Virginia's voice is a loose stream of consciousness, jumping off from mundane details to metaphor or allusion and then slipping back through memory: Virginia's father develops an incurable, rare blood disease her best friend suddenly pushes away from her, leaving her even more isolated with her own and her family's grief.ĭonovan's first-person narration mirrors and intensifies the sense of instability and loss. Instead, the violent mess and the arbitrary cruelty of those first pages seep and spread across the whole book. Virginia makes a deal with the vet to work for him in exchange for treating her dog-but her mother's decision is never explained, much less apologized for. The doctor calls her mom to ask if she'll pay for an operation-and Virginia's mom says 'no.'Ĭontrary to the argument that YA is simplistic and satisfying, there are few neat ends in the ensuing tale. She gets it to the vet with the help of a passing stranger. In the book's brutal opening, Virginia Dunn's dog is hit by a car. If Dive is remarkable, then other YA books can be remarkable too. Graham’s claim about books for children is a blanket dismissal, which means that counterexamples, however obscure, call her whole argument into question. It's not a famous book it got positive reviews when it came out, but Donovan didn't write a follow-up, and it's been largely forgotten (except by Nora Olsen, who alerted me to its existence.) But it's firmly in the YA genre.

As one example, I'd urge Graham to try reading the wonderful novel 1994 Dive, by Stacey Donovan. But there are also some works that provide everything that Graham is asking for-complexity, ambiguity, depth, and even good writing. There are certainly many mediocre YA books, as there are mediocre books in any genre, be it sci-fi or romance or literary fiction.

Swans and Klons by Nora Olsen