Teens are voracious readers. The gobble up fantasy, devour romance, and chug down the latest Japanese graphic novels. But although they'll always check out the latest fad, once a teen has had their fill they usually turn to the young adult's favorite standby: realistic fiction.
What is Realistic Fiction?
At its core, good realistic fiction is about people, their problems, and their challenges. Realistic fiction can shock, move, excite, inspire, or even disgust the reader. It can open their eyes to another view of the world.
Why do Teens Like Realistic Fiction?
Teens love realistic fiction because it allows them to try on different roles, see the consequences of bad choices and negative behaviors, and watch another teen solve a problem similar to their own. The goal of realistic fiction is to portray life as accurately as possible. Realistic fiction features believable teen characters in true-to-life situations with satisfying outcomes.
Is Realistic Fiction Good for Teens?
Through realistic fiction, teens can identify with the characters and their lives, and learn from their experiences. Realistic fiction gives teens a safe place to experience new and often difficult real-life drama such as suicide, mental illness, self-mutilation, abusive relationships, prejudice, eating disorders, and experimenting with drugs and alcohol.
What Types of Books are Realistic Fiction?
Realistic Fiction usually falls into one or more of these categories:
- Coming of Age: forming identity and moving from childhood to adulthood.
- Dysfunctional Family: exploring teen-parent reversal, a teen pulling away from their unhealthy family, a family torn apart by death, divorce, or a parent's mid-life crisis.
- Friends: featuring cliques, bullies, betrayal, outcasts, and the meaning of friendship.
- Love and Sex: the story of first romance which often focuses on risk of opening up one's heart when one or both people are too immature to foster a lasting romance, also depicting the real consequences of sexual activity.
- Teen Parenthood: goes with the Love and Sex novels, but also explores the consequences of conceiving a child during adolescence.
- School: the social laboratory which cooks up peer pressure, teachers, cheating, harassment, and other group dynamic dilemmas.
- Death and Near Death: including chronic illness, living with disfigurement, rebuilding a life after the death of a loved one and more.
- Substance Abuse and Mental Illness: either the main character or someone close to them suffers from an unhealthy mind; these books explore how an altered state affects every aspect of everyday life.
- Crime: where the protagonist is the victim of crime, or commits a crime and deals with the consequences.
- Religion and Spirituality: usually involves prejudice against a religious belief, rejecting or discovering spirituality, or exploring the spiritual realm on one's own.
- Racial and Ethnic Conflicts: often in a school setting, involves the reader in a sympathetic way as they observe prejudices and conflicts that may be foreign to them.
Realistic fiction has something for every age teen, especially older teens (age 16 and up). For some suggestions of realistic fiction novels for teens, see this list of "Get Real" fiction for teens created by the Young Adult Library Services Association.
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