It's "Snow" Secret!

Just wanted to post pictures of our cute Lunch Bunch Book Club display because it makes me happy.  Thank you to Florence Kosloski for always coming up with and putting together the cutest ideas!  Students love to see what she'll do next, and they really do use these peer reviews to get ideas for their reading.  Let it snow!

The Allure of Darker Young Adult Novels

I came across these reflections Mrs. Lawrence's 8th-grade Langauage Arts students completed as part of a lesson using Visual Thesaurus.  Students used Visual Thesaurus to annotate an opinion article from the New York Times, James Parini's "Feeling 'Gamed,'" on why today's students are so drawn to darker, dystopian literature like Hunger Games and Life as We Knew It.  I was impressed with the students' insightful responses when they reflected on the question for themselves. 

Following are some of the highlights:

Novels are darker now than before because we are more dramatic and we are tired, as a society of teens, of the happy stories.  We are getting more opinionated and independent in the way we voice our opinions.  There is so much support of the dystopian trend because each character has maybe the dark side of us that we keep secret.  - Rachel

Everyone wants a darker story because as we get older we get sick of the "everything is happy," cheerful books and want to move on to something different and new.  I'm not saying perfect love stories are bad, but sometimes the darker side has a real interesting appeal to it.  For example, with the Hunger Games, it is all about children killing children, yet I stayed up all night to finish the book because it drew me in... - Peyton

We have become so absorbed by technology in the visual arts that fantasies of death and destruction become commonplace.  It takes a really horrible story to get our attention.  Also, when our grandparents and parents were young, wars were going on like Vietnam and the Cold War, not to mention World Wars I and II.  That is why youth wanted to escape to a place of happiness and peace.  Now that time has passed, we want to be entertained like the Romans at the Colisseum.  We need something abnormal like the spilling of blood to get our attention. - Alex


I think best-selling young adult novels are darker now because it's something different from our lives.  Also, everyone has so many happy things in life, reading books like this gives us a sense of what life could be like for others, or just a different perspective on life. - Kennedi

I think dark, dystopian novels are really popular now because it is a different setting.  These novels make you think, "What if?"  What if the Hunger Games were real?  Also, many dystopian books are extremes of real life.  The world could easily become a dystopia.  That's why so many people read these books. - Amanda

I love these thoughtful responses!