teens.” Teens are not jaded, “bland and blank.” They are “eccentric,” and curious about the world. He observed that there is “only one taboo left in young adult literature: intelligence.” Why, he wondered, were Lockhart’s references to P.G. Wodehouse and Michel Foucault in Frankie considered more elitist than references to fashion labels in many popular teen series? Wodehouse, he pointed out, is not an “intimidating author,” and is one that many of us actually discovered in our teens. “It takes an adult to make a child hate knowing things,” Anderson warned.
Lockhart observed that adults often treat young adult novels “as if they were billboards” for moral stances. Literature should be ambiguous, complex and argued over, she said, declaring that “nothing has pleased me more than to receive mail denouncing Frankie as a borderline psychotic.”
And this is why the Printz Award is so important: it helps to establish young adult literature as a literary form, one that celebrates ambiguity, complexity and intelligence, and one that deserves to be the subject of passionate debate.
One last note – I was pleased to hear Melina Marchetta, who won the Printz Award for Jellicoe Road, mention Enid Blyton’s Naughtiest Girl in the School series in her speech. I was lucky enough to read my English mother’s copies of these 1940s schoolgirl stories as a child and grew up reading them over and over again, eventually writing numerous parodies of them. They tell a strange story of an unintentionally Socialist boarding school in which students must surrender all of their money for equal redistribution, and are harshly judged by a jury of their peers. If you read these, you will learn what a “tuck box” and a “jam sandwich” are, and you will be forced to learn the intricacies of old British currency, when a pound was twenty shillings, and five shillings was a crown, and there were also half-crowns, farthings and ha’pennies to contend with. Track down the series if you can!
