They grow up so fast

Barbara Feinberg's two children have always loved to read. So when her 12-year-old son, Alex, began complaining about the young adult novels his seventh-grade teacher had assigned, Ms. Feinberg was puzzled.

"Everyone dies in them," Alex told his mother wearily. His teacher put it this way: "A good book should make you cry."

Curious, Feinberg started reading the novels herself. What she found was a literary world filled with traumatic images and plots that mirror daily headlines. Child abuse, abandonment, alcoholism, incest, teen suicide, rape, self-mutilation - all are recurring themes in young-adult novels. Coping with grief becomes the order of the day for young characters.

Goodbye, childhood fantasy. Hello, gritty realism.

For publishers, it's a formula for success. "Problem novels" constitute the largest genre of books for teens. Some win top awards, proudly displaying the prestigious Newbery Medal on the cover.

But for Feinberg, who runs a creative-arts program for children called the Story Shop in Westchester County, N.Y., these gloom-and-doom books, as her children call them, raise concerns. She explores this literary landscape in "Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up" (Beacon Press, $23). Part critique, part parenting memoir, the book makes a persuasive case for the value of imagination and creativity in stories for young adults.

Although Feinberg praises the quality of writing in many of these books, she takes issue with their basic premise. "What kids are expected to learn in problem novels is, you have no one but yourself," she says in a telephone interview. Adult characters are often destructive or inept. Or the family is broken and unsupportive. The child must find meaning or comfort alone, or with help from an adult outside the family.

Feinberg also laments the lack of a rich fantasy life in these novels. Descriptions of characters and settings are often minimal. Unlike earlier books that emphasized young people's relationship to the larger community, these plots turn inward, focusing on feelings. "They're not wacky or funny," she says. "They're very serious, very earnest."

What a contrast to the "cozier" and "less catastrophic" stories Feinberg remembers reading as an adolescent. Those books depict a whole world, she explains, with a rich narrative voice and rounded characters. "Even if a sad thing happens, it's part of a whole, so you come away with a feeling of having a rich experience. That isn't the case with a lot of these 'problem novels.' "

She traces the beginning of the genre to the 1960s and 1970s. As social change rocked the country, it reshaped young-adult fiction.

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