#aetonormativity

Bug’s recent post about Turning Red, and especially all the thoughtful responses, made me decide to put together a list of Middle Grade and YA novels in which the parents are negligent, imperfect, judgmental, narrow-minded, and/or some combination of all four, and aren’t shown to be in the right by the end of the story. More importantly, while the child protagonist may face pressure from other characters to help/accept their parent, the book overall doesn’t suggest this is automatically The Right Thing To Do. I decided to leave off books where parents are straight-up abusive (like A Step From Heaven, What Jamie Saw, Rules of Survival, and The Great Gilly Hopkins,) because the parent(s) in those stories are unambiguously in the wrong—it’s clear to the reader, if not the protagonist, pretty much from the beginning that these are not good parents. This list obviously isn’t exhaustive, and I tried to include as many books as possible that were “genre fiction” (fantasy, sci fi, mysteries, adventures, most historical fiction) that subverts putting the burden on the child to accept their parent’s flaws, because those stories aren’t nearly as common as realistic fiction that tackles the imperfect parent.

The first section are Middle Grade novels, the second are YA novels and the last section are novels for adults that have child protagonists and are Alex Award recipients, an award “given to books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults”. I also tried to list the books in sections one and two approximately in order of suggested reading age, from youngest to oldest. Even though I have a bee in my bonnet about Middle Grade books being retroactively labelled as YA, I did include a few Middle Grade novels in the YA category (like Silent to the Bone and Homecoming,) which would almost certainly have been published as YA if the category had existed when the books came out. Animorphs isn’t included because I’m assuming if you’re reading this you’re already a fan of the series.

Final Caveat: I would strongly recommend all of these books, but some have aspects that haven’t aged well, ie, The Planet of Junior Brown was published in 1971 and its attitude towards mental illness is accordingly outdated, and The Letter, The Witch, and the Ring’s portrayal of gender exploration is similarly outdated, but again, it came out in 1972, and for the time it was incredibly subversive and ground-breaking.  

The “My Teacher” series by Bruce Coville, especially My Teacher Is an Alien

The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs

Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson

ParaNorman from LAIKA Studios

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

Deep and Dark and Dangerous by Mary Downing Hahn  

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi

Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett Krosoczka

The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

****************************

Silverwing and Sunwing by Kenneth Oppel

His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman (although The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage unfortunately ret-cons this to some extent)

Silent to the Bone by E.L Konigsburg

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt

The Planet of Junior Brown by Virginia Hamilton

Homecoming by Cynthia Voight

Tangerine by Edward Bloor

Dead Girls Don’t Write Letters by Gail Giles

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

The Pigman by Paul Zindel

Hero by S.L. Rottman

Burning Up by Caroline B. Cooney (a lot of Cooney’s books subvert the Mother Knows Best trope)

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

********************************

The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell (not a sequel to The Secret Life of Bees : )

[Nonny refers to the tags where I said I liked 97% of Turning Red.]

My peeve, in a word: aetonormativity.

In a bunch of words:

Aetonormativity (literally, "adult = normal") is the idea that a lot of our stories carry the hidden assumption that adults' perspective both is and should be the default way of understanding life. It dismisses children's perspective as selfish and limited, or simply fails to consider that a child could be right where adults are wrong.

Cates has written extensively about the fact that in magical coming-of-age stories, especially those starring girls, there is a tendency not to let girls have too much power. Enough that girls have power over boys, maybe, but not so much that they start to disrespect women. For example, Korra spends much of Legend of Korra not listening to her adult mentors, which always proves to be a mistake and leads to her learning to listen better. (Contrast: Aang.) Buffy will let Willow be more powerful than the gods, but never has a moment where she is right and Giles wrong when they disagree about her magic. A Little Princess features Sara often going behind adults' backs, but her ultimate act of defiance is to Get an Adult who saves the day. So on.

Anyway, Turning Red is 97% a story about a teen girl defying the adults in her life — and being right to do so. And I really like that movie. It's the feminist remake of Teen Wolf (1985) I never knew I'd wanted all these years. (Also: your mileage may vary, my perspective is biased, and my major peeve is someone else's easily-ignored blip.)

However. Meilin's mom might mean well... but she also follows her daughter around, sex-shames her, shows up at her school, deliberately ruins her social life, and eventually resorts to physically attacking her. Sure, we can argue that Ming's dealing with her own anxiety and she's scared of losing her future if Meilin becomes Canadian-acculturated... but. BUT the security guard at Meilin's school is apparently on high alert and has had to escort Ming off the premises to keep her from spying on students, by the time Ming shows up during the merch montage. BUT Ming doesn't want Meilin to have other friendships and tries to end those friendships where possible. BUT Meilin feels unsafe at home and can only be mentally safe when with friends.

I watched Turning Red with Spouse; the moment Panda-Ming attacked the concert crowd, we gasped and grabbed hands, babbling "they're doing it" "oh my god they're doing it" "they're going there". Because we thought we were finally, finally witnessing the moment where Rapunzel rejects Mother Gothel... with a biological parent. Where Meilin realizes that her mother loving her is not enough, if she can't be safe at home.

Only, see, Ming and Meilin do share genes. So it doesn't ultimately matter that Ming beats Meilin up and tries to kill her; Ming "can't help it" on account of being premenstrual caught up in panda emotions. It doesn't ultimately matter that other adults in Meilin's life feel moved to shelter her from her mom; Ming means well and intentions are more important than actions. Because adults are right, and when kids disagree with them then the kids should be corrected.