Reconsidering YA Lit
Randy Boyagoda
Tradewind Books, 2025; 256 pp., $12.95 (paperback)
Review of Little Sanctuary
A librarian-produced infographic at School Library Journal marks stages in the sixty or so years young adult literature has existed as a distinct subfield of literature, the most recent of which unsurprisingly emphasizes the broadening of diversity and inclusion. The researcher optimistically predicts a continued emphasis on representation as well as an increase in books written by authors who share identity and experiences with their characters. An emphasis on characters’ identity has made way for a more concentrated expression of the author’s identity; it follows that we are meant to take this as progress.
Write what you know, sure. But this approach begs the question of what literature is for children—even older children—at its best. Is it in service of the author? Or is it for the reader?
The characters in Randy Boyagoda’s debut young adult novel Little Sanctuary are black and brown, as Boyagoda is, being of Sri Lankan descent. But the book is decidedly not about him. With this novel, Boyagoda reestablishes a course for a proper means of conceiving young adult literature: as well-crafted art aimed at calling the developing reader to something greater than himself.
Jacques Maritain understood art to be “a fundamental necessity in the human state,” which “teaches men the pleasures of the spirit, and because it is sensitive and adapted to their nature, it is better able to lead them to what is nobler than itself.” Contemporary young adult literature is sensitive—sometimes to a fault—and has adapted to the emotive nature of young people in their formative years. What it too often lacks is the sincere interest in leading them to what is decent and worthy.
Generally speaking, our culture asks little more of our children than to make the most of themselves for the sake of a comfortable adulthood. The dual expectations that children have phones with Internet access (and engage with the algorithms that come along with them) and that they busy themselves with myriad athletic, academic, and theatrical endeavors (available to some, but certainly not all) tend to put the child front and center—and not in a good way. I don’t mean to suggest the Internet is intrinsically evil, nor do I contest that extracurricular activities can foster good work ethic, resilience, and teamwork. My children are involved in their share.
My concern is rather that such a narrow and short-sighted scope of priorities is to the detriment of our children developing a sense of where they exist in time and place. When everything in their world is about them and what feels important to them, little time and space is left for who and what came before them. Without an appreciation for what exists outside of those bounds and what there is to strive for, their generation will struggle to participate in future communities small and large, from their homes and families to their countries.
“How do you find sweet syrup at the end of the world?” So begins the opening chapter of Boyagoda’s dystopia, first published as a standalone short story in The Walrus. For the family joining hands around the table, “the end of the world” is not an idiom but a very real possibility. Outside, the world is in shambles. The president of this never-named nation has been killed. A bomb has recently been dropped near the family’s home. The family is preparing to flee in separate directions. There are soldiers. There are questions. There are no answers. As the chaos reaches into their home, it is impossible to say if or when such a meal will happen again.
The father, known as Appa, has somehow obtained a small portion of a particular food for each of his five children: the eldest, his sixteen-year-old daughter Sabel; the youngest, eight-year-old S’Jin, his only son. For his wife, Amma, he has procured two things: a bowl of sour yogurt and a thimble of sweet syrup.
Sour and sweet, indeed. Glad as the family is to be together, they are reluctant to start the meal. The sooner it begins, the sooner it finishes, and the sooner this unit will be shattered—the children sent away from their parents and the sanctuary of their home.
That intensity does not flag, though it shifts as the children find themselves on a bus, a boat, another bus, and then in a compound where they are told their parents have sent them to stay for ten days for their safety. The reader stays close to Sabel as she learns that two dozen other children, most also from wealthy families, have spent the day in a similar way.
The children are right to question the validity of Chynoweth and Gyre, the young adults in charge. The pair claims to be siblings, but the children can see through their lie, even if they can’t yet see that these two are also being duped and conned. They shuffle the children to meals, classes, and bedtimes, feigning a sense of order. Perspective shifts to Chynoweth to reveal how much of the compound’s apparent layers of security are being stripped away. She and Gyre are to keep the children safe until one—which one, they don’t know—is taken. Their orders have been handed down from a suspicious crew, and yet in one regard, their task is similar to that of Sabel, who is meant to watch out for her siblings, to help them understand something she doesn’t understand herself.
Even as the children in the compound form cautious alliances, they remember their parents’ insistence on protecting personal information. (They had also practiced playing dead at home, should a situation in which this was warranted present itself.) Siblings warn each other to keep silent on topics that are “family talking.” Every hour is a question of what is real and what they can hold on to. An escape from the grounds is plotted and carried out, only for the children to find themselves bound anew by systems beyond their ken. The unspoken question, surfacing over and over, is whether there is anywhere that is safe anymore. It seems the only sanctuary the children have is in relationship with each other. When Sabel and her siblings finally come back home, the place is not what they knew it to be; never will it be the same again.
Make no mistake: this is not your typical teen-driven dystopia. I have read many that are likewise violent and ugly and, when read well, thought-provoking. But I finished this book and was stunned. For weeks I didn’t know what to think of it. I’d anticipated sharing the work of an author I respect with my older sons. The intensity of a malicious and unknowable governing force disrupting the home probed more deeply than I’d expected. The resolution left me unsettled and unnerved. Could I give them this book?
With further consideration, yes, and I will. This experience of being caught between what is revealed and what is held secret, which questions can be answered and which maybe never will be is what it is to be a teenager, to grapple with the self, the world, and one’s place in it. Sabel’s coming of age is, on one level, anyone’s coming of age. Certainly, in the novel this uncertainty has been grafted onto a larger scale, where the stakes are higher. I pray my suburban-dwelling children never have the experience of being shipped away from their home in the name of safety and then coming home to find all is not as it was.
Still, Boyagoda’s narrative powerfully taps into the real fears adolescents experience: what is this world I’m in? Where are the dangers? What is to come of me, my friends, my family? Who am I when everything around me changes? Like it or not, the reader is forced to ask himself what kind of sacrifices he would be willing to make if he was in these positions. There is immediacy to Sabel determining what family means to her and to what, to whom she is responsible.
The novel ends where it began, at another family meal, though there is no sweet syrup, only sour yogurt. Still the family joins hands, still they pray. The last line—“The children let go of each other and stared at their hands”—indicates that though the children are home now, they cannot stay here, not forever. Their relationships are stronger now, but the children are meant to grow up, to “let go of each other” and navigate their own courses, probably sooner than they’d thought. These hands they look at might do any number of things: grasp greedily for their own good, cradle a child of their own, or do things the children never thought themselves capable of in the name of bringing back the ones they love. In this image is a proclamation that children are not a generalized group, but a host of diverse and irreplaceable individuals, each capable of contributing to something beyond the realm of this dining room table.
If young adult literature is meant to glorify the author by affirming his experiences, it would seem Boyagoda didn’t get the brief. If it’s meant to encourage young readers to think beyond themselves and their spheres, to reflect on where they are situated now and where they want to end up, and if it can present hope and trust to our young people that they can meaningfully engage with tough decisions and choose well, then we can look forward to wherever Boyagoda chooses to take them next.