Are Young Adult Books Too Dark?

I have read the book Speak and The Diary of a Part-Time Indian and I liked both of them. I read them in high school my freshman year. I found The Diary of a Part-time Indian to be more interesting though. In case you don't know these books, Speak is about a girl named Melinda who is too scared to tell her story about being raped at the beginning of the summer. She spends most of her time in the janitor's closet and drawing trees in art class. Over the course of the book, Melinda goes through some rough times but eventually comes to terms with what had happened that summer. The Diary of a Part-Time Indian is about a young boy named Junior. He is fourteen and lives on the spokesman Indian reservation in Washington Junior really likes drawing cartoons. It will be his first year attending a school of their reservation but things don't go as planned. Junior gets bullied and his life starts to go downhill, family and friendships are torn apart and people die. Junior learns that drinking isn't a way to solve all your problems either.

In Alexie Sherman's "why the best books are written in blood", Alexie talked about a young man, "he was seventeen and destined to join the military. Yes, he was old enough to die and kill for his country. And old enough to experience the infinite horrors. But according to Ms.Gurdon, he might be too young to read a YA novel that vividly portrays those very same horrors"(Sherman). I thought that this was a very interesting point because it shows that stuff that happens in books isn't all lies, parts of it are real. In that boy's case, I feel like he should be allowed to read those types of books because he might go through some of the same struggles later in life. I do agree with the fact that the best books are books written by people who have experience. It makes the book more relatable to others who have gone through events.

In the reading of "Darkness to Visible", there were some great points brought up. One that really hit me was how dark things have gotten in books. an example that was used was Andrew Smith's novel in 2010, "young Jack is drugged and abducted and nearly raped by a male captor. After escaping, he encounters a curious pair of classes that transport him into an alternate world of almost unimaginable gore and cruelty. Moments after arriving he finds himself facing a wall of horrors". To me, I don't understand how someone could read this, let alone write it. This is an example of too much darkness. Young adults don't need to be reading about that dark of stuff. I think at a point there is such thing as too much darkness in Young Adult books. If a book is too dark Young Adults might take the meaning of the book in the wrong way and I think at some point, yes, it could hurt their mental health.

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