If I ever write a YA novel, it’s going to be a fantasy. I decided this because I’ve been weeding, and I’ve been struck yet again by the short shelf life of “contemporary” YA fiction. I personally think that The Mouse Rap by Walter Dean Myers is hilarious, but the cover of our copy has a picture of a kid with a flattop haircut and a Sony Walkman cassette player. No youth in our service area will pick this book up, except possibly to bring it to the desk and ask me what the kid on the cover has growing out of his ears and why his iPod is so enormous that it messes up the line of his t-shirt.
Nobody in fantasy novels mentions that they’re carrying a Prada bag or wearing 7 For All Mankind jeans. More to the point, they don’t mention breakdancing, record albums, soda fountains, or Reeboks. And all the clothes and hairstyles on fantasy covers look alike, no matter when the book was written. Wear and tear might make your fantasy cover look bad, but Farrah Fawcett hair won’t.
But this brings up another question. When does a contemporary novel become historical? Last year I recommended The Watsons Go To Birmingham, 1963 to a girl who liked historical fiction, shocking one of my colleagues for whom, unlike the patron and me, 1963 did not fit the standard definition of “historical” as “a time when I wasn’t alive.”
Little Women was contemporary YA fiction in its day. (By the way, Louisa May Alcott could be the patron saint of YA librarians. She once said she hoped her books had the dirtiest covers in the library because that meant kids enjoyed them.) Is Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen outdated contemporary fiction, or does it deserve a place on the shelf for its portrayal of teen-hood in the early 1950s? Only weeding YA librarians can decide.
