The young adult novel Girlfriend in a Coma follows six people as they grow from naive high-schoolers to weathered adults, losing one in a coma but getting her back 17 years later. This book deals with both real life and the supernatural, making it captivating for fans of both genres. But this book also has many aspects that require maturity to understand, such as alcoholism, drugs, teenage pregnancies, and sex. There are many reasons supporting the possible questioning of this book, and vice versa.
As soon as you start reading Girlfriend in a Coma, you are faced with teenagers have intimate sexual relations upon a ski slope. Next, they attend a "house-wrecker" party with drugs and alcohol, but one of the main characters doesn't have anything--Karen is starving herself, taking pills upon pills to make herself thin for her trip to Hawaii. Fast forward until after Karen's in her coma, and you find her ex-boyfriend an alcoholic and her best friends overdosing on drugs. And then you find out that Karen's pregnant from that night on the ski slope. She has the baby in her vegetative state, and she gets pregnant at 16. Karen's a grandmother at 34. All of these situations seem as though they were taken out of 10 different young adult book and rolled into one, making an overwhelming novel filled with all of the things parents want to protect their children from. This is why Girlfriend in a Coma seems like a candidate for challenging.
On the other hand, the issues mentioned in the book are not glorified at all, even explaining the harsh reality of overdosing on heroin with the characters nearly dying side by side. At the end of the book, each person is granted a wish by an old, deceased friend (don't ask... it's a long story). The two friends struggling with drugs are both cleared of their addictions, and they are obviously ecstatic and newly in love with the world. When one character asks the other in wonder if she feels like getting high again, and she responds "'No... I like being inside my own skin again.'" This shows that the book is sending the message that drug use is dangerous and changes you, which is a good message to be sending to teens when they will be introduced to drugs for the first time. Therefore, the way the author writes about some of these issues in a degrading manner almost makes up for mentioning them, and even more.
Overall, I am still undecided about the appropriateness of Girlfriend in a Coma, but I know for certain that it teaches valuable (yet strange) lessons to teens.
I feel that not all YA books should be challenged like this one. This book (although I never read it) I balieve that it teaches a lesson so it's not neccessarily a dark YA book that only have sex and drugs, etc.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you when you say that not all YA books should be challenged. I still think Girlfriend in a Coma is dark, but like many other YA books, it also teaches a lesson.
DeleteI really like reading your blog post! I find it interesting the way you described this book as having the adult content of 10 YA books rolled into one. That image really stood out to me. I think that probably a lot of YA books feel that way, which is the exact reason many parents and critics want to challenge YA books. But what you did so well was you also showed the good in these YA books, with a really meaningful conclusion. I think that most YA books teach valuable lessons through the intensity, even if it may feel like too much. Do you think that there was too much dark material pushed into this one book? Or do you feel it was necessary to get the messages through to the readers?
ReplyDeleteThanks so much! To answer your question, I don't necessarily think it was too much dark material crammed into one book, but it definitely wasn't very realistic. It does get the message across but it distracts from the themes in a way. I agree that lessons can be taught through intensity, but I think the drugs, sex, alcohol, etc. (not to mention the supernatural aspect) in this book was a little much.
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