Abstract
In Karen McManus’s first three young adult novels—One of Us is Lying (2017), One of Us is Next (2020), and Two Can Keep a Secret (2019)—dead teen bodies are literary cyphers around which adolescent characters learn to navigate intersectional injustices. McManus fulfills John Charles belief that all genres, including mystery-crime, are dynamic and iterative, doing so by recalibrating her novels as across-genre intersections: mystery-crime and multimedia literacies (e.g., social media, texting, graffiti). In the hands of adolescent readers, young adult literature like McManus’s become agents for discovery: whodunnit and who am I as I emerge into adulthood? One of Us is Lying, One of Us is Next, and Two Can Keep a Secret invite emergent adults into joint attention with fictional characters, through first-person narrations, to learn about and discover strategies for negotiating young adult entanglements with ideological and material injustices.
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Danette DiMarco (PhD) is Professor of English at Slippery Rock University. She has been published in journals like Mosaic, Papers on Language and Literature, College Literature, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and in the edited collections The Sea and the Literary Imagination, Misfit Children, and Teaching Multiethnic American Literatures. She and Dr. Nancy A. Barta-Smith collaborated to edit Inhabited by Stories: Critical Essays on Tales Retold (Cambridge Scholars), and she and Dr. Timothy Ruppert are currently under contract with Rowman and Littlefield’s imprint Lexington to produce the edited collection Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in Popular Imagination (Spring 2022). She teaches across levels, has a wealth of instructional experience in British, World, and Environmental literatures as well as composition, and serves as chairperson of the English Department. A past recipient of her university’s President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and President’s Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievement, she has also held the position of faculty coordinator for the Center for Teaching and Learning.
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DiMarco, D. Navigating the Mysteries of Intersectional Injustices in Karen McManus’s Teen-Crime Novels. Child Lit Educ 54, 223–235 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-021-09470-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-021-09470-9