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Abstract
Abbruscato then returns with a chapter on Gaiman's woefully underpraised Graveyard Book, observing the gradual construction of identity through compounding trial and adversity, and Sarah R. Wakefield offers a chapter treating incest in McKinley's Deerskin in relation to real-world survivors, sexual trauma scholarship, and incest as a fairy tale theme. In other words, YA conventions-and thus the YA genre-are shaped by the presumed demands of an assumed readership, while the fairy tale and the Gothic that otherwise predominate this collection are identified by proximity, however imperfect, to genre conventions (8-9). [...]YA literature can be marked or prefaced (fantasy YA, sci-fi YA, LGBT YA, realistic YA) in ways unavailable to most genres, which were already delineated along those lines in the first place. Despite their range of subject texts, these essays do offer a fairly comprehensive and unified picture of ideas and concerns that often characterize the Gothic fairy tale: readers see self-identification, storytelling, fallibility, and awakening understandings of the world play out across multiple authors, texts, and secondary genres (fantasy and science fiction). [...]its various authors seem to be working from different ideas of audience: