Ginia Belafante writes about the new realism in YA fiction, citing works like “All American Boys,” a novel by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, “The Hate U Give” by Angela Thomas, and “June the Sparrow and the Million-Dollar Penny,” a novel about an orphaned girl forced to move from the Dakota to South Dakota.  She adds:

In some sense these new realist novels are even grittier than their predecessors from the 1970s, even though children, especially in New York where crime rates were so high, faced greater perils then. The classic young-adult novel of that period typically dealt with characters managing the fracture of American family life — divorce, a mother’s new boyfriend and so on — but those characters most often enjoyed the comforts of middle-class life. Norma Klein’s Manhattan was as sophisticated as any Woody Allen would devise. Children today may finally be resisting the elusive insulation we crave for them.

It’s fascinating to me that we give children agency, suggesting that they set the agenda when it comes to YA fiction.  Possible, but it’s the adults who are writing the books.  I’m not persuaded that we “crave” the idea of protecting them from the hard facts once they hit the teen years.