Taking Action

            Young adult literature is also about taking action.  Young adults are ready to take on the world and see what they can do about things from the personal to the global.  If you can’t make a difference, what does any of it matter anyway?    Impelled to act and bursting from the limitations of childhood, young adults are raring to find ways they can make an impact.  I think three important characteristics of YA fall underneath the Taking Action umbrella:

            • Young adults read to grow up, which necessitates distinguishing

                their individual independence from family and peer group.

            • Young adults also read to be introduced to options they didn’t 

                know they had and protagonists who take action.

            • The ending of a young adult novel is usually a new beginning.

            Because so many of my other What Makes YA YA? posts have included spoiler alerts and because this final installment requires discussing the endings of YA books, I’m going to use S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders to illustrate my points.  This is the forty-fifth anniversary of this classic young adult novel, the first many of us read.  So if you haven’t read The Outsiders sometime in the last forty-five years, be warned…I’m telling the ending!

Young adults read to grow up, which necessitates distinguishing

their individual independence from family and peer group.

            Okay, now I’m going to take you back.  Remember when Ponyboy and his friends meet Cherry Valance, and he realizes she’s not like any other Soc he’s ever met?  He admires her as an individual distinct from her peer group.  Afterwards, Ponyboy comes home late, and big brother Darry gets angry and hits him.  As a result, Ponyboy runs away from home and Darry’s aggression, asserting independence from his family’s ways.  By the end of the novel, Ponyboy comes to see his own unique qualities apart from the Greasers –remember Johnny writing to him to “stay gold”?

Young adults also read to be introduced to options they didn’t 

know they had and protagonists who take action.

            Ponyboy also learns there’s more to life than the Greaser ways of loyalty, violence, and vengeance.  On the run after his friend Johnny accidentally stabs a Soc, they come across a burning church with children inside.  The boys rush in to rescue the children.  Taking this action changes everything for them.  Ponyboy, who is rescued by brother Darry, realizes how much his brother cares for him.  Johnny, though charged with manslaughter, feels he can die redeemed for having saved the children.

The ending of a young adult novel is usually a new beginning.

            The Outsiders is a great demonstration of the ending as a beginning.  After Johnny dies and Dally, torn up by the tragedy, commits suicide, Ponyboy falls sick for days.  He returns to school, only to face his dramatically dropping grades.  His English teacher, perhaps seeing Ponyboy’s proclivity for the written word, offers to pass him if he writes a good theme.  Inspired by Johnny’s note to “stay gold,” and beginning with the opening line of the novel itself, Ponyboy writes about the recent events he’s experienced.  The reader is left to believe Ponyboy’s assignment is the novel, itself.  We leave Ponyboy, assured he will follow his writing dreams.  We see, as in so many other great YA novels, the young adult taking what he’s learned from his challenging experiences and turning it into a new beginning.  And how appropriate, because, indeed, adolescence is the road we walk to the beginning of our adult lives.  How conscious we are at this time of life that the actions we take impact not only those around us, but also the very door we choose to step through into an adulthood of our making.