When I was a pre-teen, I loved it. Beyond any other book I read, and I read a lot, I loved Little Women. And loved it more every one of the hundred or more times I read it. So I thought a young person very dear to me would love it too. Still, I held off patiently (“No, 8 is too young;” “She’s only 10; “Soon she’ll be 12”) until she was old enough to appreciate it.

Finally I took the plunge. Highly recommended Little Women. Raved over Little Women. Told her how much it meant to me as I read and reread it, growing up. She looked at me with as much scorn as would be compatible with the love and respect she has for me. “I never read anything anyone recommends to me,” she said loftily. Four years later I am still waiting.

From the start I should have known better. She reads constantly (good!) but only science fiction (!). Like so many other kids these days she reads almost nothing about real life. Only about “monsters.”

At this point, I’m going to ask you not to interrupt me with the facts. Yes, it’s true that there are a few writers for young folks (Judy Blume-type authors) who persist in writing about ordinary young people living fairly ordinary 21st century lives. I’m just not talking about them now.

And don’t misunderstand me about “monsters,” either. I’m not necessarily referring here to ugly or evil creatures, but to fabulously unreal beings, the kind you see around you all the time (kidding), capable of overcoming their human circumstances with extraordinary powers.

Hardly any of the characters in best-selling youth literature these days are ordinary people. People, I mean, like you and me. Those “little women,” Ann of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Bobbsey Twins and Huckleberry Finn were like the people of their time. Even Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys got a lot done using slightly idealized human skills in pretty everyday situations.

Nowadays, though, from kindergarten on, whether it’s Pokeymon or Captain Underpants or Power Rangers, or Dora the Explorer and Diego with their backpacks, they all seem to possess either magical tools of various kinds, or unhuman skill sets. (As they say these days. Whatever happened to just plain old “skills”?)

It’s all “monsters,” all the time!

Lots of these “monsters” are very appealing. You could hardly say that Harry Potter and friends are real people — indeed “muggles” sometimes get pretty bad ratings in this series — but they’re delightful all the same. So are the Narnia children. And, yes, as you point out (I hear you, I hear you!) they cast a great deal of light on the, well, nuances and contradictions that indeed distinguish human life. (You did say that, didn’t you?)

Well, hooray for nuances and contradictions.

But my point here is this: These are not your average human beings.

Not that there’s anything wrong with fantasy. I spent the first three or four years of my reading life exclusively in the fairy-tale section of Wheeling Library. But, as I remember, the transition from Cinderella to Heidi was pretty seamless, and after that the whole real world opened up to me — or at least the real world as it existed then. After that, the only “monsters” I cared to know personally were Santa Claus and the Easter bunny.

Nowadays, you don’t have to come down to earth at any time in your adolescence, or even your adulthood, if you don’t want to. And many don’t. There’s always another bookful of sort-of-humans to read about, or, for that matter, another movie to see, with characters ranging from monsters of violence to Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman and the Joker to the Lemony Snickett cast of characters. And the Godfather folks, Bonnie and Clyde types, and the Sopranos certainly tilt the popular culture toward monsters, monsters, monsters!

Even comedies, which used to feature ordinary heroes and heroines, played by such as Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart, now feature actors playing criminals and stoners, and that’s not counting the werewolves, mummies, vampires for all ages (even vegan ones!), zombies, and serial killers, that show up on any given day in books, including children’s books, and your local movie theater.

As for television, I suppose you could say shows like Ugly Betty include ordinary people, but the fact is that viewers are much more interested in the “monsters” who surround them. And you could call the rock-and-rap characters who have taken over so much of our public imagination many things, including colorful and maybe in some cases, likable, but they are surely not any part of an earnest world of down-to-earth real people.

No doubt, you will argue that many of the sitcoms of our time feature way-ordinary people like Chris, whom nobody likes, or Raymond, whom everybody loves. Sorry, these folks, unlike the Dick Van Dyck, Mary Tyler Moore, even Green Acres, types of the past, are just another version of “monsters.” They are unconnected to real life, except maybe the meaner sides of it, the part where you make fun of everybody and see who can be nastier or dumber. (I saw a clip yesterday of a routine between the actor Jack Webb and Johnny Carson in which the entire joke was alliteration. Everything they talked about began with “c.” It was, and still is, hilarious. It could never make it today.)

Meanwhile, you could say that the real world is becoming more and more like its monstrous versions in the modern culture. Certainly, you seem to hear a lot more in the news about real-life monsters. So complaints like mine lose their bite as the worlds come closer together. Pretty soon, no doubt, the monster-next-door will become every-day reality.

Perhaps that will be the day when my teenager, as a grown woman, might pick up Little Women after all. Because, in the world she’s living in then, “real people” as we know them, will be so science fiction!

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer whose column appears in the Times-News on alternate Sundays.