i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.
Fuck. Yes.
I’m very glad I read H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, William Peter Blatty, Poppy Z. Brite et al, when I was very young — even though I was castigated for reading those by adults who found out — because they allowed me to experience traumatic events and compare them to my own real life (which was also often traumatic) and see that people could persevere through them and even worse than what I was experiencing, that horrible people didn’t have to make you into a horrible person, and that there could be something else despite what people did to (literally) beat you down.