Enough with depressing reading lists

Well-written books don't need to have a twisted plot to keep you engaged.

By Mary Collins

from the September 14, 2007 edition

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West Hartford, Conn. - My 14-year-old daughter just completed another cycle of required summer reading, and the tally of distressing plots continues to mount.

She first complained about the number of sad, even sinister, story lines two years ago. But this summer the problem became a crisis. Normally an avid reader, she began to shy away from any form of fiction for fear it would focus on some rape, murder, emotional abuse, or other horrible outrage.

At first I brushed off her complaints. OK, so Huck Finn's father is an abusive drunk, and a black man in "To Kill a Mockingbird" is falsely convicted of a crime. While disturbing, I argued, these narratives capture certain elemental truths so effectively that they've been on summer reading lists for generations.

Then I realized she wasn't referring to these classics, but to a whole new crop of young adult fiction that I had never heard of. So I asked her for some plot summaries. A sampler:

White people purposely burn an entire town of black people. Many survivors have no ears or mouths.

A girl, age 12, growing up in the Middle East, marries a man in his forties who has several wives. The older wives resent and torment the young girl.

A town holds a lottery. At first it seems like an innocent exercise, but the author slowly reveals that the winner of the lottery will be sacrificed.

We all know that somewhere in the world there is a 12-year-old being forced to marry a middle-aged man whose other wives will abuse her. We all know that some whites committed atrocities upon some blacks throughout history.

But the humanity presented in the plots of my daughter's required reading spends 90 percent of its time hacking one another physically and emotionally.

"It's sadistic." That's my daughter's summary, which is more concise than mine.

And it's lazy.

It's easy to develop dramatic tension if a ship wrecks or a man attacks a girl, but what of the slowly unwinding dramatic tension of an Alice McDermott novel ("Charming Billy" comes to mind)? What of the astounding linguistic dance in Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping," which has almost no plot and certainly no shipwreck?

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