AS IN THE LONG AGO

In an interview  that you can watch on her website  Geraldine McCaughrean described the origin of her book  Where the World Ends  which won the Carnegie Medal in 2018. Her daughter had visited St Kilda and returned with a head full of anecdotes about the island archipelago, the most remote in the British Isles. One of those anecdotes concerned something that happened in 1727. A small party of boys and men had crossed from the main island, Hirta, to a sea stack called Stac an Armin which is also known as the Warrior Stac, to catch wild fowl. They were ferried across on the island's only boat and expected to be picked up again after three weeks or so. But no one came, and they were marooned there for nine months with no idea why the boat had not returned to take them home. In fact, as Geraldine McCaughrean says in the interview, this anecdote consisted of only two sentences. No one knows what actually happened on that entirely barren spike of rock during those nine mon...

I read a lot of fiction. SF, thrillers, detective fiction, literary fiction, all kinds of stuff. In none of it do I find rape, murder, genocide and war occurring so regularly as in the Carnegie Medal winners I've been reading in the last few months. This month I've read  Buffalo Soldier  by Tanya Landman, 2015 winner (rape, lynching, murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, American Civil War, Indian Wars) and  Salt to the Sea  by Ruta Sepetys, 2017 winner (rape, murder, ethnic cleansing, maritime disaster with thousands of deaths, WW2). Did I enjoy them? Not really. Is enjoyment even an appropriate response to these novels? Well, probably not. Are they children's books? No. So why, then, are they not adult books? (Not that that is even a category). The subject matter is at least as extreme as most adult fiction that I read. I'm beginning to suspect that an important distinguishing feature of YA fiction is that it lacks  complexity.  I know that's a ridiculous o...