Alaya Dawn Johnson: What Makes YA Fantasy So Awesome

Alaya Dawn Johnson is a young fantasy writer whose debut novel, Racing the Dark, has been drawing comparisons to authors like Paulo Coelho and Ursula K. LeGuin. You can read one of her shorter works, the novella “Shard of Glass,” at the Strange Horizons website, and in this essay, she explains what attracts her to young adult fantasy, as both a writer and a reader.

I love young adult fantasy. My life underwent a sea-change when I discovered Diana Wynne Jones in sixth grade, and I’ve never grown out of it. What I especially love about young adult fantasy is a certain quality of focus, wherein even epic situations have a very personal orientation. In other words, the world might be about to get destroyed, but instead of hearing the story from the point of view of the king and his advisors and soldiers (the George R.R. Martin model), the young adult fantasy novel focuses on the scribe buried in the library (The Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia McKillip), or the thief falling in love with his greatest enemy (The Thief and sequels by Megan Whalen Turner).

But even better, in YA fantasy the world is frequently not in any danger at all. There’s no more of a “chosen one” in these novels than there is in real life. The problems are closer to those we encounter in our own lives, no matter how exotic the setting. So, in Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn, the main character has to confront how she has enabled the slavery of another race. In The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones, the main character struggles over nearly a hundred years just to get home.

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16 February 2008 | guest authors |

Taylor Materne’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

Still have a few people left on your holiday shopping list? I don’t envy you this weekend, but Taylor Materne, one of the three co-authors on the Upper Class series of YA novels, can help. (Watch out for that link; it’s a MySpace page, and you know how those can set off your computer’s speakers with their soundtracks!) His tips will come in handy for any teenagers on your list—and more than a few adults, too.

If the eggnog and mistletoe are too sweet, and you need to cut it with some bitters, A Fan’s Notes is for you. It is a darkly funny and beautiful story. This is the American dream (or at least the East Coast version of it) dropped on its head. Sadly, it is a classic that’s often stuck in the back row of a double-stacked shelf. It’s a book you almost don’t want to meet, a man you don’t want to know, but who better to visit for the holidays? Frederick Exley is a brilliant monster, and in his fictionalized memoir we find a braid of truth and imagination as he laments his failed marriage, alcoholism and the 1950s notion of celebrity. If nothing else, it may just take your mind off the more tangible challenges of the celebratory season. So take a seat on the ratty couch with Exley and suckle on some stunning failure.

If Exley’s bitter-high-school-teacher virulence doesn’t strike the right chord, perhaps something else from the over-addressed world of prep school will suit you. There is no shortage of novels of late with Harry Potter, Gossip Girls, Prep, Academy X—and us, for god’s sake. But perhaps you would be better off visiting the classics. There are the obvious choices: A Separate Peace and The Catcher in the Rye. Or you could look deeper at overlooked gems like the collectible Chalet School series, about a boarding school in Austria (subsequently moved) from the 1920s. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair begins at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies. Looking for something more relevant? Try A Good School, a sexually frustrated tale by Richard Yates—who himself went to Avon Old Farms, a boarding school in Connecticut.

21 December 2007 | gift ideas, guest authors |