The Door in the Hedge by Robin McKinley. 1981.
I’m a snob about young adult fiction - I don’t like it, I don’t like being asked to pay any attention to it, and I don’t care for the ways it has creeped into much of mainstream science fiction and fantasy for adults. There’s a tonal and aesthetic sameness to it which I can’t stand. The lessons are at once heavy-handed and paper thin - and yes, with YA the appropriate word is “lesson” rather than “theme.” The language is quippy. Everybody’s a nerd with no ability to regulate their own emotions. There are lots of found families, who don’t act like real families but like college-age friend groups. There’s a kind of squeamishness around the difficult things in adult life, whether sex or death or boredom or parenthood or old age. None of the characters, regardless of age (and there are plenty of grown adults in books like this) seem like people I’d trust to pay a bill on time.
I’m speaking broadly here, of course. There are plenty of books for young people that aren’t like this. But I find there’s a particular type of YA novel that is really directed not towards actual kids, but towards adults who still read YA. Once you realize the intended audience, the broadness and heaviness of the lessons becomes a little distasteful - shouldn’t adults know this stuff already? Shouldn’t adults know that, I don’t know, it’s important to be yourself and prejudice is bad and friendship is important and trauma really screws you up?
This is supposed to be about Robin McKinley.
This is all to say, that she is one of the few YA authors I return to as an adult, and I’ve been trying to work out for myself why that is. There’s nostalgia at work, certainly, and I understand and respect the desire to feel that. There’s a poignant quality to her work; it’s subtle but you get a sense of a world disappearing. I think the best - the longest lasting - literature for children has this quality to it. It might be Narnia, or Middle Earth, or McKinley’s fairy kingdom but we have to know that really the world that’s disappearing, that can’t not disappear, is the world of childhood.
Her heroines are thoughtful, but not unnaturally brilliant. They’re strong, and brave, but they don’t kick anybody’s ass. They are mostly girls, but every once in a while - as in her retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses - she writes as an aging man. Youth, in her stories, is never eternal - it’s transitory and contingent. Aging, the gaining of experience and also sadness and tiredness, is always present in these stories. In the kind of YA book I talk about above, everybody, regardless of age, acts like a teenager. In McKinley, young people act like young people, but only while they’re young. And the stories, like the best stories for young people, are about leaving youth behind. I think that’s my problem with a lot of YA literature now - it’s not about leaving youth behind, but about holding onto it. It’s about learning lessons - the same ones, over and over - but never gaining wisdom. It’s selling something false. No one is young forever.
One of my favorite fairy tales, since I was a child, is The Twelve Dancing Princesses, and when I was a child I don’t think I could have explained this, but I always found it terrifying. I think McKinley got this - that it’s a horror story. Her version of the underworld where the girls dance is appropriately creepy. Everything is off, even as it’s beautiful, there’s a coldness and a menace to it that you can’t quite define but is definitely there. You feel the age of the old soldier, and of the eldest princess. The resolution is mournful, as it should be, because something is being lost, even if it’s good that it’s lost.