Why All This Hate?

I wrote my final paper of the semester on Minus Me and Boy on the Edge, and revisiting Minus Me made me realize that it perhaps wasn’t that deserving of the criticism we gave it in class. Although the final twist ending was frustrating, writing about the novel showed me the many hints towards this ending that I suspect may just be a feature of Scandinavian YA Lit. Zak also played a much more important role in this novel as a “special sibling” than what we have seen in American YA Lit. Zak’s character was very central to the plot of the novel and he was not merely a contextual character. He played an important role in Linda’s character development, and I think that the general characterization in this novel and in the other Scandinavian literature we read was very different from American YA lit. Comparing this specifically to Phoebe from Catcher in the Rye shows that the “special sibling” in Scandinavian Lit is a lot more “human,” whereas someone like Phoebe appeared to be relatively flawless and superficial. We saw this also in the characterization of parents and families in Scandinavian literature, where the parents are portrayed as wholesome characters and not just contextual background characters that serve to highlight the teenage troubles of the protagonist. This was evident in Minus Me, Me on the Floor Bleeding, as well as Boy on the Edge to some extent. Is it possible that this different tradition of characterization in Scandinavian literature and an inclination to use different plot devices made us miss the hints that would have let us guess the twist ending in Minus Me? Can we chalk that up to cultural differences?