Seventeen-year-old Sarah is abducted by Brian, a sexual predator, kept imprisoned for four months, starved, raped repeatedly, and psychologically tortured. In Stained, author Cheryl Rainfield once again tackles heavy, topical, mature subject matter (her 2010 novel, Scars, was called out by The Wall Street Journal in a contentious 2011 article for exemplifying the “darkness” pervasive in YA). But what is our position when we write for teenagers? Often, especially in realistic novels, YA authors seem to be trying (and not quite succeeding) to set their adult selves aside, resulting in an uncomfortable hybrid. We have connections to this tribe, of course, having once belonged to it, but nonetheless our status as outsiders is clear. When we write for children, we’re writing for another tribe. When authors write for adults, we’re writing for each other. Young adult fiction has always been an uneasy genre.
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