Should Young Adult Books Explore Difficult Issues?

On Saturday, the Journal’s Meghan Cox Gurdon, who covers kids books for the paper, wrote a story called “Darkness Too Visible” in which she argued that fiction aimed at young adults in recent years had become rife with pathologies. “[K]idnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18,” she wrote. => http://on.wsj.com/kUUeID