The best way to engage a young adult would be to tell a story well, not spoonfeed them with morals and messages
Discussions about literature for children and young adults often pivot around the question: Should young readers be spoon-fed? Do messages and morals have to be spelt out? Many parents and teachers seem to think so, but there are others who give pre-teen readers more credit and point out that the best way to engage a mind—and to provoke some thought in the process—is to tell a story really well, to make the characters and situations involving. Ideas can lie embedded even within a ‘fun’ narrative. Besides, as the writer EB White once put it, “Children are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick and generally congenial readers on earth. Anyone who writes down to them is wasting his time.” A related observation is that it makes little sense to shield children from ‘dark’ subject matter, especially at a time when content of all sorts is so easy to access.
Having recently read a number of new young-adult (YA) books by Indian authors, I was pleased to find that many of them—some to a greater degree than others—steer clear of pedantry. Even the ones that are set in a school environment and deal with a vulnerable but intelligent child beginning to make sense of the world,working his way through notions of right and wrong, seeing a friend or classmate through fresh eyes and learning about empathy.
A good example of this is in Payal Dhar’s Slightly Burnt, which begins by cleverly misdirecting the reader: The narrator, a 16-year-old named Komal, has just had her life turned upside down, because her best friend Sahil (and she only wants to be his ‘friend’, nothing more) has said three little words to her. We think we know what those words are, but soon we discover that we were wrong; we then follow Komal on a journey to understanding and acceptance. I won’t provide big spoilers here, but this novel addresses an important subject—the marginalisation of people who are unconventional in some way—with lightness. You won’t at all feel you are being preached to.
Which is also the case with Samit Basu’s delightful The Adventures of Stoob: Testing Times. If you’re in a solemn mood, you might tell someone that this book’s lesson is: It isn’t good to cheat in your exams. But that wouldn’t begin to convey the strengths of this fluid, funny narrative about a boy who has a rich inner life, and who is so nervous about his exams that he nearly crosses over to the dark side. In a smart demonstration that “doing the right thing” can be cool, some of the most fun passages have Stoob and his friends thinking up ways to prevent another friend from cheating during a test. The writing aside, I enjoyed Sunaina Coelho’s illustrations, like the drawing of Stoob being chased by weapon-wielding Hindi alphabets, or the hilarious one of him and his parents depicted as mythological characters from an old, melodramatic movie.
(This story appears in the Jan-Feb 2016 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)