Has a book resonated with you, gotten so inside your head, that you had to talk to someone?

That experience may not seem a remarkable one to many adults. But when that engagement with a story occurs with youth, it is something.

Kids make such striking connections, notably after reading “intense and disturbing” books, finds recent research by Gay Ivey and Peter Johnston.

With implications for teachers, school districts, and libraries, the study is worth unpacking for any caring adult who wishes to enable young people to have the personal transformation made possible by books.

Ivey, the William E. Moran Distinguished Professor in Literacy at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and Johnston, professor emeritus of literacy teaching and learning at the University at Albany, have written extensively on youth literacy. Their 2023 book, Teens Choosing to Read: Fostering Social, Emotional, and Intellectual Growth Through Books (Teachers College Pr.), derives from a four-year study documenting the evolution of adolescents from reluctant to enthusiastic readers.

Two tenets of the book—the value of student choice in book selection and the benefits of reading toward personal development—may be preaching to the choir of SLJ readers.

But such ideas bear revisiting when assessment and proscribed curricula dominate classrooms in a focused drive to reverse a post-pandemic downturn in reading scores. And the continuing onslaught of book challenges further curbs student access.

It’s an opportunity, too, at least in this space, to advocate for the agency of young readers to engage books of their choosing, and time to read, understood for the value that it brings and accommodated for both in and out of school.

In Ivey and Johnston’s research published this year, young readers not only gravitated toward “disturbing” books, they leaned into moral and cultural complexities of the narrative and emerged transformed, according to the kids themselves, by their reading experience.

Gay Ivey will join us at the 2024 SLJ Summit to lead a roundtable discussion of "edgy" books

In addition, the eighth graders in the study felt compelled to discuss the book, its characters, complicated scenarios, and moral dilemmas with their peers. “Teachers invited it,” as the report states, “and the disturbingness of the books demanded it.”

Conversations about books occurred spontaneously, as the students engaged friends, teachers, and family to talk about what they read, both in and outside of school.

“We have been struck by how the most meaningful markers for students seem to be places of discomfort, surprise, and disturbance—moments of incomprehension rather than moments of comprehension,” reads the report.

If students embrace difficult books, narratives that enhance their understanding of the world and themselves, much less advance their capacity as readers, why can’t we simply let them?

“We’re not teaching in an environment right now that values that,” says Steven L. Layne, professor of education at Wheaton College. “We need to give [students] access to books, time to read, and create a kind of environment that helps kids want to read. That’s not the conversation that people want to have right now. It’s what can we buy,” says Layne, author of In Defense of Read-Aloud (Routledge, 2015), referring to packaged curricula.

This is where librarians come in. Layne says, “They’re critical in the schools.” In seminars, he tells classroom teachers: “This is like the best partner in your life, this librarian.”