Many years ago (about nine, to be exact), a friend of mine gave me a copy of
Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce for my eleventh birthday. I'd never read anything like it before, and I LOVED IT. When I finished, I wanted more, and I went on my first voyage into the young adult section at my local library and bookstore to get it.
There's a newer, sleeker cover out now, but this is the one I grew up with.
Tamora Pierce creates strong characters (as in dynamic and round and all that jazz + independence, smarts, and--sometimes--lots of hard-earned muscles). Her protagonists are usually female, and there's usually a girl on the cover of her books, but the male characters in her novels are far from the weakened stereotypes discussed by author Hannah Moskowitz in
THIS POST.
The Quick and Dirty:
Most boys seem to skip from middle grade to adult books, with no stop in the YA section. Moskowitz suggests many reasons why, one of them being that all the female-empowering books flooding the shelves have stereotyped male characters into flat, fake people:
Boys in YA are rubber walls for our 3D female characters to bounce off of. They're props for girls to throw around to show that they're the stronger sex.
I'm not going to name names, but in reference to the above italicized quote, I think Hannah Moskowitz has a point. There are plenty of cardboard boys in YA lit for female characters to push and grow and change around.
But they're not all like that, which brings me back to Tamora Pierce, who posted
THIS RESPONSE to Moskowitz's thoughts. She talks about why she writes girl heroes, and notes this reason for the many girl-geared books around:
girls buy books. That's it, clear and simple. Guys don't. They take books out of the library, or they borrow books from girls, but they don't buy. Not like girls do.
Fair point I'd never considered.
Anyway. Both Moskowitz's and Pierce's posts are worth reading and considering. This post isn't about over-analyzing their thoughts or picking a side or a fight.
It's about boy books and girl books, versus, you know, just books.
As a library clerk and a girl with Friends Who Are Boys, I agree with Moskowitz that many boys skip right past the YA section. I don't see as many boys as I do girls browse through and check out YA titles at the library. (Unless we're talking graphic novels, in which case, those readers are mostly boys...and so are the characters in the graphic novels they check out.) For the most part, my Guy Friends Who Read didn't read many books beyond what was required in high school, and now they're in college and reading classics and adult fiction and nonfiction for fun. They never checked out the YA shelves. When I ask why, they say, "Aren't most of those for girls?"
Walk through any bookstore, note all the pink and dramatic photos of girls in the cover art, and I think you'll see their point, valid or not.
There are plenty of YA novels written by males, with male leads. Tammy Pierce elaborates on that. If you read, I suspect you could, too.
What bothers me the most--and what I've been thinking about a lot lately--is that it's okay for girls to take an interest in books and movies with male leads. It's even encouraged. But for a boy to choose entertainment featuring a female character? That's taboo. And if Hannah Moskowitz is right and most female-featuring books relegate males to stereotypes, I get it. If this is so, then it also suggests that the quality of the writing and plotting in such books is inferior to those geared toward males.
This can happen, but boy books aren't all award winners either.
This brings me to Moskowitz's idea of promoting books with Real Boys in them. This, in turn, brings me back to Tammy Pierce, who rightly asserts that these already exist. (M.T. Anderson's
Octavian Nothing, any John Green hero, and Maggie Stiefvater's Sam and Cole, anyone? This list is potentially two miles long.)
Moreover, Pierce asserts that, no matter how many girl books one sees around, most books are still For Boys. She's got a point. And the classics shelf? (Also meaning a good portion of what both girls and boys read in high school and college--) Plenty of male authors and characters there.
Hmph. All this differentiation is silly. In a perfect literary world, books would be books, and they would feature strong characters of both sexes, and they would be for everyone, and there would be no stigmas or ideas of "boy books" and "girl books."
But that's not how today's culture rolls. (And I'll admit that it is nice to have very girly books and very boyish books, and that I enjoy pink and sparkles pretty regularly. But that's another set of ideas.)
Authors Maggie Stiefvater writes about similar things
here.
And have you heard about the whole Disney Rapunzel movie being renamed Tangled and advertised as more boyish because girly-looking The Princess and the Frog didn't attract the hoped-for amount of money thing?
Thoughts, feelings, ideas about any of this? (All hopefully more well-organized than mine?) (Also, should I just conclude that being a girl is awesome because I can read girl and boy books with no apologies necessary?)
