Trust your young adults - a response to the WSJ

[lightcastle]

So my sister responded to the WSJ opinion piece that set off the #YASaves thing on Twitter here in her role as YA editor for the LA Review of Books

Comments

[janewilliams20]

Yes. Let them read what they want, and trust them to stop reading if they don't like what they're reading. That's what my parents did for me, at least. "There's the bookcase", followed by "there's the library". So I started at top left, first bookcase, and worked my way through to bottom right, last bookcase. Anything I wanted: no judgement of age criteria, any questions I asked answered, no sense of "failure" if I didn't feel like finishing a book. "Forever Amber" I got about 2/3 of the way through, "The Cruel Sea" I dropped a lot earlier, loved Plato's Life of Socrates and Eysenck's "Straight and Crooked Thinking", rated Dickens about the same as Enid Blyton. I was seven... I'm not saying every seven-year-old would do the same, but any "young adult" could, surely?

[lightcastle]

I would certainly think so.