Education or Escape, Reform or Release
After a long time of not visiting (I’m lazy and I don’t have any kind of blog alerts set up), I stopped by the teen marketing website Ypulse (www.ypulse.com) and saw this note about a new marketing initiative from Penguin called “Point of View.” The note, which links to Penguin’s website by the same title, describes the Point of View initiative one meant to “spotlight[] novels dealing with difficult topics and [which] aims to connect teens to books that address those topics.” A visit to the Point of View website made me wonder about the real audience of this marketing push. Featuring promotions for several novels, including the incredibly lame Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, Wintergirls and Speak, both by Laurie Halse Anderson, and Looking for Alaska, by John Green, the site points out these novels as books “that fill the silence that surrounds difficult topics.” Now, I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t really sound like teen-targeted marketing to me. And, yeah, I know that YA books–particularly those that address (for better or for worse) social issues affecting teens and of interest to adults serving teens–are often differently marketed to teens and adults, I really wonder about the promotion of these novels for what seems to me to be purely bibliotheraputic purposes.
I think it’s the fact that this campaign uses the hot-topic-touchstone of each novel as a base over which to lay some kind of didactic/theraputic promotion that gives me pause. Because, really, other than the fact that critics and other adults have identified the chosen novels as “timely” in terms of content, the books don’t have that much in common. I mean, I think (hope) we can all agree that Thirteen Reasons Why sucks ass and that even Wintergirls is a bit more sympathetic and even-handed in its treatment of its protagonist than Thirteen was with its sensational “Othering” of its doomed narrative object. And what the hell is Looking for Alaska doing in this promotion? Am I supposed to believe that Green’s novel’s value comes from it’s status as a cautionary tale about drunk driving? Give me a break, dudes.