Realistic Fiction

The list on p. 103 seems fairly good to me; I have read several of the novels and have been curious about others. I just read Catcher in the Rye a couple years ago and absolutely loved it. I read Outsiders and Giver in middle school, the latter which I just reread, and enjoyed thouse, and I also read Holes a few years ago for fun, also good. I loved and cried over Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and also read the sequels sometime during my young adolescence.

This chapter was particularly interesting to me because of all the controversial yet important topics realistic fiction covers. I laughed about Nancy Drew because I read all of those books in elementary school and loved them, so did my mom when she was growing up in the sixties. I found the section about not adolescence being created after the Industrial Revolution interested as well.

While I understand that many of these forbidden taboo topics needed to be written about, I do think there needs to be a balance of realistic fiction. Like we talked about in chapter three, you have to be careful because some parents don't want their children reading certain things. And I respect that-I know I won't want my children reading all of these books, although I also know that someday, I have to let them go and they need to realize what is out there.

I especially find the sexual topics of importance, because it has swung so far onto the other pendulum. Yes, teens needed to be able to realized sex was out there and read about it, but many novels do a bad job of letting teens know about the consequences, and now, many books don't talk about abstinence at all-it is like teen fiction has gotten so trendy and needing shock value like the idea of Hollywood and media and "sex sells."

I also believed there needs to be a balance of reading depressing or too deep of literature. Yes, bad things happen and teens need to be able to relate to them or know they are out there, but sometimes in high school, I hated reading because we were always having to read horrible books with violent rape scenes where everyone died at the end. I know I am too much of an idealist sometimes and not everything has to have a happy ending, but I do think it is better when a novel offers some kind of resolution or hope.

Finally, I found particular interest in the section that said more and more books were being written about kids with mental illnesses, special needs, or physical disablities. As an oldest child of four, my youngest sibling was diagnosed with autism when he was two and I was ten. This was a hard period for me and my siblings-15 years ago, hardly anyone had heard of autism, and I often felt like my family was alone. None of my friends understood my brother, and when I said he was autistic (which now, I know to say he has autism!), they replied with, oh, he can draw really well? After that, I just wanted to end the conversation. So it is nice to know there are books out there that I could relate to, or that my own brother could relate to.

*I have yet to try the p. 150 questions, but plan on trying some as my freshman class gets deeper into To Kill a Mockingbird (one of my favorite novels of all time and taught by one of the people who led me to want to become an English teacher).