Asian American Literature Fans

that's why i want spark* to read this book and blog about it! she's always trying to get more people to study asian american children's and young adult literature. my sense is that there is definitely a marketing aspect to YA lit. but from my limited reading in the genre, there also seems to be a huge focus on protagonists in their tween to teenage years, often in first-person point-of-view. and for me, one particular quality that i associate with YA lit is its centering of a younger person's perspective (rather than offering a more knowledgeable narrative perspective). i thought patti kim's a cab called reliable read like YA, for example, because though the narrator is past her childhood/teen years when she tells her story, there is that dwelling on those particular moments of one's life and an attempt to inhabit that mindset (rather than more self-consciousness narrating from a later perspective). i can't quite articulate the difference very well, but i do think there is a particular perspective or even aesthetic that is growing out of the YA label, and it does seem to be in contrast to (or maybe even supplanting) coming-of-age narratives in more standard novels. anyways, there is definitely work to be done in studying the outpouring! plenty of fodder for someone's dissertation...