As a future teacher, I am always looking for ways to incorporate feminism into my classroom. While working on a project for one of my education classes, I stumbled across two awesome young adult novels that could help teachers and parents introduce feminist ideas to their teens.
The first novel is Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. The protagonist in Speak is a 9th grade girl named Melinda. In the summer before her Freshman year, Melinda went to a party and was raped by a guy she would go to high school with in the Fall. Melinda, not knowing what to do, called the cops on the party, causing all of her friends to turn against her. Melinda goes through most of the year without telling her friends or family about what has happened to her. She does not know what to say, and is not even fully aware that what had happened to her was considered rape. In the end, Melinda finds the courage to finally tell her friend what happened, but endures much suffering before she is able to do so. The book causes the reader to ask why rape is a topic that is so taboo, despite the fact that it is so prevalent in our society.
The other novel is called Luna by Julie Anne Peters. Luna is told from the point of view of a fifteen-year-old girl named Reagan. Reagan’s seventeen-year-old brother Liam is a transsexual who wants to begin living his life as a girl and going by the name Luna. Liam chooses the name Luna, meaning “moon” because the only time she feels comfortable dressing and appearing as a girl is in the middle of the night when she sneaks into Reagan’s room. When Liam chooses to become Luna for good, Reagan is apprehensive about how their parents and Luna’s friends will respond. After encountering several struggles with the people she loves, Luna decides to leave town t0 begin her life anew. The novel asks the reader to think about how difficult it would be to be trapped in a body of the opposite gender, and also how the people you love would respond if you decided to change it.
Speak and Luna are a breath of fresh air in comparison with many young adult novels I have encountered (Cough, cough…Twilight). Melinda and Luna’s stories are great for introducing women’s issues and LGBT issues to young teens who are, for the most part, uneducated about them. If we can help increase this kind of awareness in teens, it will help them to learn to be more accepting of others and to question societal norms from a young age.
-Lauranium
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