It seems like there are quite a lot of people in the contemporary SF & Fantasy scene who aren't willing to read even a single word of Young Adult literature. I can somewhat empathize: People have their dignity and reading books that are explicitly not marketed to oneself can seem kind of undignified. But if you ask me, then it is a lot more undignified to ignore books just because they were explicitly not written for or marketed to oneself. I'm a somewhat old-fashioned kind of guy, so the first question I ask myself when confronted with a book is not "Did the author write this for me?" but rather "Is it any good?".
Which leads me to Margo Lanagan's Black Juice, a YA story collection by the Australian author and (I think still) two-times World Fantasy Award winner that is more than just "good". The stories contain a few elements I have found to be typical of much of the YA I have read (which isn't that high a number): especially mostly young protagonists and a strong emphasis on the process of growing-up. In that sense, they aren't written for me, or weren't written for me if I believed the process of growing-up would actually end completely and had also lost all interest in what happens in other people's heads.
Fortunately I don't and I haven't, and so am rather nicely prepared to appreciate the finer qualities of Lanagan's writing. These aren't stories about how nice and friendly childhood and young adulthood are; Lanagan seems more interested in the sadness and the difficulties of life, without being so much in love with being dark that she ignores hope or love or the possibility of things actually getting better some day.
Most of the stories in the book are products of the sort of worldbuilding I admire the most - worldbuilding through suggestion, with trust in the reader's ability to think and understand. Lanagan mostly achieves an even more difficult goal: writing stories with fantastical elements that work equally well as metaphors and taken as "real" parts of the fictional world.
I'm quite awed by the language of the stories, perfectly believable voices whose sometimes slightly strange diction makes them come alive even more.
But what hits me most (and some of these stories really hit) is the rhythmic quality of the language, the way the words transport more than just their surface meaning. It's what is sometimes called art.
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