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As a 17 year old avid reader, I have to respectfully disagree with this article. Or perhaps not so respectfully. Teenagers are not made of fragile glass, and there’s no magical switch that is flipped at age 18 to suddenly prepare us for real life. We are experiencing the realities and harshness of life NOW, and these books are a way for us to understand our own pain and hardships. When we read books like the hunger games, or any dystopian literature for that matter, we are not reveling in all the blood, violence, and psychological horror. Instead, we see a world with themes startlingly similar to our own: plagued with war, government control, and countless other human atrocities, with characters who we can relate to dealing with the same issues as us. When we read a book about someone who is depressed or dealing with difficulties over their race, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or any of the other countless problems that teens go through, we see ourselves, or someone we know, struggling those same battles in their own life. We realize that we’re not alone in our struggles, and that gives us courage to face our real-life demons.
So, in my opinion, YA literature is not too dark. Our LIVES are dark, and our genre of literature reflects what we’re going through. We’ve never known a time when our country wasn’t engaged in war. We’ve never been able to turn on the news without a list of the dead scrolling across the bottom column. Sure, we like to read happy books; there’s plenty of those in YA literature. But to me, and many other avid readers I know, the books that make us feel something, the books that evoke our empathy and help us confront our own life problems, whatever they may be, are the books that we really want to read.

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