What's odd about the direction this discussion has taken is that I agree with Sharon Flake about almost everything.

Flake points out that she and many other readers of every race are much more compelled by stories of triumph over immediate, real-world trouble than by distant fantasy or lighter fare. This is absolutely true for the vast majority of my students, who treasure her work and who most eagerly request more books with “lots of drama.” (Bang! and The Skin I'm In are particular favorites, but we also love Money Hungry, Begging for Change, and Who Am I Without Him, and I buy multiple copies of each every year.)

Flake and I also agree that these novels work quite differently from fantasies like the Harry Potter or Twilight series. I do think it's interesting and worthwhile to consider how and why these texts set up such different roles for their protagonists; I'm not sure why Flake concludes that this comparison devalues the “real trouble” novels when I note repeatedly that those are the ones that matter to my students (and, incidentally, to me.)

There are plenty of white-focalized “real trouble” books as well; but within the broad category of gritty problem novels about black adolescents, there's a specific trend I do find troubling, a subgenre in which the forces of evil seem to inhere in some essential badness of individual children. In my article I argued that The Skin I'm In fits this pattern while Coe Booth and Walter Dean Myers in his novels for older readers avoid it; if we seek further examples of this watch-yourself didacticism, we might identify it in Miracle's Boys but not Hush or Feathers, ambivalently on and off in The First Part Last, in Hazelwood but not Bluford High.

I do not think that all black YA works this way, only that many popular books do. Nor do I think that any such book is without value, only that it strikes me as a problematic trait. Whether Charlese in The Skin I'm In, in particular, offers a persuasively complex portrait of bad behavior is the one question on which I know Flake and I disagree — but I'm glad for the opportunity to consider her reading and to share it with my students.

In reading Flake's and others' responses to my piece — both positive and negative — I have felt more than once that they are addressing arguments I have not made. I set out to identify a peculiar pattern in a subset of realistic black-focalized YA; I think it's a stretch to conclude that I therefore want black writers or black youth or problem novels to go away. What I want, actually, is what I teach my kids: for all of us to read and think and wonder, to notice how the stories we encounter meet or extend or differ from our own view of the world we live in.

Lelac Almagor teaches seventh-grade English at KIPP DC: AIM Academy in Washington, D.C.