Narrative, Style, and Structure in YA Literature

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1. Point of View. YA fiction, specifically contemporary realistic fiction, has traditionally employed a first person, teenage narrator, narrative structure (Aronson, 2001). Results from this study (see Table 5) show that recent YA fiction is continuing this trend; however, it is also notable that the books in this sample included a variety of voice styles. Almost one in every four books was written using either a combination of first and third person or multiple voices/multiple narrators alternating to tell the Cartier Replica Watches story and thus provide multiple points of view (e.g., Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez [2001] and Jonathan Stroud's [2003] The Amulet of Samarkand). Also, one third of the titles had an unreliable narrator, as in Alex Flinn's (2001) Breathing Underwater. 2. Writing Style. In examining facets of writing style, it was found that over half of the titles were written using a straightforward or blunt tone. One quarter were written using a very literary style, as was the case with The Lightkeeper's Daughter by Iain Lawrence (2002), and 17% were written in what we found to be an overly dramatic (or "sappy") manner. The literary books tended to be the award winners (titles selected by adult educators and librarians), and the sappy titles tended to be the teen favorites or publisher best sellers, including Lurlene McDaniel's (2002) Telling Christina Goodbye. The books in the sample also varied in text types connected with the writing style.

3. Organization. The titles in the sample were examined for their organizational features and narrative structures. Almost half of the titles (46%) employed a distinctive organizing feature, such as a table of contents, timeline, or map. This is significant since 40% of the books that used such features were fiction titles, including The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (2002), which incorporated a table of contents, character list, and family tree.

Examination of the books' narrative structure looked at the linear or nonlinear structure of the books and the writing devices embedded into the narrative. Most of the books (81%) followed a chronological narrative, but they were not all written in the traditional, linear, single-voiced pattern. Almost one quarter of the titles had different characters alternating to tell the story, such as The Second Summer of the Sisterhood (Brashares, 2003), which links four separate girls' stories into one, or Bird by Angela Johnson (2004), which alternates between three main characters whose stories interconnect. A few abandoned the chronological pattern and alternated between the present and past, as in The First Par! Last by Angela Johnson (2003).

The books also used a variety of writing devices to impact the structure of the narrative. Slightly over half the titles (53%) incorporated Cartier Replica some type of writing device—such as flashbacks and flash-forwards (13%) or poetry and song lyrics (7%)—or multiple devices incorporated into one book (42%). Moreover, the use of the writing device in most of these books did not function merely as an "add-on" feature—it was a significant part of the narrative structure, such as the alternating between the present and the past in The First Part Last (Johnson, 2003).