Yesterday, I read the student comments on the evaluations from my Young Adult Fiction class, and I was annoyed by one comment in particular: a student wrote that s/he liked most of the books, except The Golden Compass, which was too hard, and The Graveyard Book, which was too scary. Initially, I think this annoyed me because college students shouldn't find any books in a Young Adult Fiction class "too hard," but as I thought more deeply about this comment, I realized it bothers me for a more complicated reason.
I teach a lot of books that are hard, but most of them are books students expect to be hard, like Middlemarch, and the comment reveals that some students (probably most) don't expect books written for young readers to be hard. But shouldn't these books be hard, too? Shouldn't young readers get to relish the thrill of a complex plot, a complex moral landscape, even a complex sentence? Life troubles us in small and large ways, and whether books take us into fantastical or realistic places, those books should explore life's troubles. A book that is nothing more than an escape has a place, but it does nothing to prepare readers, young or old, to face life and the troubles that await. A book that is hard enriches its readers, and I am very sorry that I failed to convey that vital element of literature to even one of my students.
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