Okay, so the second one has a cliff-hanger ending. I should’ve seen that coming. This installment of Jessica Verday’s The Hollow Trilogy moves the story pretty directly into the realm of the dead pervading the everyday world of Sleepy Hollow. For young adult literature from the era of Twilight, it does raise issues that, although they were around when I was young, have become more prominent in the thinking of teens. Overdoses, college choices, attempted rape (or at least threatened), seem like things our society might’ve either overcome or matured about. Instead, we start putting these pressures on our young and wonder why society has a hard time coping. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve made society too complex. As an adult it’s become so complex that I’m never quite sure if I’m getting things done correctly, or if they might come back to haunt me later.
In any case, in the first novel of the set, The Hollow, the protagonist/narrator, Abbey, discovers that her boyfriend has been dead all along. The Haunted, volume two, is about how she copes with that. I read many years ago that certain narratives are something like preloaded in human brains. Given even the most basic pieces, our minds fill in the blanks. When girl meets boy and likes him, our thoughts go toward getting them together. Of course, a story is all about the difficulties that threaten to prevent that from happening. For most of us, we start to experience these things as teens and even as adults we remember it well. These are intense emotions and society complicates them because just when we think we know what we want at high school age, college separates us and we start over again. Thus college visits. It’s even more complicated when your boyfriend is a shade/ghost.
How the material and spiritual relate is an unresolved issue. Materialists have already decided by cutting the spiritual out altogether, but the rest of us, perhaps trusting our feelings more, wonder. Although these books are more paranormal romances than philosophical musings, they nevertheless raise questions that even adults struggle with (or should). We don’t have all the answers and we hope that our children might get further along this path than we did. Young adult literature helps them do so. Some choose to respond by banning books. The rest of us know that literature can help to discuss difficult topics in a world we’ve made far too complicated, for young and old alike.
