I have to admit I'm a sucker for this kind of books. I recall sitting on the Recommended Books for the Reluctant Young Adult Reader Committee a few years back as we were reading yet another story about some shy quirky girl who overcomes a problem and emerges from it a better person. Not really coming of age story, not really a problem novel, more just a slice of adolescent life that wasn't the least bit interesting. Then a book like Crosses, in some ways one of the ground breakers, comes out and just blows you out of the water, mainly by showing you what a YA books could be if they dared stretch, although Crosses stretches back to the mundane at the last minute. I know people get bothered by books with bleak endings, no hope, and the like, but there's the crux of our dilemma.
Kids says they want realism, but they also want happy endings.
But the one rule in almost every teen book is that somebody grows. And many people consider that notion, found in some ways in books like Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves or Cormier's Tenderness, scarier than any Fear Street book. A message that some kids don't change, that life does not always get better, and that taking drugs for kicks, engaging in sex, and drinking does not ruin always ruin life might not be the message that books for youth should send. The consensus seems to he that books for youth are held to a higher standard. That they must teach the good tale and send the positive message.