Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers recall wisdom from the past that we should commit to heart. Last week, Abigail Shrier reflected on the greatest romantic comedy of all time, “When Harry Met Sally.” This week, our farm correspondent Larissa Phillips celebrates another genre that’s out of vogue these days: the young adult adventure novel.
I had an adventurous childhood.
Before I even finished elementary school, I had tracked a monster bear through the Pennsylvania woods with a spectacular dog at my side. I’d climbed a precipice to steal a falcon hatchling from its nest in upstate New York. I’d helped my older brother use his incredible brain to rescue some lost boys who’d gotten trapped in a cave in Utah.
Of course, I didn’t do any of these things in reality. I experienced them all vicariously, through characters in my favorite books: Big Red by Jim Kjelgaard. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald. I was lucky: In the ’70s, the young adult adventure novel was still widely read, and I loved these action-packed books.
Usually, they featured a boy who, through some calamitous or surprising event, was thrust into a harrowing situation. Shipwrecks and plane crashes were common, but a parent leaving home could also do the trick. The safe parameters of childhood dissolve. The boy is on his own. He might go hungry, or be wounded, or temporarily lose hope. But over the course of the novel he eventually emerges, scathed and scarred, and on the way to becoming an adult.
