Heavens to Betsy!

LA Times article about how crappy "tween-lit" is

I don't agree with their conclusion, which is that teens don't want to read about people just like them. That's a vast overgeneralization. I was a fantasy nerd (am? When I watch the Lord of the Ring movies I am reminded), I was a sci-fi nerd, I played King's Quest, I had a dragon puppet and wizard legos. I also loved Ramona and the Betsy-Tacy books and Laura Ingalls Wilder, which were books about girls like me, but in different time periods (or way wackier, in the case of Ramona, who basically lived in a world of her own imagining anyway). So what's the difference? Besides the fact that those books were infinitely better written than contemporary tween/teen lit, I think it's partly a "focus group" problem (the anxiety of audience as I call it) like the Times article said, and since the characters in teen lit are so generalized (to appeal to all teen girls) that they are boring - they're nowhere near as unique as Betsy or Ramona or Anne or Laura - they're all clones of one another, their friends are clones of each other, their parents are all the same and they all go to big public high schools with no distinguishing characteristics and they all just want a boy to like them. Anne and Ramona (with the exception of Ramona in the late, in my opinion lame, "Ramona's World) and Laura couldn't care less about boys, and I suspect that modern girls really have enough to worry about in that arena without stressing out about whether or not female characters are getting any as well. The rare standouts from this genre are the ones that truly stand out - the Princess Diaries, for example, is about a girl who discovers that she is queen of an imaginary country, and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants centers around, well, magical traveling pants. Even those people (and I don't think it's just because I'm too old for them) will never have my sympathy like Anne did when she wanted to be Cordelia with an alabaster brow, or like Laura did when she wanted to keep going west like the wild horses.

All of this just serves to make me very anxious about the kind of literature my kids (still imaginary) will be reading one day. So anxious that I start stocking an amazing, imaginary library for them to choose from. No tween-lit-shit allowed.