So what if I were to tell you that we weren’t the center of the universe and what if I were to tell you that I held the future of the entire world in the palm of my hand? That’s right. The aliens chose me and I don’t know why, but they told me I could decide whether or not the world keeps on existing.
Easy choice, right?
Not… exactly.
It should be no surprise to anyone that we live in a nostalgia driven world. I mean, take a look at the movies and TV shows that are coming out and you’ll see many appeals to our nostalgia, some predatory, some not. It’s nostalgia that started me on the road of rereading all the Baby-Sitter’s Club books and looking back at the things I’d read as a kid as an adult. It can almost feel like opening up a time capsule to peer inside when you crack open an old book again, looking back into the past with every turned page.
Everyone is afraid of death. It’s one of those universal truths that we all live with and while we may feel like we’re invincible when we’re teenagers, there’s always been fiction which undercuts that. Were you into fiction that was set in our world? There are books that will satisfy your young adult death craving such as John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars or Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember. Want to be more fanciful? Harry Potter and the Hunger Games have you covered.
There’s an allure to reading about death. At first, I was puzzled about why there were so many deaths in Young Adult fiction before I looked over at my bookshelf and saw all of the true crime that was waiting for me there. Death fascinates us all and when written well (like it was in Everything, Everything), for the purpose of telling a good story rather than simply trying to write porn for emotions, the death of teens can be incredibly cathartic to read about.
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