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I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.
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Wow. This is one of the most pompous articles I've read about YA lit, and I've read a ton of articles about how much YA lit sucks and how juvenile it is. Sure, a lot of YA is simple, genre crap. So is a lot of adult fiction. But I think the thing that pisses me off the most is the way he's deliberately dismissing a whole swathe of literature about which he admits he's completely ignorant, and then pats himself on the back for it. The
Hunger Games does do a lot of those things (minus the Pynchonesque turns of phrase), though perhaps not perfectly and perhaps not as well as other before it have, as do other YA lit titles.
As others here have said, YA is a
marketing category, not a genre/content label, and there's a lot of it that's just as deep and dark and complex and lyrical as stuff written for adults. A lot of it also has just as much swearing and sex, so that's a misconception I wish would go away as well. The biggest difference (at least when talking about genre fiction) is that the protagonists are pretty much guaranteed to be under the age of 20.
Read Gaiman, Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, Ann Rinaldi, Ursula LeGuin, Patricia Wrede, Judy Blume, Sarah Dessen, Scott Westerfield, Pratchett, Justine Larbalestier, David Levithan, and Sherman Alexi (many of whom write for adults as well as kids/teens); read any book that has ever been nominated for the Printz award (or the Newberry, or the Edwards, or the Morris) and then come back and try and tell me that all YA is juvenile, simplistic crap.