I also enjoyed this post at Nothing Cannot Happen Today. She discusses the wide range of ages young adult books are labeled for. Perhaps YA books need a rating system? Obviously a twelve year old and an eighteen year old are going to have a different maturity level and therefore what they can handle/should be reading about are likely to be on different pages (or in different books... ;).
Something needs to change or young adult books will continue to get slammed. Sure, there are some books that may surprise me, but I won't complain about them and start some kind of fight, criticizing the author. I will simply own up to the fact that the book isn't for me (as a twenty-eight year old adult, even), and guess what? I don't read it. The end. It was written, and it was probably written for a reason, and that reason does not apply to me. But it no doubt applies to someone.
All this to say, I'm all for age recommendations on books, especially if some parents still aren't monitoring what their children (especially the younger, possibly more sensitive set) read. Like Veronica Roth mentioned in her article, I was also a pretty sensitive child. I could see a television special on forest fires and have nightmares for weeks that my house was burning down. I didn't grow out of truly being affected and sometimes scared by what I saw/read about until I was near high school age. Every child grows at a different pace, and it's the parent's responsibility to know what their child can and can't handle.
I made the mistake of skimming through some of the comments to the WSJ article. Wow. If you want your blood to boil.... There is a lot of ignorance in the world. I don't know why this continually surprises me, but it does.
