Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism by Michael Cart

Author:Michael Cart [Cart, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780838990988
Publisher: ALA Editions
Published: 2010-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

The Alex Awards

Speaking of adult books for young adults brings us to YALSA’s Alex Awards, a list of the ten best adult books for young adults that has been assembled annually since 1998. In light of our lengthy discussion of the ongoing blurring of the boundary between adult and young adult books, this category-driven list might seem, at first blush, a bit regressive. But as Betty Carter notes, “Alex winners put more books on the table for librarians to read and use for readers advisory. And that’s what Margaret Edwards [the legendary YA librarian for whom the awards are named] was about: wide reading and solid recommending in order to create lifetime readers of thousands of young adults” (Carter 2008, 22).

Spearheaded by Deborah D. Taylor, the former YALSA president, and funded by the Margaret Alexander Edwards Trust, the Alex Awards began in 1997 as a five-year YALSA project designed to investigate the use of adult books with young adult readers. It was the ad hoc committee appointed to administer this project that recommended the creation of both an annual list of best books and the presentation of a program at each annual ALA conference that would focus on some aspect of adult books for young adults. Thus, it was that the first program, held in 1998, featured a lecture titled “Back to the Future with Adult Books for the Teenage Reader.” Presented by Richard F. Abrahamson, professor of literature for children and young adults at the University of Houston, it offered a retrospective view of the historic importance to young adults and their reading of adult books; it also examined the continuing importance of nonfiction in stimulating teens’ interest in reading adult books (Abrahamson is the coauthor with Betty Carter of the important book Nonaction for Young Adults from Delight to Wisdom [Oryx Press, 1990] now sadly out of print) and called for more future research on the relationship of adult books and teen readers while stressing the importance of providing teens with enhanced opportunities for free reading—of both YA and adult books.

The Alex Awards ultimately became a permanent YALSA fixture in 2002 when the five-year project concluded and the board voted to perpetuate the list under the cosponsorship of Booklist magazine, which for a number of years has been adding four categories of repeat notes to adult titles to identify those with special interest to general readers, mature teens, teens with special interest in specific subjects, and those books with particular curriculum value.

As a result, 120 adult books have been named Alex winners. Viewed retrospectively, they are remarkable for the diversity of reading interests they represent, ranging from commercial and genre fiction to serious investigations of race, ethnicity, and civil rights, and from sports to memoirs to science. But they also have some important elements in common: one is the large number of nonfiction titles, particularly in the categories of biography, science, and narrative accounts of adventure; a second is the large number of first novels; and a third is the increasingly large number of what we would now call crossover books (e.

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