Hello my friends of the Omschool. March is National Reading Month and also Women's History Month. I've been writing a lot about books with flawed but relatable girl heroes from my boomer childhood (late 60s into 70s) These characters are often misunderstood and seem very broken, which is what resonated with me and maybe a lot of girls my age. What I realize, reading reviews from clearly younger people, is that these stories don't translate well with Gen Y and Z and maybe not even Gen X.
Interestingly enough, they don't make sense to earlier boomers either who were raised on Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. It seems we, the last of the late, great boomers are the only ones that get these characters. That's because our youth and teen time was very different than any before or after us.
Let's take for example, the book Me Too by Vera and Bill Cleaver. A 12 y/o girl is abandoned by father and essentially mother, to care for her developmentally disabled (called retarded back then) sister Lorna. She tries to "make Lorna smart" to win back father. This book often gets low reviews, venomous actually, for being unrealistic and because the main character (sorry I've forgotten her name) is so angry with her sister.
But from the perspective of a kid then and now, if we're honest, it's absolutely believable. Fathers (and mothers) do abandon families. Mine did. And moms (and dads) are often absent. Mine were. Parents did leave their oldest kids to basically raise their siblings. Mine did. And while my situation was quite unusual comparatively speaking (and maybe why I appreciated this book so much), I know others could relate as well.
And the older sister who gets all the venom, was the most believable of all. She was hurt that her family was shattered, resented her sister for ruining her life, angry with her parents for not taking care of her or Lorna and just mad at life in general for dealing her such a rotten hand. Now you tell me what generation of adolescents hasn't felt these things and for fewer reasons than this character has.
Reviewers faulted her for blaming her sister, calling her names and hating her, but also for, politically incorrectly, trying to make her normal. Now, to begin with, a kid shouldn't be left to care for their sibling alone, especially not one with special needs. And if they are, they're going to make mistakes and get it wrong because they are KIDS. I find it interesting how we don't fault parents for parentifying their child and then blame the child for failing to be the adults that the adults are unwilling to be.
And trying to normalize her sister, calling her names, punishing her is exactly what normal teens would do. THAT is realistic. Hurtful? Sure. Sometimes mean, yep. Misguided, absolutely. She had none of the parental guidance she should have had. Life is not a Hardy Boys novel. And most girls or people aren't Nancy Drew with her perfect piety and smug saintliness. We bumble and stumble.
One reviewer scalded the book for not having a happy ending. (so read the Bobbsey Twins) And that's what I like about the book! My life has never had neat, tidy conclusions either. Another faulted her for using God's name in vain and for having "janky" ideas of Christianity. So sanctimoniousness aside, A lot of us in that time were questioning the hypocrisy of organized religion, being raised to do things that weren't modelled for us. And if the character had wrong ideas, it was because she was showed a janky version. She was being made to carry heavy burdens the "Christians" weren't helping carry.
I confess I'm surprised at the vituperative attitude toward this book and others like it from Gen X, Y and Z. I expected it from older generations who tended not to understand kids of the 70s. How often did we hear "things were different in my generation!" They certainly were and now we're having to deal with the fallout of all that. So cut us some slack!
But I didn't expect to read such scathing criticism from younger, self-professed enlightened people. It is shows how differently kids are now raised and that closemindedness is not the purview of older people alone. It never ceases to amaze me how insular people can be. They see things only through the lens of their own experience, social norms and constructs. They pass judgement on people who have not lived in their reality. They hold past people accountable to now expectations.
So where was I going with this? It gets back to my earlier post that to understand books from another time and place we have to understand the time and place it was written. We have to drop preconceived notions and leave off judging what we didn't live and seek to understand cultural, and time period differences.
There are so many examples of late boomer teen and kids books and plays that older boomers, Gen Y and Z don't understand. Some of these teen angst stories from the 50s were censored and banned:
West Side Story (Jerome Robbins play)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Rebel Without a Cause (film by Nicholas Ray)
Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)
The Wild One (Lazlo Benedek film),
Cross and the Switchblade, Purple Violet Squish (and others by David Wilkerson co-authored with John and Elisabeth Sherril)
Run, Baby, Run (Nicky Cruz)
From the 60s and 70s, the Bill and Vera Cleaver book Where the Lilies Bloom. M.E.Kerr's Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack, The Outsiders (an all of S.E. Hinton's books), Judy Blume books, The Pigman (and others by Paul Zindel).
The only play/movie that I know of that dealt with troubled teens prior to this was the Dead End (1934) a fictionalized account of the Bowery Boys (Dead End kids). The characters are often considered unbelievable, 2D, archetypal or anachronistic by younger readers. Older boomers criticized them for showing kids as angry, fallible, "immoral", mouthy and even cruel. All of these books have been challenged and sometimes banned.
And that's because readers are either looking at them through 21st century or good-ole days glasses. Books about teen gangs, drugs, abusive parents, youth violence, depression, murder, ageism, racism, alcoholism, runaways, suicide all this was for adults. We kids had it with dinner on TV. No one protected us from it but they also never imagined WE were dealing with it too. Dead End kids excepted, virtually no story ). So now, topics like this might seem trite. Because people talk about these things now. When they were written they were revolutionary.
