Navigation

Abstract

Navigation Sara K. Day Late in 2018, FORESHADOW: A Serial YA Anthology, Published Digitally released its first issue of young adult short stories. Each month since, three new stories by established and emerging voices in the field have been published online, making work by authors such as Dhonielle Clayton, Malinda Lo, and S. K. Ali available to readers and highlighting the breadth and power of young adult literature with the specific objective of "contribut[ing] to the changing landscape of young adult publishing to become more inclusive and diverse" ("About"). Edited by Emily X. R. Pan and Nova Ren Suma, FORESHADOW's literature and mission are beautiful, compelling, and inspiring, and I am excited to continue reading along with each new issue. A recent story by Mayra Cuevas particularly caught my attention with its timely representation of a young woman navigating a life very unlike the one that she had planned. In "Resilient," Puerto Rican protagonist Marisol ruminates on what she lost when Hurricane María swept across her island home. She had been accepted for a college degree in Latin American studies, but first, she says, "I was saving to pay for my dream trip through Latin America, with a teen tour company that follows the route Ché Guevara took in his Diarios de Motocicleta. According to the description on the website, it would be a time of awakening, of leaving my mark on the world and allowing it to leave its mark on me." Instead, when Puerto Rico remains dark months after María, Marisol finds herself on a very different journey, traveling to South Dakota to work in a turkey processing plant. Although her cousin Rosita tells her that it's "an adventure," she struggles to adapt to the chilly climate and the seeming hopelessness of her situation. It is only when Marisol calls on the memory of the palmeras that bent in the hurricane winds but refused to break that she begins to see how she can make her way in this new, uncertain future. Like Marisol, the characters discussed in this issue's four articles represent the theme of navigation as they literally or figuratively work to determine where they are going and how they should get there. In turn, their journeys pose challenges for readers to navigate, from confronting the historical and ongoing consequences of colonialism and the Jewish Holocaust to interrogating [End Page 247] the ways in which contemporary Western culture defines and limits our expectations regarding gender. Jocelyn van Tuyl's "What Goes Up Must Come Down: The Twenty-One Balloons and the Politics of Lighter-Than-Air Fantasy" reconsiders William Péne du Bois's 1947 novel with a particular eye to the ways in which the novel actively obscures the goals and effects of colonialism. The article puts Péne du Bois's work in conversation with other "empty island" stories in order to consider how it functions as part of a larger effort in US children's literature to privilege settler narratives that ignore or erase indigenous, enslaved, and oppressed peoples. Roni Sarig likewise looks to the past in "Under Empty Skies: The Absence of God and Parental Replacement in Israeli Children's Literature on the Jewish Holocaust," examining the ways in which late twentieth-century texts for young readers answer the question "Where was God during the Holocaust?" Focusing on a picture book and two short stories for young people written by Holocaust survivors, Sarig investigates how these texts position fathers and mothers as replacing a seemingly absent God during the atrocities. The second half of the issue turns to more recent young adult literature with a particular interest in the challenges of navigating contemporary Western cultural constructs of femininity. Wendy J. Glenn and Danielle King-Watson's "Being an Athlete or Being a Girl: Selective Identities among Fictional Female Athletes Who Play with the Boys" considers a number of recent works that portray young women struggling with the question of identity as they pursue athletic success in sports that have usually been limited to men. Noting the persistent, insistent binary constructions that define femininity in opposition to rather than inclusive of athleticism, Glenn and King-Watson particularly...