What the hell? I’m not a seasoned reader of young adult novels, and although I tended to find myself nodding along with parts of Caitlin Flanagan’s essay in December’s Atlantic, I don’t bear any involuntary grudges against the genre. YA, literary, crime, thriller—genres are merely marketing in the end. I want only to be engrossed in something well-made and complicated.
Go here to read the whole of Anthony Doerr‘s decision on the match between Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country and E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks at The Tournament of Books and here to read the commentary and comments on that decision. Till this year, all the contenders for TOB have been adult literary works, but this time they threw (and that probably is the operative word) a YA novel into the mix.
educating alice 