"Der det er bilder så kan man slappe litt av"

Ungdommers vurderinger av lettlest skjønnlitteratur

Abstract

^{Theme: Children's Literature Reviews - How, Where and Who? Ill. Jenny Nyström from Barnkammarens bok, 1882.}

"Where there are pictures, you can relax a bit": Young People’s Assessments of Easy-to-read Fiction

This article examines young people’s reviews of a selection of Norwegian easy-to-read YA fiction books. The purpose of the study is to gain more knowledge about young people as actual readers and critics of easy-to-read literature, but also to gain insight into what makes a literary text easier to read. Our empirical material consists of 129 reviews from the digital archive of Uprisen, a literature prize awarded to the best Norwegian YA novel of the year. We have analysed the reception of three easy-to-read YA novels across different genres. The analysis is grounded in theories of reading processes and multimodality, as well as the field’s own definitions of easy-to-read literature. Our findings show that young readers primarily associate readability with linguistic simplicity and brevity. At the same time, they point to connections between readability and aspects such as content, theme, composition, credibility, and originality, as well as opportunities for immersion and identification. However, there are also statements that reveal a tension between easy-to-read language and more complex themes, content, narrative structures or forms of presentation. Although all three books fall under the category of easy-to-read, they are not unequivocally perceived as such by all reviewers. Both compressed text and multimodal formats appear challenging. The analysis shows that young critics do not share a uniform understanding of what is easy or difficult to read, which underlines that the categorization of readability cannot be regarded as a straightforward or objective category.