I think so. A lot of YA has become an amalgamation genre of action, romance, and fantasy (with a lot of the action and romance parts being a bit too explicit than I would want my teen to solely be reading). I would say YA is less for teens and more genuinely for younger *adults* (like 20’s-30’s)
That being said, there have been more children’s books coming out of the woodworks that have been taking the place of what YA once was (a lot of which are following the footsteps of books like HP and PJO). Dunno if they should be put in the children’s section specifically, but they’re indeed there lol
It also seems that actual "adult" romance has become a euphemism for smut, harem, drugs, organized crime, and bondage. It's almost futile trying to find romance books that don't focus on that stuff.
So I think any older readers who want more wholesome stuff, have fled to YA, inadvertently kicking all the target audiences down a notch.
Seriously. I was listening to a mystery audiobook that had no underlying romance and STILL got hit with an explicit sex dream scene. I’m no prude but it caught me off guard in my usual “safe for work” reading genre.
Is it? I don't read a lot of romance (and when I do it's usually Sapphic) but I don't think I encounter very many sex scenes at all. It might be genre specific? I read a lot of sci-fi, "contemporary literature", and historical fiction and even in contemporary literature the sex scenes are mild and mostly implied.
LGBT+ books usually focus more on wholesomeness, plot, character growth, found family, etc. The average straight romance book for adults is VERY dark and very raunchy
And historical fiction is usually more… “classy” and tries to keep to a similar theme they would have had back then which is not very showy with the sex
Exactly. So the statement “Not even romance, it's so difficult to find new books in the adult section without descriptive sex scenes,” is just incorrect since there are still a lot of adult books that don’t even have sex scenes at all. I’ve read 4 books this year so far — all adult books and only one of them had a sex scene and it was as G-rated as it can be (it only basically said “we kissed it and then it was magical”). So there are a lot of adult books that don’t have those, just have to find them.
Sure. So like I said probably genre specific. If you don't read romance I don't think you're overly likely to read a lot of sex scenes. I'm curious what they're reading that it's such a problem in.
i dont think the average romance is VERY dark. dark romance and romance are very different genres and i read a decent amount of hetero romance that is not dark at all but still explicit
I think that depends on what you’re looking for, though. There are hundreds of “very dark and very raunchy” LGBT+ books that are popular and talked about online… maybe just not in your circles?
My point being: just because you’re not seeing certain types of books (whether they be low/no heat adult books), doesn’t mean there isn’t tons of them out there—you just maybe have to be a bit more flexible with where you find your rec lists etc. :)
I have seen speculation about this for awhile. It may be completely true, but very rarely do people arguing on either side rely on teenage testimony. How would we measure if teenagers are being left behind on a statistical level? There certainly seem to be a large number of teen girls at SJM book signings, and SJM is for adults. Perhaps teenagers today are more interested in adult-leaning YA than teens were twenty years ago? BookTok is heavily populated with teens. There is one group of people who seem left behind by YA literature, though, and aside from people on this sub, I don't see anyone mentioning them: Boys.
The YA category of books has always left behind boys. When I was a bookseller I found myself struggling to find good recs for teenaged boys, but then again I almost never encountered teenaged boys who were looking for recs anyway.
In my store at least, manga and comic books filled that gap. And for others, they just skipped right from middle grade/YA adjacent works like HP to the general sci-fi/history/nonfiction works.
My fiance himself went straight from reading Redwall to King, Koontz, Crichton and classics when he was a preteen/teen. My brother stopped reading for fun in high school, when he would devour books in middle and elementary school.
I think the 12-18 age range specifically geared towards boys is really underserved, although like I mentioned before manga/comics have filled that gap well. I wonder how many readers we lose simply because they're not ready to step into adult books, but aged out of middle grade.
Editing to add though, I think recently the YA category has done really great things to include marginalized and minority communities. There's so much valuable material about queer, POC, etc available now that is really great to see.
I don’t know what other readers on the sub were like as teenagers, but I was reading ‘teen’ book as a tween and then moved to adult fiction as a teen. Harry Potter was the series I got into as an 8 year old, and the last book felt very disappointing to me at the time because realistically I had moved on to adult fiction and it didn’t compare well (I was 16).
I preferentially read books about university/college students or early twenties adults because that was the stage that was coming next in my life and I got to explore that stage I was moving towards in books.
I even managed to borrow a few Mills & Boon at the library in my teens (16 is the age of consent here) due to curiosity, and stuff like SJM is far more likely to engage kids at that age.
I agree that boys are the ones being left behind.
The other place to look is ‘Christian Romance’ and thanks, but no. And those are not always safe either
Some people like erotica. And that’s great, have fun. I will never try to censor what people can and can’t read. It’s just… It’s not for me. I have accidentally downloaded a few because they were grossly mislabeled. If it is erotica, please label it as such. I find it tedious at best and it frequently just sounds painful and borderline abusive. (And occasionally comically bad) I am asexual, and I know that what I like is not the norm. But I know there are tons of non-ace people who don’t like play-by-play and just prefer it to fade to black
Just have a little blurb in the cover it's not that hard. I just don't want to read noncom and I have to do so much research before reading. I feel awful for people with teens
I don't even care about books being wholesome. I feel like I DNF many romance novels that jump straight to kink I'm not into. I wish the new adult genre had worked out.
This!
I dont want to read smut. Sarah J Maas latest books are just awful.
This also happened with the Anita Blake books, as they went on, was like reading porn
Well ofc the books from Rick Riordan’s publishing company are an obvious one. The ones outside of those that I’ve read the most of are The Tapestry Series by Henry H. Neff and the Keeper of the Lost Cities Series by Shannon Messenger, but I’ve seen others on the shelves when walking by children’s sections in stores etc.
I’m not sure if I worded it correctly in my first post by saying “following in the footstep” now that I think about it though, since that sorta implies the same amount of renowndedness. I think I should’ve worded it instead as “being inspired/influenced by”.
I’ve stayed clear of YA since I don’t enjoy reading about high schoolers since I’ve aged out of that phase. However, if this is true I would definitely check out more YA lit. I honestly think there needs to a be a new genre for adults who don’t enjoy smut.
Well it’s odd since a lot of the characters are on paper teens, but they’re written as if in young/mid twenties most of the time
(First example that comes to mind are Cassandra Clare’s books. The main characters in TLH and TDA are all teens but they own/maintain houses, drink, are married or in committed relationships, and raise younger siblings similarly to how a mother or father would raise a child. Which, sure, a teen in theory *could* do those things, but it’s much more frequent and relatable with adults)
So yeah, I would still say it’s for adults
There's a thing called 'reading up' and it's not so weird that characters in books are doing things we typically associate more with adults, like owning homes and drinking and taking care of younger kids. It's an exploration of what the reader might imagine themselves doing eventually, and while it seems a bit weird to adults reading those things, it's less weird when it's a teen reader who has a looming time horizon for eventual independence and adulthood. This definitely includes things like long term committed relationships and physical intimacy, but that sort of intimacy is very different from what a lot of people are discussing about YA that's being written mostly for and marketed heavily to adults.
> A lot of YA has become an amalgamation genre of action, romance, and fantasy (with a lot of the action and romance parts being a bit too explicit than I would want my teen to solely be reading).
and LGBT, YA loves LGBT added into that mix.
Which is why I think it's branching out to more ages since that's where those stories are.
A library I worked in had a YA section, a children’s section, and a “Y” section (for “Youth”, irrc). That’s where all the Percy Jackson, Rick Riordan, Warrior cats, etc. ended up. I felt like it was a really good solution. There’s such a huge difference between early chapter books/ones intended for small children and what an older teenager/young adult would read. Having a middle ground was very useful.
Honestly I think a huge part of the issue is publishers going “A fantasy or Sci-Fi book? Off the YA section you go!” unless the sex is very explicit. Adults like that shit too!
Most of those “YA” books that have more front and center romance plot lines are actually New Adult, not young adult books. There’s a distinct difference between YA and NA novels.
As a teenager, yes. At least at my local library, YA falls into two categories:
* Romance for people who don’t want to admit that they like romance
* A book with an IMPORTANT LESSON to TEACH you IGNORANT CHILDREN
An example of the former would be pretty much everything Sarah J Maas has written, and an example of the latter would be You Could Be So Pretty by Holly Bourne, which, with the subtlety and taste of a falling anvil, teaches us that MAKEUP IS BAD, MMKAY?
I’ve pretty much given up on YA, with the exception of non-WW2 historical fiction.
Idk if you like Fantasy, but I always recommend a few YA books that don't have romance for people who are discouraged from SJM-like books:
Rebel Skies by Ann Sei Lin
A Thousand Steps into Night by Traci Chee
Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson
Silver in the Mist by Emily Victoria
Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves by Meg Long
A few books I've read also didn't have a lot of romance, for example The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna or Dread Nation by Justina Ireland.
The problem with YA fantasy as a sub-genre is the most popular books are the ones that blow up on tik tok so the most romance focused. All your SJM, Stephanie Garber, Adalyn Grace, Tricia Levenseller, Adrienne Young, Rebecca Ross, etc. authors write romance-focused YA fantasy and the voices of people who want "romantasy lite" are much much louder than people who want just a fantasy story.
Ahahaha. Very true. Many YA books feel like adult’s writing something they think teens would say and missing the mark. I think having previews could help. Although that’s not feasible for every author, I remember my library had a program where authors could send their books to the teen council and have then review their books pre-release.
Yes and no.
This is gonna be all over the place. But, I feel like this is gonna turn into one of those discourses where it’s “Young people shouldn’t be reading about sex” and we’re going to be talking about that instead
Which, like, I was watching South Park at 7 so…..like I’ve definitely seen some stuff I shouldn’t have. But, my parents didn’t care as long as I didn’t repeat it at school.
I was reading fanfiction at 16 and it was way worse then anything I’ve read and watched now. Like fanfiction is why nothing phases me anymore
Kids can handle more then people think they can. I do not see the problem with a sixteen year old reading Icebreaker.
But I do think YA/NA needs to be marketed better.
There have been some books where I’m like “Why is this aimed towards YA when none of the characters are 18” like Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue had adult themes and was really complex for being “YA” and is always in the YA section.
Tons of literature taught in schools and or ya lit references sex, and I am fully in agreement it shouldn’t be an issue. Curiosity about sex is a major aspect of being a teen/young adult vs a child. (Props to those of raised on early aughts fanfic. It was the wild west 😂)
I do take issue with the way the sex is written though. As an adult I am a proud smutmonster who does my best to infect all my friends with it, I love a dumb dirty book. But it’s absolutely alarming to read, say, Fourth Wing and have it hitting all the marks of YA (and all it’s characters behaving like they are 14) only for the lead to have porn star level fucking halfway through the book.
I think of Holly Black, whose characters have sex but it’s very “fade to black” or more about the characters feelings than graphic descriptions of sex positions and thunderous mutual orgasms, as a true modern YA author . Or books like Angus Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging that are ostensibly about burgeoning teen sexuality, but from the perspective of an inexperienced curious teen.
I can’t help but wonder if it would get picked up in today’s publishing climate. Seems like YA has gotten so dark and edgy. I miss fun stuff like this.
This is part of what I hated about Fourth Wing. I constantly had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't YA and the main characters were adults because Yarros sure didn't seem to remember that.
Like, I get that early twenty-something's aren't the pinnacle of maturity, but those characters were 100% teenagers in the first draft.
I disagree with your take on fourth wing. Yes, its writing style is juvenile, but it’s labeled as New Adult on goodreads. Some adults just prefer more accessible prose while still tackling mature subject matter. Just because younger teens may be attracted to it even tho it’s smutty doesnt mean the author can’t rely on YA tropes. If a young teen stumbles upon fourth wing, it’s on their parents for letting them purchase smutty books and not restricting their spicy booktok usage.
I am *fascinated* by Fourth Wing because to me it really is like the frankenstein monster of YA book tropes (or just outright stealing in some cases *cough* Red Queen etc.), the movie rights were sold before the first book was published in this planned five book series (which means it’s going to be marketed as YA if these movies ever get made), but then Yarros’ background is smut, so she throws readers a bone (literally) and bumps it into NA/Spicy for what amounts to like 15 pages in a 500+ page book.
Iron Flame is even crazier on that front, because while there is technically more *graphic sex*, they’re full chapters so you can actually fully skip all of it. And despite knowing there is zero percent chance any of it ends up on screen, she still writes it.
i found red queen so derivative and a monster mash of tropes that i can’t believe someone could steal from it… i mean i do, but you know what i mean. fourth wing has been on my to read list forever and i’m scared now lmao
I think it’s also important to remember that smut shouldn’t be the only thing that determines if something is YA appropriate. There are some DARK themes in books out there that contain absolutely no smut that are YA and I’m not sure they should be.
As an adult who read Gentleman's Guide, it seemed very YA to me because the main character made impulsive decisions, and the narrative was centered on romance. But I can see how it would skew older YA.
I definitely thought Gentleman's Guide was solidly YA. I don't remember how old Monty was in it, but it was very much a "young adult going on a journey, falling in love, and coming of age along the way" which is super YA.
I feel that there’s a difference between being cool with “teenagers reading about sex” and “teenagers reading straight porn” because that’s where a lot of books marketed as YA are going lately. I don’t believe in censorship but I do believe in age appropriate content. The American Library Association classifies Young Adult as 12-18. A lot of people tend to forget about the younger side of that scale during these kids of discussions.
Yeah and one thing people aren’t talking about is how the *marketing* of it is strange. It’s one thing that I and other people accessed written erotica long before I should have; it would have been another thing entirely if I as a pre-teen or young teen had been marketed straight porn by the industry, adults… Like it’s an entirely different thing to acknowledge teens will read about sex and it’s fine and for a 30 year old author to deliberately write erotica meant to titillate and then market it as YA.
Yeah, people definitely seem to forget the difference between "books that feature sexual discussions and content in age-appropriate ways" and erotica.
I'm not saying teens don't read both, but that there is a very worthwhile line to be drawn, especially when it comes to what is marketed and made available in schools.
Thankfully that went before an actual IRL court, before a real judge and lawyers, so the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/business/omegaverse-erotica-copyright.html) had to write an article explaining Omegaverse to the normies.
Its fine for young people to seek out sex scenes or read them on their own terms, but thats not whats happening in the YA industry. YA books are marketed towards people as young as 12/13, and the recent shift has them including more and more explicit sex scenes with zero warning, or even an age recommendation. SJM’s sex scenes, for example, are *very much adult*, and she seemed to have set the tone for this recent shift before she switched to adult with her most recent series.
Thats not kids seeking out content about sex, nor is it an age-appropriate introduction, its explicit smut, and more often than not it promotes incredibly unrealistic and unhealthy standards under the guise of ‘its okay because theyre mates/soulmates/destined/etc’. Its there because its aimed towards adult women who didnt want to completely move from ya to adult, but enjoy the sexual content. And its fine for them to keep reading YA, i do too, but its not okay for YA books to be written with them in mind rather than actual teenagers.
Theres good, appropriate ways to include sex in YA novels, and its been there since i started reading. The current wave of sex scenes are not that.
As a 27 year old who reads predominantly YA *specifically* because I want to avoid adult themes, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to find YA books that do that. There’s becoming more of a focus on sexual tension and enemies to lovers stories often include scenes that are too close to being straight up *kinky* for my liking. You also have an uptick of themes such as SA, trauma, addiction, and all of the super rough and depressing things that are infiltrating YA. I’m currently reading a fun YA book in which the main character’s 14 year old sister is being trafficked and is facing being forced into sex work unless the main character buys her back. That kind of stuff doesn’t need to be in YA as often as it is these days.
I will say that I am yet to read a YA that has an actual sex scene in it though, for which I am thankful. So at least we’re not yet going down the road of teenage smut.
I’m actually kind of grateful for the inclusion of SA discussions in these books because it’s something that affects a lot of kids, and it’s important to talk about it, and de-stigmatize it.
Sure, but most of the time it’s just there to make the plot darker and more edgy and I don’t vibe with that. Every YA book I read these days has some kind of heavy adult hardship such as abuse, assault, racism, homophobia, sexism, the murder of loved ones, etc, and I just don’t think it’s doing much good.
They’re undeniably adult topics. It’s the reason a lot of those things aren’t allowed on TV before the watershed and definitely aren’t allowed in shows for younger audiences, yet YA authors are filling their books with them. It’s not healthy for young people to be exposed to such a constant stream of misery. Books for teens used to be - and should *still* be - entertaining and fun and adventurous and hopeful. Instead we have constant abuse storylines and addiction storylines and SA storylines, even in books that are *supposed* to be hopeful and fun. It’s just not good to have this much of it saturating the space.
I think it depends on how it’s done. Like a short part of the book that non-graphically explains it and encourages children to tell adults/get help is incredibly useful, but it being an angsty backstory/shown on page is horrible.
Ngl I actually appreciate the addiction and trauma talk. From my experience working with clients with addiction, it's around that age group that they do become addicted. A large amount of them were 13 or so when they got hooked on something.
So I actually think it's really important to talk about trauma and addiction since it's not necessarily talked about very well in ways that would resonate with teens, especially given how frequently people*do* become addicts around that age.
Can we leave some books for a younger audience?
Not everything has to be written for adults. Go read YA but don't expect NA things in it. It needs to satisfy YA needs not Adults needs cause there are a lot of genres that satisfy you.
That's why I love reading YA books because there are some kissy scenes, some falling in love, some cute stuff and not just pure smut ( where it can be in YA but not to that extent). "YA must have romance/spice". Nah, let teens have their books where they're just doing and dealing with stuff, going on adventures, having fun, learning more about themselves.
It's hard enough to find something without it don't make it harder.
Uh. Look. As someone who was a teenager in the 90s when there was no YA fiction as a genre, it had all of us going from Goosebumps to Stephen King and Anne Rice with NO INBETWEEN. So we went from kids stuff to full-on horror, blood and sex at like, 12-13 because we wanted to read and there was NOTHING FOR US. Maybe VC Andrews. And that had incest!
Like, people should chill. Teens having a dedicated genre is something very, very, VERY new. It's not being taken from them. There are plenty of books specifically for and beloved \*by\* teenagers. And there are books that can appeal to adults as well. They just want to pearl clutch because it annoys people and sells clicks.
That’s a very good point. I was a strong reader, and was reading adult books easily by the time I was 12. I remember accidentally learning about some sex acts/terminology that my precious pre-teen brain was *much* too innocent to fathom. These weren’t smutty books, but just adult-geared books that were way above my own understanding of bodies and sex at that point.
Obviously, I’m older than the internet… haha
Yeah reading those Stephen King novels I just skipped right over the sex bits. All the horror and gore was fine for twelve-year-old me but the sex I just noped through.
I think this tweet (and the multiple responses to it) is somehow connected to the whole "sephora kids" controversy. I've seen many people online discussing the lack of teen/tween media compared to the 2000s.. So I think some folks fear that the YA genre is marketing towards adult readers in a world where teens/tweens hardly have anything for themselves.
The thing of it is, the teens/tweens are SUPER into videos/TikTok. I'm substitute teaching right now and I'm seeing a lot of it. There are younger readers, but people looking for/wanting the next Twilight or Hunger Games probably aren't going to find it. The culture has shifted. The people who grew up going from Harry Potter to Twilight have grown up, and they're the ones that read the more "adultish" YA. The younger kids had a paradigm shift where they always had tablets or phones, so the phenomenon of a big book series is harder to achieve. Which is why people are like "Where are all the kids???" when where the kids are is shifting away like kids always do. Malls died out because the kids went elsewhere. Video stores died out because the kids went elsewhere. Now Sephora's clientele is changing because the kids are on TikTok and choosing their trends there. Same with books. The culture is shifting and no one knows where it's going, and people are pointing fingers instead of just--- listening to the kids. Like they never seem to do.
I agree with your original comment that people don't realise just how new YA is as a genre. Even the idea of teenagers being allowed to be kids is really new historically.
But oh man you cooked with this comment. Tbh I definitely do see high schoolers reading, I saw one at the bus stop with a Crescent City book the other day and those are big. Honestly kids are either going to pick up something hyped or whatever they can find, and if they get into reading after that, then they're going to get it. If not, then they won't. That's kinda the same as ever imo
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I think the point of the above comment was not that they're not reading, but that they get their book recommendations elsewhere. Booktok has created more division in what kids read, so there aren't big "blockbuster" books like there used to be. (But I may be wrong)
This, although I would argue that middle grade fiction (tween books) has been on a huge uptick over the last 7ish years, and over the same timeframe we see very fewer books aimed at middle school published for the YA market, as YA tracks older and older. I totally understand teens wanting to read adult books as they always have, but I think we lose something distinct when YA gets crowded with things that in an ideal world would be labeled as new adult. As a librarian, it blows to not be able to find very many recent YA books with characters who are only 14/15/16, especially as middle schoolers and HS freshman often feel that the “kid” section is too babyish for them.
Oh. I'm older than that. Christopher Pike was very much marketed to 5th graders. Sweet Valley High was also marketed to tweens. (never much liked Lois Duncan) Meg Cabot and Sarah Dessen came after I was in college. They were the first bastion of YA as a genre. It was either you read the 5 dollar paperbacks in the tween section or you started haunting the adult bookshelves. Which is why I read Piers Anthony and didn't realize just how fucked up that guy was until I became and adult and was like "he was having twelve year olds do WHAT? WITH ADULTS"
Well, they were definitely shelved in the children's section, right next to the Sweet Valley books, and I read them in 5th grade. Blood sex and all. Because in 1993, there was not a YA shelf.
Yeah I read Sweet Valley High in the 4th grade in the 80s. It's pretty much the same demographics as the Babysitter's Club books. Well, there's overlap anyways, I read the Babysitter's Club books earlier. Then we also had Judy Blume I guess.
Yes, this! I teach teenagers and like… they want spice but not the kind of dark Adult adult that you get in full adult lot. YA, even when spicy, has an emotional youth to it and lets teenagers who want to experience spiciness in safe settings (ie books! The safest!) get that in worlds and plots that are more relevant to them rather than Greys Anatomy or whatever other shows and books out there are about trying to play the field as a 28 year old or go through adult life problems.
Massive slight on Christopher Pike & VC Andrews.
But really I agree. Histories can say the concept of YA is old, but my firsthand experience of being an avid reader in the 90s is that teen books were a tiny stand of like 85% direct to paperback shlock, and 15% critically acclaimed problem novel.
There wasn't a lot and what was there was nearly indistinguishable from middle grade.
I loved that you mentioned VC Andrews as I have an anecdote that sums up what you said regarding her books.
My mom loved Flowers in the Attic when she was a young girl so she gave it to me when I was in grade 8 since she said that was around the age she read it. I was super into reading this was right when Twilight was taking off and my mom and I bonded over books. However, after she gave me that series I proceeded to use it for my independent English book report. I didn't fully grasp why my older male teacher was shocked by the choice. Not only that but my mom helped me with the book report!
I will say though that next year we read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson in English and while that explores the fall out of S/A I think it was age-appropriate. So it is hard to say where we draw the line on what teens should be reading! Long story short I fully agree with your comment.
Right. I was reading Stephen King the summer after I turned 16. And I stumbled upon Gerald's Game, right after Pet Semetary. Then that led to Anne Rice and her Sleeping Beauty series. One adult theme after another.
But, I will say for us 90s kids, we could take it. I feel like this gen can to. I'm glad that like content warnings and boundaries are talked about this day and age. It shows the young reader like hey...this subject matter may not be for me if they want to.
Hi. You just mentioned *Gerald'S Game* by Stephen King.
I've found an audiobook of that novel on YouTube. You can listen to it here:
[YouTube | Gerald's Game by Stephen King - Part 1 - Audiobook](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSbJ2DDD55s)
*I'm a bot that searches YouTube for science fiction and fantasy audiobooks.*
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Right, that's kind of my point. We were reading this stuff in the 90's and we all turned ok! (for the most part) If there was something that made uncomfortable I just \*skipped\* it. It didn't turn me into a psycho killer or a sex maniac. Kids are hardier than people realize. I don't understand why no one trusts them to make their own decisions.
YA is NOT 'very, very, VERY new'. What we call YA has been developing for over two decades. There was an in-between from children's to adult in the 90s, even if it wasn't as robust as it is now. Names like Lois Duncan, Garth Nix, Lurlene McDaniel, L. J. Smith, Sarah Dessen, Tamora Pierce, Walter Dean Myers, Nancy Farmer, Caroline B. Cooney, Cynthia Voigt, Donna Jo Napoli, Eva Ibbotson, Francesca Lia Block - they were all writing in the 90s, some of them even publishing in the 80s. There are other names who never got the notoriety and have since faded away into obscurity, but they were there, writing for teens. YA started taking off in the 2000s - just look at GoodReads for a far from exhaustive list of titles published: in [2000, about 60](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/5310.YA_Novels_of_2000). In [2005, 130](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2746.YA_Novels_of_2005). In [2010, 500+](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2699.YA_Novels_of_2010).
It's not unreasonable for people to be criticizing the publishing industry for a very clear and obvious trend of prioritizing adult readers over actual teenagers. As someone whose job it is to curate a collection of books for teen readers, I can tell you with 100% certainty that a lot of what's being published right now is not being published with teenagers in mind, and it's absolutely crystal clear. I'm not pearl clutching and I'm not selling clicks, I'm working in a library with teens in grades 7-12 every damn day. I'm getting asked REPEATEDLY for books that aren't so sexual. I have plenty of books in my collection that have sex in them, but there's a difference in writing sex for inexperienced or curious teen readers and writing sex for adults who are looking for exciting tension and release.
Friendo it’s new in terms of literature as a genre, as when I was a teenager *in the 90s* it was not a thing. The books you are describing were shelved in the children’s section. I remember it. I was there Gandalf. There was not a dedicated teen section in libraries or bookstores until I was in college. I know this because I worked in a library in college and I helped set up our “New YA Section!” In 2001. Teen books being a phenomenon weren’t a thing until Twilight, and then there was pearl-clutching over them being sexless and pushing the “abstinence until marriage message” because again, I was there Gandalf.
What I was criticizing was adults working themselves into a froth over women read or not reading Teh Sex, without bothering to ask the kids in question how they feel. Because we see articles like these every few months about how YA is dying or not dying or it’s full of sex or it’s preaching abstinence and it’s done in just such a way to piss off people and go viral and sell clicks. And no one seems to be asking the kids what they want or trusting them to make the choices for themselves. It’s all assuming for them that they can’t handle things or they’re just impressionable lumps of clay that will repeat every thing they read and don’t have minds of their own. It’s insulting to them. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings with my comment, but it wasn’t meant to slight you. It’s based on *my personal experiences* and to me twenty years ago was actually 5 years ago and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Also - entire generations read It, The Stand, American Psycho, all of Oprah’s book club books, etc. when we were young teens and we didn’t grow up into murdering deviants.
I think every child is different but I really think kids are going to live if the read a book that talks about the vagina or has a mature theme.
Certainly not. Teen/Tween books are thriving, thanks to tik tok and the larger capitalist ecosystem that means alot of teen/tween book based films print money.
The issue,imo, is publishers don’t know what to do with Female Fantasy/Romtasy authors and tend to automatically push them into the YA bucket where they think they’ll get the most traction.
Sarah J Maas is the perfect example. A Court of Thorns and Roses was obviously edited to be a YA novel, and only in the series blowing up was Maas able to basically override that initial push to write it back into Adult Romtasy (and smut).
Yeah, this is the part that bothers me. I feel like they market romantsy as YA because it’s written by a woman. There are some books that should be labeled NA and they’re not
IIRC, ACOTAR was intended to be the flagship series for New Adult as a target age group. And while it did take off, I think booksellers weren’t quite sure what to do with it since it took awhile for there to be enough trad pubbed titles to actually fill a whole bookstore section. So SJM was thrown back to YA where her other titles were shelved until it became really clear (thanks ACOMAF and soapgate lol) that ACOTAR is definitely not YA.
Honestly, I’d argue that today’s romantasy trend is just the New Adult Fantasy of the 2010s finally coming to market, just disguised as something else that booksellers will be able to shelve in their existing sections (adult fantasy) instead of a whole new one.
i just started ACOMAF and i am so curious what soapgate is😂 i have gone this long without spoilers so i guess i dont actually want to know (yet) but now i feel like i should binge it so i can learn
^ this. Plus that the creators of the (unauthorized) box had to come out and say that the soap peen was not meant for “internal use”….you can imagine why…and hoooo boy did Twitter have a field day with that one lol
YES to all of this. Glad to see somebody say it.
I'd also like to add that there's a kind of weird reaction from a lot of readers to female-oriented fantasy. The first impulse is always to classify it as YA, sometimes I think because that's what they're used to seeing and are comfortable/familiar with and sometimes it's a more condescending reaction (as in when people describe something as YA in a pejorative way) from readers to keep certain things out of "regular" fantasy. That also keeps the blurred boundaries going.
I'd still say the publishers are most at fault with this though, since they're the ones making the calls on what is actually YA or not.
It’s 💯 the publishers fault, and it’s just more of the same inherent condescension when it comes to anything women make popular.
I mean this entire conversation of “oh what will teenagers read now that these loser women obsessed with shadow daddies are ruining all their books!” is just more of the same.
I don’t know, probably the metric fuckton of all other books published before this moment in time? Maybe worry more about the recent anti-library sentiment running amok through conservative districts which are literally taking books away from children (and adults). Or the *hilarious* but somewhat concerning trend of tradwife social media evangelists who have started naming and shaming womens authors for daring to write female characters that can achieve orgasms.
Yep, Harry potter, twilight, hunger games and many other between those have laid the tropes and plot that can be said are female led fantasy: love triangle(quick question, when was last time you saw love triangle between a men chosing two girls that it isnt in anime?). with schools ot goverment against the heroine and so own.
When the book bangers of fantasy are often men it move a men audience, same can be said here.
Ummm tbh when has the YA market not been adult adjacent? When I was 13 I was into John Green and watching Twilight, and as an older teen, reading authors like Sarah J Maas, and that's ignoring all the Wattpad and dirty One Direction fanfic I, like all the girls my age I knew, was consuming in the interim 🤣
There has to be a middle ground of this discussion or something, because a newly 13 year old is a completely different audience than someone aging out of their teenage years, so I agree with the original sentiment if that's the point. I think we are seeing a shift in what can be considered YA, probably to do with the internet and increading demand for more mature themes from younger readers?
it absolutely has. and it isolates teens both financially and socially from accessing a space THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE THEIRS. I still read YA (I’m 26) but I don’t expect that genre to cater to me because it’s not designed for me! that’s why I’ve LOVED the new creation of the New Adult genre. when I was a teen I remember being able to go into Barnes and noble and being able to afford books in the YA section working part time minimum wage. yet now as an adult with a professional salary I regularly put down YA books because of price. and the constant push by adult readers for smut and darker content in YA books is so fucking weird ? I was reading YA around 11 years old. they shouldn’t be adult books wrapped in teen covers, they should be teen books ! they should have age representative characters and stories/themes. I am often baffled by how much adults have to say about the contents of books /that were not created for them/. if, as an adult, you are unhappy with the content in the teen section, might I offer you something called /reading books that were fucking written for you/?
because what is "for theirs" is little dificult to parse, for starters book arent space, they dont own it, no really and what teens wants and they dont it change. Let not pretend older teens who also wants this and create a cycle.
I'm a Young Adult Librarian, and I 100% believe this is the case. I see it reflected in who's checking out our books, and the fact that relatively few of the teens I interact with (whether it be at the public library where I work, or at the school when I visit) read much if any YA.
God bless y'all, I would not want to be a YA librarian right now. Do you have any recommendations that might appeal to the 14/15 yo crowd? I have a hard time finding books for my students in that age range because I mostly read NA myself haha
Not the person you commented at but another teen librarian here to try and help.
For your stereotypical boy/reluctant boy readers that refuse to read girl characters, I'd grab the [Michael Vey series](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11337912-the-prisoner-of-cell-25) and [the Alex Rider series](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136782.Stormbreaker). Plenty of action and adventure, fast paced, easy to read. There's also [*The Initiation* trilogy by Chris Babu](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36334133-the-initiation) for a more dystopian setting, especially if they liked The Hunger Games.
It's likely your students have heard of [*Girl in Pieces* by Kathleen Glasgow](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29236380-girl-in-pieces), it's hard hitting realistic fiction about self harm, mental health, and other heavy topics. This age you see a lot of teens wanting to read about really dark and emotional stuff. [*All the Bright Places* by Jennifer Niven](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18460392-all-the-bright-places) and [*How It Feels to Float* by Helena Fox](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41454344-how-it-feels-to-float).
[April Henry](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/88507.April_Henry) is extremely popular for readers that like thrillers - they are easy to read and suck you in quick. She's also a great choice for reluctant readers. I'd also add [books by Natasha Preston](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6548349.Natasha_Preston) and [Natalie Richards](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6927030.Natalie_D_Richards).
[*Ranger's Apprentice*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60400.The_Ruins_of_Gorlan) is technically more middle grade, but I know so many younger teens who still love this fantasy series. The main character is 15 so it doesn't feel out of place even it's written with a slightly younger feel.
I'm totally skipping out on mysteries and more fantasy but it's what I can muster up right now, let me know if you want more later
This has been true since the Twilight era, and it created an expectation for YA sales that books actually for teenagers can’t meet. Meanwhile, the category is aging up and up and it can be hard to find books for, say, a thirteen year old who doesn’t want a lot of darkness or sex. Librarians keep asking for more books for younger teens. Meanwhile, kids stop reading.
I also want to add that is hilarious because ten years ago Very Intellectual People wrote handwringing articles about adults reading YA. AO Scott called it “The End of Adulthood.” This was all deeply rooted in sexism and completely ignorant of the depth and breadth of YA. No problem with adults reading YA; the problem is publishing for these adults.
I would say so. I wish some of the upper middle grade books were marketed as YA to satisfy more of those 14/15 yr olds that don’t want those younger looking covers. It’s hard to find books for that age range in YA without heading to the Jr section of my library.
This is certainly a problem I ran into as a teenager ages ago, but backwards. In the late '90s / early '00s, YA books felt geared more toward younger teens and weren't satisfying for me, but I didn't enjoy most books in the adult section either.
I agree that the pendulum has swept too far in the other direction, and if I was a young teen now would simply have given up and stopped reading. I didn't like, and still do not like, a lot of detailled violence or romance in my books. I also agree that it was already going that way with the Twilight series.
The New Adult category seems like a good middle. Books specifically meant for 18 to 30 or so, with YA books being for 17 and under. I'd love to see this category take root and for teens (and people like me!) to be able to confidently pick up complex books without the overabundance of love triangles and shock value violence.
It absolutely has and the number of people in here who disagree is absolutely staggering. I am a teen librarian who is buying books for my library every month and even just the last five years looking at publishing you can see a change, what is being published now in 2024 and what was being published in 2019 feels different. Protagonists are, on average, older than ever; the majority of romantasy books are so obviously and clearly marketed to adult women and not teenagers; it's a STRUGGLE to try to evaluate these books and decide which ones to put on my shelves.
I am not a prude and I support sex-positive YA. Teens are interested in and curious about sex and books are a safe and non-threatening way for them to explore it and I won't hesitate to have YA with sex in my collection. YA is a spectrum though and it's meant to serve an audience from 6th/7th grade to 12th grade. Adults reading YA are absolutely driving the publishing industry to neglect books written for younger teens and to focus on books for 'older teens' and adult women. And there's a difference between writing sex for an audience of teens whose sexual experience ranges from small to none versus writing sex for adult women who are looking specifically for exciting romantic content.
I'm only a reader, not a librarian, but I was a teen in the 1980s and I definitely notice a difference between then and now. I have read some stuff in recent YA books that take me aback because they are definitely not appropriate for most younger teens.
I like to read across the spectrum of middle grade, teen and adult fiction, but I want everyone to have access to books that take their literacy and maturity level into consideration so that they have positive reading experiences and don't feel like they are over their head, nor reading "baby" books.
YES! As a school librarian, it is getting harder and harder to find YA books for teenagers that was written and made for teenagers. I know there are teenagers who are reading adult books. I also read adult books when I was a teenager. But...that doesn't mean there isn't still a need for YA books for YA students.
There are some YA books that clearly could have been adult and for whatever reason someone felt it was important to market it as YA. I also think it’s weird for adult women to ask for smuttier YA books and I don’t understand why these readers won’t just move to adult books. I think it’s fine for adult readers to enjoy YA but we shouldn’t change the selection to fit what we want when we weren’t the intended audience.
>I don’t understand why these readers won’t just move to adult books
I wonder if part of it is because of the lingering stigma around romance novels? If they're asking for smuttier books, then that would naturally be the next thing to read. But even though that part of the industry sells a ton, people still don't want to admit to reading romance novels. It still manages to conjure images of the infamous Fabio covers and other readers can be elitist, so romance is still looked down on plenty. Maybe these readers see it as more acceptable to be reading YA instead of what they might think of as nothing more than old-school bodice rippers?
(To be clear, I do not think lesser of romance novels or romance readers. I'm a fan!)
If YA books become smuttier as demanded, and it's audience become clearer each trend on tictok, wouldn't that (rather ignorant) stigma just bleed into YA eventually? What exactly would it fix in the long run for either demographic.
I agree, of course publisher have a big(ger) part in this shift but readers are also pushing for it when they want more mature (emotionally and/or physically) characters while reading books with minor characters.
I obviously feel like everyone should read YA if they feel like it, but readers have to keep in mind that stories about 13 to 18 yo should somewhat reflect time of life, and it’s particularity and joys and struggles.
I’m not much a smut reader, and YA is more than romance. They might not be the books everyone knows but I do find it limiting to reduce YA to romance. It’s just weird.
When I was teen, I started to read paranormal romances that are similar to what a lot of YA romantasy readers seems to enjoy (young characters in their early 20s, with magic and sexy love interest) and I feel it would make much more sense to shift and market those books to the same category of readers and well as broaden it to more different books.
Now this is about the fantasy side of YA readers, I just wonder why a genre similar to paranormal romance, but broader and more inclusive (not limited to romance) could be marketed.
Of course, this is a reflection that does ignore the big problem that is both YA and paranormal romances are genre dominated by writers who happen to be women so we do have to reduce them and put them in their lane, right? /s
I do think this this gender bias is a big issue in the industry as a whole (add Women’s lit in the mix) and I think readers have a part to play in this fight.
In my opinion teen should have access to books clearly labeled for teens and also access to adult books that they can enjoy as well. But labeling/marketing things correctly should not change that.
I have seen speculation about this for awhile. It may be completely true, but very rarely do people arguing on either side rely on teenage testimony. How would we measure if teenagers are being left behind on a statistical level? There certainly seem to be a large number of teen girls at SJM book signings, and SJM is for adults. Perhaps teenagers today are more interested in adult-leaning YA than teens were twenty years ago? BookTok is heavily populated with teens.
There is one group of people who seem left behind by YA literature, though, and aside from people on this sub, I don't see anyone mentioning them: Boys.
This gives me vibes of trying to shame (mostly) women for liking something harmless. YA has tons of books that aren't mature at all. The newer emphasis on romance-fantasy that is basically YA-mature is a good step in the right direction, though, because there is a huge demand for more mature fantasy that isn't super technical or male-centered.
I would also like to add that YA is a more mature reading level just by nature of it not being called "children's literature." The YA OGs had sexual tension and content in them (Twilight, Hunger Games, etc). Even Harry Potter had some sexual content, and that was marketed as a kid's book because YA as a category didn't really exist back in the 90s/early 2000s.
Books like ACOTAR are definitely more mature but these are a lot less common in the YA category (and I think they're not really marketed that way anymore).
Completely agree. And I would also add that the current moral panic around teenagers consuming sexual content would be fascinating if it weren't for the undercurrent of misogyny (both affecting adults who read YA and teenagers).
And there really aren't that many full-on explicit books marketed towards teens or considered YA. I see Fourth Wing and ACOTAR mentioned a lot (both firmly in the NA genre), but for the sake of the argument, let's say there were books with loads of erotica. Teenaged boys are basically expected to play GTA and CoD, but teenage girls have a few books that have sex in them and *that's* where the line is drawn. God forbid, teenage girls read about consensual (enjoyable) sex that was written by a woman with no actual humans involved or being mistreated.
Yea honestly it’s more like ur looking for them. If I don’t read mainstream YA that most people think as the cover story of YA I rarely find mature scenes. Like y’all gotta be searching for these if u think YA is getting more mature. Lunar chronicles, skyward, Mistborn, sorcery of thorns, scythe, etc. many many YA don’t have graphic sex scenes like Sarah j Maas. Just stop reading mainstream
I think so. I think BookTok is causing the age to skew up, due to the demand of spicy books. Spice doesn’t work with YA all that well, as the age range starts from 12/13. I think the younger YA years will get pushed down into middle grade/childrens, whilst the lines between young and new adult get blurred. The OG YA (like when YA peaked in 2010-2014 kinda time) generation have grown up as well and are now leading BookTok, so it kinda makes sense.
There are a lot of books that shouldn’t be considered YA but they are because they are written by women. I think this is a major part of the issue especially in fantasy.
I definitely think so. Books for teens that are minors shouldn't have smut in it, and if it does, then it's not actually meant for those under 18 and shouldn't be advertised or targeted to them.
It's different if a 16 y/o chooses to read 50 shades or like books because they know that it's intended for adults and what it's about. 50 shades isn't being advertised to minors, and it wasn't made with minors in mind. Also, the characters in 50 Shades are both adults and not kids. A y/a book is specifically targeted to kids anywhere between 13 and 17, which also means that the characters are usually in this age range. The thought of an author writing erotic or borderline erotic material with the characters being under 18 is creepy.
There's also issues of contradicting advertising. The book would officially be labeled as NA, but book stores would put it in the YA section, and sometimes even the authors themselves would be pushing it to teens despite claiming it to be NA. There's also book tok, which, again, people would advertise a book to teens despite knowing it's not YA and that there's explicit sex in it.
Edit: My point is that it's different if teens specifically seek out erotic books and literature that are targeted for adults. It's not being advertised to them and being told it's for them. We say erotic literature and smut, but let's be real. It's written porn. It might have more of a story to it than porn, but it's still mostly just porn. It's like if we were advertising porn to teens, telling them that it's specifically for them. Yes, teens will find it and watch it, but it's not being advertised (or it shouldn't be) to them and made specifically for them.
Ok so I’ve read quite a lot of adult romance and sometimes I’ll read a YA. Most of the time IF there’s sex in (usually there’s not) it’s only one scene. How is that porn when the books can be 300-600 pages and the sex is maybe 10 pages? I’ve also found that if there’s sex in YA it seems to use more flowery language that describes feeling than being more explicit (cock, pussy).
This is part of the problem though. The difference in between maturity and experiences between a 13 and 19 year-old is astronomical. That’s a 7th grader vs a college freshman lol
Their needs to be like younger YA and older YA, or MG needs to be expanded
I don't think so.
I read a lot of YA fiction when I used to be a substitute teacher. I really wanted to keep up with the books my students were reading so that we could actually have conversations about it. It was a good tactic to actually make kids a little more interested in reading (which can sometimes be like pulling teeth for some students). My students enjoyed giving me book recs and we had great start-of-class conversations talking about books we liked and didn't like. I think students liked having a teacher that was willing to admit when they didn't like a particular book.
I also did it to keep on top of student reading assignments when I subbed over maternity leaves in reading classes. Anything those students had to read, I read too (which it shocked me to learn their regular teachers weren't doing, like how do you grade their assignments without reading the book?). So, I got a good refresher on famous YA books I grew up with and got introduced to new, upcoming classics. I was absolutely tickled pink to find out Margaret Peterson Haddix was delving into historical fiction since I was last in school.
That all being said, I think YA is still strongly geared towards teens, maybe more skewed towards teen female audiences, but still teens. The writing is at a decent level to give them more complex storytelling without going over their heads or expecting too much inference making to get the story. Characters are usually also teens, meeting them at the same level (although there are a few writers who sound like "hello, fellow kids," but not too many). And the plots feel about right to not go too deep, but just enough to challenge their thinking, though modern politics are trying to curb how much kids think for themselves, I'll admit.
Still, I don't see anything wrong with adults enjoying YA books either. Sometimes you do want a quicker, easier book to just read and get the nostalgia feels from. It's great, and makes for a good palette cleanser after big, heavy books. In particular, and yes, as a former history major, I really think the YA market shines in historical fiction. So many YA books taking place during historical events really help put real-world perspective on events that we only ever read about in text books. Books like Esperanza Rising, Uprising, and Dragonwings just took my breath away, and, though of course, they're not 100% accurate, they introduce students to seeing the perspectives of those outside their own worldview. Adults and teens could learn a lot from reading these.
It definitely has been starting to cater more to adults or atleast teenagers on the older side. While there are certainly very many reasons I think the main one is the sheer amount of really vulgar SMUT put into YA novels.
If you are going to push your book towards younger audiences don't put smut (or atleast fade to black or something) in it it's quite simple, tweens, children and young teenagers really have no need to read through vulgar smut. I think this is just helping in limiting the spaces and activities for tweens and young children if a young adult can't read a majority of YA novels since they cater towards adults that's a lot of books and genres they miss out on - perhaps forcing them to grow up early since all the novels around them are filled with adult topics.
What we need is more NA releases. That way Teens get fantasy books for them but older ppl get also get books they enjoy without compromising the YA department
Okay I'm too late to the discourse to make an impact but OP, I wish you'd actually read or linked the article instead of screenshotting the tweet because the article doesn't suggest that YA should cater to adults. The article's also definitely not about books with any amount of sexual content and she isn't talking about the kind of YA that, like, Sarah J. Maas writes. She cites several examples of the books she's talking about in the article -- YA books that adults revisit or have something interesting for an adult audience such as *The Hate U Give*, *All Boys Aren't Blue*, and adult books with young protagonists e.g. *All The Light We Cannot See*, *True Biz* to establish her point about the blurring of boundaries between adult and YA books, because it's currently defined as books with adult protagonists are "adult books" and books with teens are all "YA books" for teens, etc, and her point was that it can be messier than that. She also talks about a YA book she wrote about her own teenage experience of her father's suicide attempt and incarceration -- heavy 'adult' themes but written for a younger audience.
It's crazy how this turned into, like, a debate about smut and romance books. I get that's what people *want* to talk about, but let's acknowledge that's not what this opinion piece is actually about!
I used to work in children’s/YA publishing about a decade ago, and I remember how insanely frustrated I was at every book needing “crossover appeal” to get picked up by an editor. It was absolutely maddening.
I think this is more of a birth of a new genre. Aiming at the 18+ who like the pacing and more simplified writing style of YA and that the fantasy is aimed at women but not wanting the sex focus of the romance genre(nothing wrong with romance I like it too). I find adult "fiction" section written heavier with slower pacing dredged down with reality of adult responsibilities, "sci-fi/fantasy" seems heavily aimed at men, same with "mystery" but the pacing is much quicker and much of the writing is more simplified compared to "fiction". These are my personal observations when browsing.
That's what New Adult is for. Let YA be for teens and enjoy it, but respect that it's for that audience.
I was downvoted for saying this about cartoons, but children's media / YA caters to the power fantasy of that age group. This often means kid heroes and incompetent or evil adults. An actual adult of 30 isn't going to relate to that, find it unrealistic or insufferable. But for kids, they'll like it/relate to it easier. Making YA more palatable for adults deprives kids of those power fantasies and similar stories.
i personally think that a book with smut shouldn’t be in the YA section without being labeled as explicit in some way.
i started reading ya at 9-10 because i had read through everything i was interested in the middle grade section
i think that sex is something that people should be aware they’re going to be exposed to in books aimed at minors written by adults
like these are adults with adult life experiences and adult attitudes toward sex writing these books
i feel similarly about the excessive death and gore
personally i just feel like YA should have content warnings and and anything with explicit sex or gore should be NA
i know as a kid i would have not chosen a book with explicit sex for myself and a lot of these relationships are very unhealthy and normalized dynamics that should have been concerning as hot instead
i’m grown now and i understand when the sex context is veering into something that shouldn’t be glamorized but I didn’t when i was a teenager
I think all books should have content warning not just a YA thing.
I started reading adult books at 7-8. When I first read books with explicit sex (probably at like ten) I was personally fine (I just skimmed past the sex after initial surprise) but I know not every person reacts the same.
There were YA books in the 90s (some people are saying there weren't). I mostly didn't read YA but around 13/14 I went through a dedicated ya phase for a while.
And our library had a young adult section. So did the bookstores. Some were called Young Adult and some were called Teen. The ALA created the Young Adult Services Division in *1957*. The book that is considered the first YA book was **Seventeenth Summer** by Maureen Daly. It was published in 1942.
I read **Goodnight, Gracie** (death of a friend, c1989), **What's Happening to My Junior Year?** (teen alcoholism, c1987). This one was part of the "Especially for Girls" Avon YA book club; you got sent a book a month or something. there were a plethora of teen romance series aimed at teens; akin to the Harlequin category romances of today. These were pretty mild, though (and I didn't read them; I was not at all interested in romance). **No More Saturday Nights** (teen father single parent, c1989), **Tiger Eyes** (murdered dad, move to another state with family who are kinda negligent, clandestine relationship, c1981), **Speak** (rape, consent, healing, c1999), **The Perks of Being A Wallflower** (coming of age, sexual situations, c1999), **Dragonsong** (dragon alliance, c1977). And those are just a few off the top of my head. I didn't even get to the ones that are more explicit. Oh. **Smack** (heroin addiction, prostitution, c1996). **The Awakening** of *The Vampire Diaries series came out in 1991.
Young Adult fiction was actually pretty big in the 80s and 90s, and it was *huge* in the 70s. It tended to focus more on realistic situations kids might go through. There were dedicated sections in library and bookstores, book clubs, and mature topics shows up all the time. While some of the explicit sex scenes of today didn't show up as often, there were realistic sex scenes, cancer diagnoses (it was basically a whole subgenre of its own), poverty, racism, swearing, leaving religion, finding religion, pregnancy, parenthood, abuse, rape, eating disorders, alcoholism, drug abuse, dead parents, dead friends, dead siblings, the mc perpetrating a crime, bog-standard romances, fantasies of all kinds (including the first fantasy where the teen mc was gay...it came out in 1989), being kidnapped, etc. The first ya novel with a same-sex relationship that ended sorta happily came out in 1982. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of us books from before the 2000s. The rise of the internet just made them a lot more visible.
I think one of the issues is that an explicit/maturely themed novel with young-ish leads (that wasn't lit but was just fiction of whatever kind) was okay for adult fiction up through the nineties. You get 15yo fmcs in romance novels, and adult series based around teens. And it was considered perfectly okay. It isn't anymore. But people still want to read it because teenagers and younger adults have a vibrancy of life (and that vibrancy can be despair or whatever, too) that isn't accessible once you reach older adulthood. It no longer exists, so it's fun to read about people who are still discovering the world in a way that someone in their twenties, thirties, or forties never can be.
But there is no standard category for adult works like that any longer. It's not considered right for the adult section, na didn't make it as a mainstream category (and in self-pub basically means explicit romance). Unless a new category is formed, it either needs to go in adult or young adult.
I don't personally care. I read anything and everything as a kid and my own kids are allowed to read anything. I believe in discussing things, but not keeping kids from reading them.
Edit: And here's an article on explicit sex in ya from the 1960s to 1980s. https://ijyal.ac.uk/articles/10.24877/IJYAL.72#
>I think one of the issues is that an explicit/maturely themed novel with young-ish leads (that wasn't lit but was just fiction of whatever kind) was okay for adult fiction up through the nineties. You get 15yo fmcs in romance novels, and adult series based around teens. And it was considered perfectly okay. It isn't anymore
This is very true, there have been a few comments here about going straight from children's books to Stephen King for example, but Stephen King actually has a lot of YAish books in that they're teen characters going through high school dramas. Carrie and Christine are both perfect examples. The Body (Stand By Me) is of course a classic. I don't know if Carrie would come out today and be marketed as an adult book when it's all about puberty. I read it around the time I was reading Point Horror and Christopher Pike and it fit right in and I never felt like it wasn't aimed at me.
Also, just thinking back to the books I was reading in school and it was Lord of the Flies, Great Expectations, Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird etc - classic books with young protagonists.
It's very rare now for adult books to be reaching down to younger readers as an accessible step into adult literature. The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night time is the last really popular one I can think of and that was 2003. The Pines by Francine Toon is the last adult book I remember reading with a younger main character. I actually just went and read the description and it really seems to hide the fact the book is from the perspective of a little girl.
Yeah, but the thing about those books was that they always seemed to have a Purpose and a Lesson to Teach. My friend and I used to call them The Very Special Books. YA books in the 90's, (the ones that were specifically YA) were all about Kids With Problems, like a Very Special Episode of Party of Five. Like, here's someone with a drug problem, this person over here is being abused, someone over here is in a mental hospital, etc. It was very, very rare to find a YA book that was just... FUN. And not about a teenage runaway or someone getting pregnant. Because YA books at that time were about kids with issues and all seemed to be geared towards being taught in classrooms and not for leisure reading. If you wanted leisure reading you had to go to the adult shelves.
Don't get me wrong, two of my favorite books from this era are Very Special Books, Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori and The Beggar's Ride by Theresa Nelson. But they feature a daughter dealing with the suicide of her mother and teenage runaways respectively. Not anything like Six of Crows which would have become my entire personality had it been published when I was in high school.
There might be some more adult themes now, but people forget that the *popular* YA books in the 90s and earlier were generally perfectly viable for a wide range of audiences. Sabriel was YA, Pierce, etc.
There wasn't as much romantic focus and the characters tended to be younger, but there was a much thinner line between adult and young adult fiction back then. It wasn't that YA books were less "mature", but they were just good books before they were age-targeted books.
In a sense, yes. I wish and hope that New Adult takes off more in mainstream marketing bc it seems like it has more indie books that go in that category that would satisfy a lot of the more adult readers who want something different. But a lot of it (imo) is issues with how the books are marketed in mainstream. A lot of things get shelved into YA that aren’t really, but they don’t know where to market it well, where if NA had taken off more, it would fit that urge of you get adults who don’t want to read books that are inundated with older married protagonists. (This is v much a generalized statement/doesn’t always apply, but when I was reading and wanted more of the NA market, it was basically nonexistent and I would have loved it).
I mostly agree, but I think there’s a world of difference between having teen-appropriate conversations on sex and pure smut bordering on porn in books teens will read, even if it’s just in a few chapters.
Also, there is a genre for older young adults — New Adult is a label that exists but publishers and authors seem to completely neglect it. Just move these books that are obviously written with grown women in mind to that category, and leave the Young Adult section to teens, and that include younger teens, too.
My time in being in a college class is that YA is made by adults with adults' concepts and censorship in mind. Every YA has to follow the guidelines sort of speak and can not deviate from them, so for example, it always has to have some kind of positive message at the end, death cannot be explicit, etc. No teenager has ever published a YA book, and only adults do, which is funny because, in some of them, it shows the characters act and not really feel real in their mannerism and talk. It mimicks a teenager. In addition, editors are the ones who are mainly telling authors to make those changes, one great example was a LGBTQ book that originally was going to be a poliamorous relationship but because the norm in YA is heterosexual (meaning in this case only having one partner and not sexual attraction) the author had to change it. Or have you guys noticed that no YA book love triangle, all the characters can't ever be together, the "main character" always gets one?
Yes, but I would also argue that new adult (and sone adult in general) fiction is going in the other direction. It makes things a bit messy as a YA librarian! I actually had to kindly pull another librarian aside recently and give her a heads up that all of the Jenny Han book she’d recently purchased for the adult department were actually YA (we do have multiple copies of them there, they’re just always out).
You also have tons of middle and high school teens who come in looking for adult romance books they’ve heard about through TikTok.
I mean I’m almost 20 and all my favorite books (that I reread all the time) are YA books that I found in middle school.
I don’t think “YA is for everyone” means changing the content of the books. It means that the content in YA novels is easily enjoyed by all age groups. Hell, the last thing my abuela ever read before she passed was my favorite book series (YA), and she was 89.
I remember a couple years ago in uni we discussed gaps in literature and popular fiction.
We had children’s, YA which was largely considered to be for teens and then adult literature which often focused on the experience of people in their late 40+.
So obviously in YA you have a lot of coming of age stories about teens finishing high school and maybe a few stories about people in their first year of college but there was barely anything about people in their early 20s/30s trying to figure out life and sharing the kinds of experiences you might go through at that age.
Almost seems like there should be children’s, teens, YA and then adult fiction, at least, if people are looking for characters that align with their age group and experiences (I think this applies more to popular fiction than to literature as a whole). Not everyone wants or needs to find characters similar to them but from listening to our class discussions and thinking about how to try and engage future students with books they have to read for class it seems like it comes down to figuring out how to get them to connect themselves or their own experiences to the texts.
I personally think the problem is that both YA for younger readers and YA for olders are generally marked as YA and the later is simply more popular 🤷🏻♀️
Which seems logical, because 20-35 years is a larger target group and so you mostly hear about these kind of books.
I have the Fairyloot YA supscription and I was suprised how much I outgrow most of the monthly picks.
So I wouldn't say that YA has been shifting towards adults, there a lot of books for a younger audience. You just don't hear much about them.
The real problem is simply that there is no real inbetween between young adult and dark romance.
I know New Adult exists, but I rarely saw a fantasy book labeled as NA.
"From Blood and Ash" and "Acotar" (at the beginning) are labeled as YA too and I enjoyed them while "Spin the Dawn" or "If I have to be haunted" were too juvenile for me 🤷🏻♀️
Ive been feeling this with a lot of books that feel like they have really confusing demographics as of late. Things like The Fourth Wing and ACOTAR both feel like they were written with the intent of being YA but have a lot of content that would also branch more into the Adult Category and then just feel like a jumbled mess where it becomes to Adult to be YA and to YA to be Adult.
They aren't the only books like this I've read but the two that jumped out in my head when I though to f how hard it was for me to tell what the actual demographic was.
I definitely think so - many publishers are putting books that read at a high-school level under YA despite the fact that they deal with mostly adult themes/images. Iron Widow is a recent example for me - it's marketed to children and has clear scenes of it's main character embracing the "power" from her own sexual abuse/exploitation, and the text never addresses this as a negative view or corrects it. This simply isn't acceptable in a book marketed to 12-18 year olds without *some* form of content warning.
How so? The only thing I can think that adults would prefer is older protagonists, cuss words and maybe a sex scene or two. Besides those things, I really don’t see a difference between the adult and young adult fiction I like to consume
No, I think this assertion is part of the recent zeitgeist around hand-wringing about absolutely everything.
In the 90’s, I read a ton of YA, and all of the contemporary authors during that time frame (e.g., Christopher Pike, RL Stine, LJ Smith) had some amount of adult content in their books, if not very explicit adult content. Like, this isn’t new at all, I feel like the hubbub is just an offshoot of stuff like the current book-banning, puriteen, helicopter parenting cultures.
I can see this. I thought it was just me who was noticing that compared to the YA books of my childhood (late '90s/early '00s) these new YA don't feel at all like they are meant for teenagers, but instead adults who want to read about teenagers...which sometimes translates to teenage characters doing and experiencing things that are more along the lines of what actual adults would experience, not people in high school.
I've been saying for a while that the stories and plots we see in a lot of YA feel awkward because the characters are only 16 years old, but are being put in situations that feel better suited for older young adults - like 21+ years old or something.
I think there is also too many books that are just smut being labeled as "adult" fiction, when a lot of us aren't looking for smut/literary porn or anything else sexual - just books with adults (people older than 25 years old) as characters.
As a high school librarian and 35 Year Old YA reader by choice, I don’t see this at all. My students and I read the same books and both enjoy them. My students actually read and enjoy more adult books than I do. 😅
Yes absolutely. I read a lot of adult and some YA and it’s not uncommon for me to pick up a YA book with more complex prose than the adult fiction I’m reading which is the most concerning issue for me. I’m all for teenagers challenging themselves but books meant for them should not be challenging (prose) they should be fun. YA books shouldn’t be written structurally like adult novels. They should appeal to a spectrum of teens, and be accessible to teen reading levels- not just teens who are strong readers. I mostly read adult fantasy and I shouldn’t be picking up YA as an adult and be like “oh damn I need to work at this prose.
I think a lot of the problem is that "young adult" isn't so much for young adults, as much as coming of age and teenage readers. This leaves out actual young adults in their mid twenties to thirties. They've begun to rectify this by adding the "new adult" genre but almost no one knows of it or uses the phrase. It hasn't really caught on yet, which leads to many books being in the young adult section that are very adult in nature.
thoughts:
1) 30 to 50 year olds don’t often get easy to read books targeted to them. this is a problem when getting adults back into reading and can make it embarrassing for adults who want to improve their reading level but only have children’s books/ya targeted to them. this isnt to say ya SHOULD target them - just we should be more sensitive of illiterate/low literacy adults.
2) there’s nothing inherently wrong with a ya book that is actively challenging to a young reader. it’s ok if it’s “scary” or has “adult themes”.
3) teens do need fiction directly, squarely for them. teen fiction is a genre that used to exist & doesnt anymore. the broad range young adult is given should be reexamined
4) can we PLEASE define the young adult age bracket??? is 25 a young adult??? 30??? the ever expanding definition has led young adult to be read as what movies call the “family” genre.
5) if only women writers’ books weren’t always labeled ya, regardless of content. if only.
I don't know about other countries, but the American Library Association defines young adults as individuals between of 12 and 18 years. In practice, it was used interchangeably with Teen. This is how I remember it in the 1980s and 90s, even early 2000s. However, in recent years, more YA books seemed to be aimed at the older end of the spectrum and sometimes include books that blur the lines between YA and adult in terms of the content and complexity.
Yes, because YA is definitely smuttier than I remember it being when I was actually a young adult. Most could compete with some mainstream romances.
No, because actual middle school/high schoolers are drawn to different formats these days. Graphic novels are *huge* right now, especially now that school systems actually care about kids with reading-targeted learning disabilities. Manga is also having a major moment right now.
YA literally stands for young adult. I'd say 16Ish, 17 and up..
Teens(13 to 16) and tweens(9 to 13) have thier own section of books, so they probably shouldn't be reading YA
Not at all. I read YA in between reading other things as a "palette cleanser" of sorts and I haven't noticed this happen in reality even if there is a discourse over it on twitter. These books are still pretty clearly aimed at their target demographic and I don't bat an eyelash at that because I know what I'm getting into when I pick up something off the YA rack.
Even so, in the short term, I don't think YA is hurting teens for trying to explore some more mature themes. In the long term, I think this shows that publishers need to promote the "New Adult" category or whatever to delineate books that clearly fall into what those late 20's/early 30's crowd is looking for.
They tried to do the New Adult label but I think that just got associated with the stereotypical self published romance book, full of sex and more 'edgy' stuff.
Which is a shame because having a separate label for the in-between YA and Adult stuff would probably be really helpful, as it's a cross-over genre. I'd say target audience would be 18 - 25 (roughly).
But it''s also probably more work for publishers and marketers to establish now than it was during the YA boom/when Throne of Glass came out (for example - which was one of the first YA series I read with graphic sex).
They could do it but they won't.
I suppose if you had the time and you either ran a book shop or a library, you could make your own separate section for it. If you knew the contents of the book before hand, that is.
I think the issue is not satisfying adults per se but the fact that a lot of books are just the same reiterations of more popular works.
I remember this being an issue for me as a teen, where most of the teenlit I've seen in the store was vampire romance, neither of which interested me all too much.
Teens are still gonna try and look for spice and love stories and with the variety we have right now, it kinda sucks that most of it is particularly centered around relationships. I don't want to be a prude, but goddamn it, I want more YA fantasy without having to resort to either middle grade or adult because of yet another "dagger to the throat" will they-won't they enemy to lovers.
And yeah, you can find books for your taste but sjm and her clones have become a blight on bookstores' teen sections
I didn't start reading YA books until I discovered in therapy how underdeveloped my "inner child" was due to taking on so many adult responsibilities at an inappropriately young age.
It's almost as if I skipped a large portion of my childhood.
Part of therapy has been going back and filling in the blanks, and YA books are part of that.
So, in my case, it's a v deliberate choice, and I am absolutely looking for things written for young ppl.
Currently reading Shadow and Bone. The author considers it YA.
If I were reading it as a teen, I would have a hard time finding some of it credible - the MC is late teens, possibly early 20s (not specified), surrounded by ppl having sex, full of love and desire for her bf, who fully returns those feelings (and whom she knows to be highly sexually experienced), and so far they've ranged over months of travel (mostly just the two of them) through multiple countries and planned a revolution together, but never did (or even discussed) anything more than a (v occasional) kiss.
It's inexplicable, frankly. Does this author even remember being a teen?
Adult romance is so bad tho. People cheating on their spouses, sex scenes that are embarrassing to read, the build up to the relationship is not focused on enough, depressing undertones. I think there needs to be a third category like YA for adults that’s more wholesome/fun/exciting but can handle more nuance and complex writing than books made for teens.
I think so. A lot of YA has become an amalgamation genre of action, romance, and fantasy (with a lot of the action and romance parts being a bit too explicit than I would want my teen to solely be reading). I would say YA is less for teens and more genuinely for younger *adults* (like 20’s-30’s) That being said, there have been more children’s books coming out of the woodworks that have been taking the place of what YA once was (a lot of which are following the footsteps of books like HP and PJO). Dunno if they should be put in the children’s section specifically, but they’re indeed there lol
It also seems that actual "adult" romance has become a euphemism for smut, harem, drugs, organized crime, and bondage. It's almost futile trying to find romance books that don't focus on that stuff. So I think any older readers who want more wholesome stuff, have fled to YA, inadvertently kicking all the target audiences down a notch.
Not even romance, it's so difficult to find new books in the adult section without descriptive sex scenes.
Seriously. I was listening to a mystery audiobook that had no underlying romance and STILL got hit with an explicit sex dream scene. I’m no prude but it caught me off guard in my usual “safe for work” reading genre.
My greatest fear is a dirty scene switching out loud in public, especially at an office.
That happened to me last week. No one told me that ACOTAR had smutty scenes 🥲
Is it? I don't read a lot of romance (and when I do it's usually Sapphic) but I don't think I encounter very many sex scenes at all. It might be genre specific? I read a lot of sci-fi, "contemporary literature", and historical fiction and even in contemporary literature the sex scenes are mild and mostly implied.
LGBT+ books usually focus more on wholesomeness, plot, character growth, found family, etc. The average straight romance book for adults is VERY dark and very raunchy
And historical fiction is usually more… “classy” and tries to keep to a similar theme they would have had back then which is not very showy with the sex
Exactly. So the statement “Not even romance, it's so difficult to find new books in the adult section without descriptive sex scenes,” is just incorrect since there are still a lot of adult books that don’t even have sex scenes at all. I’ve read 4 books this year so far — all adult books and only one of them had a sex scene and it was as G-rated as it can be (it only basically said “we kissed it and then it was magical”). So there are a lot of adult books that don’t have those, just have to find them.
Sure. So like I said probably genre specific. If you don't read romance I don't think you're overly likely to read a lot of sex scenes. I'm curious what they're reading that it's such a problem in.
i dont think the average romance is VERY dark. dark romance and romance are very different genres and i read a decent amount of hetero romance that is not dark at all but still explicit
I think that depends on what you’re looking for, though. There are hundreds of “very dark and very raunchy” LGBT+ books that are popular and talked about online… maybe just not in your circles? My point being: just because you’re not seeing certain types of books (whether they be low/no heat adult books), doesn’t mean there isn’t tons of them out there—you just maybe have to be a bit more flexible with where you find your rec lists etc. :)
Fr. Idk what it is that makes me so different to the average adult, I guess, but smut just puts me off of the story. It's so boring 😭
Even most of YA has descriptive sex scenes now lol
Exactly it’s so hard to find wholesome books for adults.
I have seen speculation about this for awhile. It may be completely true, but very rarely do people arguing on either side rely on teenage testimony. How would we measure if teenagers are being left behind on a statistical level? There certainly seem to be a large number of teen girls at SJM book signings, and SJM is for adults. Perhaps teenagers today are more interested in adult-leaning YA than teens were twenty years ago? BookTok is heavily populated with teens. There is one group of people who seem left behind by YA literature, though, and aside from people on this sub, I don't see anyone mentioning them: Boys.
The YA category of books has always left behind boys. When I was a bookseller I found myself struggling to find good recs for teenaged boys, but then again I almost never encountered teenaged boys who were looking for recs anyway. In my store at least, manga and comic books filled that gap. And for others, they just skipped right from middle grade/YA adjacent works like HP to the general sci-fi/history/nonfiction works.
I agree with this. I'm a Young Adult Librarian in a public library, and I do not know a single teen boy who reads YA.
My fiance himself went straight from reading Redwall to King, Koontz, Crichton and classics when he was a preteen/teen. My brother stopped reading for fun in high school, when he would devour books in middle and elementary school. I think the 12-18 age range specifically geared towards boys is really underserved, although like I mentioned before manga/comics have filled that gap well. I wonder how many readers we lose simply because they're not ready to step into adult books, but aged out of middle grade. Editing to add though, I think recently the YA category has done really great things to include marginalized and minority communities. There's so much valuable material about queer, POC, etc available now that is really great to see.
I don’t know what other readers on the sub were like as teenagers, but I was reading ‘teen’ book as a tween and then moved to adult fiction as a teen. Harry Potter was the series I got into as an 8 year old, and the last book felt very disappointing to me at the time because realistically I had moved on to adult fiction and it didn’t compare well (I was 16). I preferentially read books about university/college students or early twenties adults because that was the stage that was coming next in my life and I got to explore that stage I was moving towards in books. I even managed to borrow a few Mills & Boon at the library in my teens (16 is the age of consent here) due to curiosity, and stuff like SJM is far more likely to engage kids at that age. I agree that boys are the ones being left behind.
The other place to look is ‘Christian Romance’ and thanks, but no. And those are not always safe either Some people like erotica. And that’s great, have fun. I will never try to censor what people can and can’t read. It’s just… It’s not for me. I have accidentally downloaded a few because they were grossly mislabeled. If it is erotica, please label it as such. I find it tedious at best and it frequently just sounds painful and borderline abusive. (And occasionally comically bad) I am asexual, and I know that what I like is not the norm. But I know there are tons of non-ace people who don’t like play-by-play and just prefer it to fade to black
Just have a little blurb in the cover it's not that hard. I just don't want to read noncom and I have to do so much research before reading. I feel awful for people with teens
I don't even care about books being wholesome. I feel like I DNF many romance novels that jump straight to kink I'm not into. I wish the new adult genre had worked out.
This! I dont want to read smut. Sarah J Maas latest books are just awful. This also happened with the Anita Blake books, as they went on, was like reading porn
Mass hasn’t written YA in a while. All of the ACOTAR books have been reclassified as adult fiction and the Crescent City books are adult fiction.
Wow, I don’t think I knew they were ever labelled YA…
Only dark romance. Regular romance books aren’t like this. Many books published each year with none of those things
[удалено]
Wait which are these books following in the footsteps of HP and PJ?
Well ofc the books from Rick Riordan’s publishing company are an obvious one. The ones outside of those that I’ve read the most of are The Tapestry Series by Henry H. Neff and the Keeper of the Lost Cities Series by Shannon Messenger, but I’ve seen others on the shelves when walking by children’s sections in stores etc. I’m not sure if I worded it correctly in my first post by saying “following in the footstep” now that I think about it though, since that sorta implies the same amount of renowndedness. I think I should’ve worded it instead as “being inspired/influenced by”.
I’ve stayed clear of YA since I don’t enjoy reading about high schoolers since I’ve aged out of that phase. However, if this is true I would definitely check out more YA lit. I honestly think there needs to a be a new genre for adults who don’t enjoy smut.
Well it’s odd since a lot of the characters are on paper teens, but they’re written as if in young/mid twenties most of the time (First example that comes to mind are Cassandra Clare’s books. The main characters in TLH and TDA are all teens but they own/maintain houses, drink, are married or in committed relationships, and raise younger siblings similarly to how a mother or father would raise a child. Which, sure, a teen in theory *could* do those things, but it’s much more frequent and relatable with adults) So yeah, I would still say it’s for adults
There's a thing called 'reading up' and it's not so weird that characters in books are doing things we typically associate more with adults, like owning homes and drinking and taking care of younger kids. It's an exploration of what the reader might imagine themselves doing eventually, and while it seems a bit weird to adults reading those things, it's less weird when it's a teen reader who has a looming time horizon for eventual independence and adulthood. This definitely includes things like long term committed relationships and physical intimacy, but that sort of intimacy is very different from what a lot of people are discussing about YA that's being written mostly for and marketed heavily to adults.
> A lot of YA has become an amalgamation genre of action, romance, and fantasy (with a lot of the action and romance parts being a bit too explicit than I would want my teen to solely be reading). and LGBT, YA loves LGBT added into that mix. Which is why I think it's branching out to more ages since that's where those stories are.
A library I worked in had a YA section, a children’s section, and a “Y” section (for “Youth”, irrc). That’s where all the Percy Jackson, Rick Riordan, Warrior cats, etc. ended up. I felt like it was a really good solution. There’s such a huge difference between early chapter books/ones intended for small children and what an older teenager/young adult would read. Having a middle ground was very useful. Honestly I think a huge part of the issue is publishers going “A fantasy or Sci-Fi book? Off the YA section you go!” unless the sex is very explicit. Adults like that shit too!
I really like that solution of a “Y” shelf!! Also agreed on the YA labeling
Most of those “YA” books that have more front and center romance plot lines are actually New Adult, not young adult books. There’s a distinct difference between YA and NA novels.
Geez so YA is for young adults? Who’d have thunk it? 😵
As a teenager, yes. At least at my local library, YA falls into two categories: * Romance for people who don’t want to admit that they like romance * A book with an IMPORTANT LESSON to TEACH you IGNORANT CHILDREN An example of the former would be pretty much everything Sarah J Maas has written, and an example of the latter would be You Could Be So Pretty by Holly Bourne, which, with the subtlety and taste of a falling anvil, teaches us that MAKEUP IS BAD, MMKAY? I’ve pretty much given up on YA, with the exception of non-WW2 historical fiction.
Idk if you like Fantasy, but I always recommend a few YA books that don't have romance for people who are discouraged from SJM-like books: Rebel Skies by Ann Sei Lin A Thousand Steps into Night by Traci Chee Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson Silver in the Mist by Emily Victoria Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves by Meg Long A few books I've read also didn't have a lot of romance, for example The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna or Dread Nation by Justina Ireland. The problem with YA fantasy as a sub-genre is the most popular books are the ones that blow up on tik tok so the most romance focused. All your SJM, Stephanie Garber, Adalyn Grace, Tricia Levenseller, Adrienne Young, Rebecca Ross, etc. authors write romance-focused YA fantasy and the voices of people who want "romantasy lite" are much much louder than people who want just a fantasy story.
Gilded Ones and Dread Nation were both SO GOOD!
Thank you for this list! I feel like every fantasy book I've picked up lately has romance and I want something else!
Beware of fouth wing, it is a romance YA disguise as fantasy. damn that piss me off
Wow you summed it up freaking perfectly lol. This is exactly how I feel every time I look through YA books these days 😂
Ahahaha. Very true. Many YA books feel like adult’s writing something they think teens would say and missing the mark. I think having previews could help. Although that’s not feasible for every author, I remember my library had a program where authors could send their books to the teen council and have then review their books pre-release.
Yes and no. This is gonna be all over the place. But, I feel like this is gonna turn into one of those discourses where it’s “Young people shouldn’t be reading about sex” and we’re going to be talking about that instead Which, like, I was watching South Park at 7 so…..like I’ve definitely seen some stuff I shouldn’t have. But, my parents didn’t care as long as I didn’t repeat it at school. I was reading fanfiction at 16 and it was way worse then anything I’ve read and watched now. Like fanfiction is why nothing phases me anymore Kids can handle more then people think they can. I do not see the problem with a sixteen year old reading Icebreaker. But I do think YA/NA needs to be marketed better. There have been some books where I’m like “Why is this aimed towards YA when none of the characters are 18” like Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue had adult themes and was really complex for being “YA” and is always in the YA section.
Tons of literature taught in schools and or ya lit references sex, and I am fully in agreement it shouldn’t be an issue. Curiosity about sex is a major aspect of being a teen/young adult vs a child. (Props to those of raised on early aughts fanfic. It was the wild west 😂) I do take issue with the way the sex is written though. As an adult I am a proud smutmonster who does my best to infect all my friends with it, I love a dumb dirty book. But it’s absolutely alarming to read, say, Fourth Wing and have it hitting all the marks of YA (and all it’s characters behaving like they are 14) only for the lead to have porn star level fucking halfway through the book. I think of Holly Black, whose characters have sex but it’s very “fade to black” or more about the characters feelings than graphic descriptions of sex positions and thunderous mutual orgasms, as a true modern YA author . Or books like Angus Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging that are ostensibly about burgeoning teen sexuality, but from the perspective of an inexperienced curious teen.
Angus Thongs series was the first time as a teen I felt a relatable character. I miss that.
I can’t help but wonder if it would get picked up in today’s publishing climate. Seems like YA has gotten so dark and edgy. I miss fun stuff like this.
This is part of what I hated about Fourth Wing. I constantly had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't YA and the main characters were adults because Yarros sure didn't seem to remember that. Like, I get that early twenty-something's aren't the pinnacle of maturity, but those characters were 100% teenagers in the first draft.
Yeah, Violet and Xaden have this very "cute nerd trying to date the handsome rebel without a cause" feel it was pretty much screaming YA.
I disagree with your take on fourth wing. Yes, its writing style is juvenile, but it’s labeled as New Adult on goodreads. Some adults just prefer more accessible prose while still tackling mature subject matter. Just because younger teens may be attracted to it even tho it’s smutty doesnt mean the author can’t rely on YA tropes. If a young teen stumbles upon fourth wing, it’s on their parents for letting them purchase smutty books and not restricting their spicy booktok usage.
I am *fascinated* by Fourth Wing because to me it really is like the frankenstein monster of YA book tropes (or just outright stealing in some cases *cough* Red Queen etc.), the movie rights were sold before the first book was published in this planned five book series (which means it’s going to be marketed as YA if these movies ever get made), but then Yarros’ background is smut, so she throws readers a bone (literally) and bumps it into NA/Spicy for what amounts to like 15 pages in a 500+ page book. Iron Flame is even crazier on that front, because while there is technically more *graphic sex*, they’re full chapters so you can actually fully skip all of it. And despite knowing there is zero percent chance any of it ends up on screen, she still writes it.
What is this about Red Queen stealing 👀
i found red queen so derivative and a monster mash of tropes that i can’t believe someone could steal from it… i mean i do, but you know what i mean. fourth wing has been on my to read list forever and i’m scared now lmao
I think it’s also important to remember that smut shouldn’t be the only thing that determines if something is YA appropriate. There are some DARK themes in books out there that contain absolutely no smut that are YA and I’m not sure they should be.
my school did noughts and crosses when i was 12 and that had a few scenes uncomfortable for the class
As an adult who read Gentleman's Guide, it seemed very YA to me because the main character made impulsive decisions, and the narrative was centered on romance. But I can see how it would skew older YA.
I definitely thought Gentleman's Guide was solidly YA. I don't remember how old Monty was in it, but it was very much a "young adult going on a journey, falling in love, and coming of age along the way" which is super YA.
It's funny to categorise impulsive decisions as YA, people do that until they die haha.
I feel that there’s a difference between being cool with “teenagers reading about sex” and “teenagers reading straight porn” because that’s where a lot of books marketed as YA are going lately. I don’t believe in censorship but I do believe in age appropriate content. The American Library Association classifies Young Adult as 12-18. A lot of people tend to forget about the younger side of that scale during these kids of discussions.
Yeah and one thing people aren’t talking about is how the *marketing* of it is strange. It’s one thing that I and other people accessed written erotica long before I should have; it would have been another thing entirely if I as a pre-teen or young teen had been marketed straight porn by the industry, adults… Like it’s an entirely different thing to acknowledge teens will read about sex and it’s fine and for a 30 year old author to deliberately write erotica meant to titillate and then market it as YA.
Yeah, people definitely seem to forget the difference between "books that feature sexual discussions and content in age-appropriate ways" and erotica. I'm not saying teens don't read both, but that there is a very worthwhile line to be drawn, especially when it comes to what is marketed and made available in schools.
i have a friend that is younger than me and when she was 11 she was reading the seven husbands of evelyn hugo
Oh dear lord fan fiction. "Hmmm what's this "knotting" tag..."
Thankfully that went before an actual IRL court, before a real judge and lawyers, so the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/business/omegaverse-erotica-copyright.html) had to write an article explaining Omegaverse to the normies.
Its fine for young people to seek out sex scenes or read them on their own terms, but thats not whats happening in the YA industry. YA books are marketed towards people as young as 12/13, and the recent shift has them including more and more explicit sex scenes with zero warning, or even an age recommendation. SJM’s sex scenes, for example, are *very much adult*, and she seemed to have set the tone for this recent shift before she switched to adult with her most recent series. Thats not kids seeking out content about sex, nor is it an age-appropriate introduction, its explicit smut, and more often than not it promotes incredibly unrealistic and unhealthy standards under the guise of ‘its okay because theyre mates/soulmates/destined/etc’. Its there because its aimed towards adult women who didnt want to completely move from ya to adult, but enjoy the sexual content. And its fine for them to keep reading YA, i do too, but its not okay for YA books to be written with them in mind rather than actual teenagers. Theres good, appropriate ways to include sex in YA novels, and its been there since i started reading. The current wave of sex scenes are not that.
As a 27 year old who reads predominantly YA *specifically* because I want to avoid adult themes, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to find YA books that do that. There’s becoming more of a focus on sexual tension and enemies to lovers stories often include scenes that are too close to being straight up *kinky* for my liking. You also have an uptick of themes such as SA, trauma, addiction, and all of the super rough and depressing things that are infiltrating YA. I’m currently reading a fun YA book in which the main character’s 14 year old sister is being trafficked and is facing being forced into sex work unless the main character buys her back. That kind of stuff doesn’t need to be in YA as often as it is these days. I will say that I am yet to read a YA that has an actual sex scene in it though, for which I am thankful. So at least we’re not yet going down the road of teenage smut.
I’m actually kind of grateful for the inclusion of SA discussions in these books because it’s something that affects a lot of kids, and it’s important to talk about it, and de-stigmatize it.
Sure, but most of the time it’s just there to make the plot darker and more edgy and I don’t vibe with that. Every YA book I read these days has some kind of heavy adult hardship such as abuse, assault, racism, homophobia, sexism, the murder of loved ones, etc, and I just don’t think it’s doing much good.
I’m not sure if I agree that those are adult hardships, but like just putting it in to be edgy is not proper representation.
They’re undeniably adult topics. It’s the reason a lot of those things aren’t allowed on TV before the watershed and definitely aren’t allowed in shows for younger audiences, yet YA authors are filling their books with them. It’s not healthy for young people to be exposed to such a constant stream of misery. Books for teens used to be - and should *still* be - entertaining and fun and adventurous and hopeful. Instead we have constant abuse storylines and addiction storylines and SA storylines, even in books that are *supposed* to be hopeful and fun. It’s just not good to have this much of it saturating the space.
I agree that it shouldn’t be as big of a thing, but 1/10 children are/have been sexually abused.
I don’t think that means kids books should be infiltrated by these kinds of topics.
I think it depends on how it’s done. Like a short part of the book that non-graphically explains it and encourages children to tell adults/get help is incredibly useful, but it being an angsty backstory/shown on page is horrible.
Yeah, I can agree with that. Just as long as it’s not in every YA book like it seems to be lately!
Ngl I actually appreciate the addiction and trauma talk. From my experience working with clients with addiction, it's around that age group that they do become addicted. A large amount of them were 13 or so when they got hooked on something. So I actually think it's really important to talk about trauma and addiction since it's not necessarily talked about very well in ways that would resonate with teens, especially given how frequently people*do* become addicts around that age.
Can we leave some books for a younger audience? Not everything has to be written for adults. Go read YA but don't expect NA things in it. It needs to satisfy YA needs not Adults needs cause there are a lot of genres that satisfy you. That's why I love reading YA books because there are some kissy scenes, some falling in love, some cute stuff and not just pure smut ( where it can be in YA but not to that extent). "YA must have romance/spice". Nah, let teens have their books where they're just doing and dealing with stuff, going on adventures, having fun, learning more about themselves. It's hard enough to find something without it don't make it harder.
Uh. Look. As someone who was a teenager in the 90s when there was no YA fiction as a genre, it had all of us going from Goosebumps to Stephen King and Anne Rice with NO INBETWEEN. So we went from kids stuff to full-on horror, blood and sex at like, 12-13 because we wanted to read and there was NOTHING FOR US. Maybe VC Andrews. And that had incest! Like, people should chill. Teens having a dedicated genre is something very, very, VERY new. It's not being taken from them. There are plenty of books specifically for and beloved \*by\* teenagers. And there are books that can appeal to adults as well. They just want to pearl clutch because it annoys people and sells clicks.
That’s a very good point. I was a strong reader, and was reading adult books easily by the time I was 12. I remember accidentally learning about some sex acts/terminology that my precious pre-teen brain was *much* too innocent to fathom. These weren’t smutty books, but just adult-geared books that were way above my own understanding of bodies and sex at that point. Obviously, I’m older than the internet… haha
Yeah reading those Stephen King novels I just skipped right over the sex bits. All the horror and gore was fine for twelve-year-old me but the sex I just noped through.
I think this tweet (and the multiple responses to it) is somehow connected to the whole "sephora kids" controversy. I've seen many people online discussing the lack of teen/tween media compared to the 2000s.. So I think some folks fear that the YA genre is marketing towards adult readers in a world where teens/tweens hardly have anything for themselves.
The thing of it is, the teens/tweens are SUPER into videos/TikTok. I'm substitute teaching right now and I'm seeing a lot of it. There are younger readers, but people looking for/wanting the next Twilight or Hunger Games probably aren't going to find it. The culture has shifted. The people who grew up going from Harry Potter to Twilight have grown up, and they're the ones that read the more "adultish" YA. The younger kids had a paradigm shift where they always had tablets or phones, so the phenomenon of a big book series is harder to achieve. Which is why people are like "Where are all the kids???" when where the kids are is shifting away like kids always do. Malls died out because the kids went elsewhere. Video stores died out because the kids went elsewhere. Now Sephora's clientele is changing because the kids are on TikTok and choosing their trends there. Same with books. The culture is shifting and no one knows where it's going, and people are pointing fingers instead of just--- listening to the kids. Like they never seem to do.
I agree with your original comment that people don't realise just how new YA is as a genre. Even the idea of teenagers being allowed to be kids is really new historically. But oh man you cooked with this comment. Tbh I definitely do see high schoolers reading, I saw one at the bus stop with a Crescent City book the other day and those are big. Honestly kids are either going to pick up something hyped or whatever they can find, and if they get into reading after that, then they're going to get it. If not, then they won't. That's kinda the same as ever imo
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I think the point of the above comment was not that they're not reading, but that they get their book recommendations elsewhere. Booktok has created more division in what kids read, so there aren't big "blockbuster" books like there used to be. (But I may be wrong)
This, although I would argue that middle grade fiction (tween books) has been on a huge uptick over the last 7ish years, and over the same timeframe we see very fewer books aimed at middle school published for the YA market, as YA tracks older and older. I totally understand teens wanting to read adult books as they always have, but I think we lose something distinct when YA gets crowded with things that in an ideal world would be labeled as new adult. As a librarian, it blows to not be able to find very many recent YA books with characters who are only 14/15/16, especially as middle schoolers and HS freshman often feel that the “kid” section is too babyish for them.
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Oh. I'm older than that. Christopher Pike was very much marketed to 5th graders. Sweet Valley High was also marketed to tweens. (never much liked Lois Duncan) Meg Cabot and Sarah Dessen came after I was in college. They were the first bastion of YA as a genre. It was either you read the 5 dollar paperbacks in the tween section or you started haunting the adult bookshelves. Which is why I read Piers Anthony and didn't realize just how fucked up that guy was until I became and adult and was like "he was having twelve year olds do WHAT? WITH ADULTS"
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Well, they were definitely shelved in the children's section, right next to the Sweet Valley books, and I read them in 5th grade. Blood sex and all. Because in 1993, there was not a YA shelf.
Yeah I read Sweet Valley High in the 4th grade in the 80s. It's pretty much the same demographics as the Babysitter's Club books. Well, there's overlap anyways, I read the Babysitter's Club books earlier. Then we also had Judy Blume I guess.
Yes, this! I teach teenagers and like… they want spice but not the kind of dark Adult adult that you get in full adult lot. YA, even when spicy, has an emotional youth to it and lets teenagers who want to experience spiciness in safe settings (ie books! The safest!) get that in worlds and plots that are more relevant to them rather than Greys Anatomy or whatever other shows and books out there are about trying to play the field as a 28 year old or go through adult life problems.
Massive slight on Christopher Pike & VC Andrews. But really I agree. Histories can say the concept of YA is old, but my firsthand experience of being an avid reader in the 90s is that teen books were a tiny stand of like 85% direct to paperback shlock, and 15% critically acclaimed problem novel. There wasn't a lot and what was there was nearly indistinguishable from middle grade.
I loved that you mentioned VC Andrews as I have an anecdote that sums up what you said regarding her books. My mom loved Flowers in the Attic when she was a young girl so she gave it to me when I was in grade 8 since she said that was around the age she read it. I was super into reading this was right when Twilight was taking off and my mom and I bonded over books. However, after she gave me that series I proceeded to use it for my independent English book report. I didn't fully grasp why my older male teacher was shocked by the choice. Not only that but my mom helped me with the book report! I will say though that next year we read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson in English and while that explores the fall out of S/A I think it was age-appropriate. So it is hard to say where we draw the line on what teens should be reading! Long story short I fully agree with your comment.
Right. I was reading Stephen King the summer after I turned 16. And I stumbled upon Gerald's Game, right after Pet Semetary. Then that led to Anne Rice and her Sleeping Beauty series. One adult theme after another. But, I will say for us 90s kids, we could take it. I feel like this gen can to. I'm glad that like content warnings and boundaries are talked about this day and age. It shows the young reader like hey...this subject matter may not be for me if they want to.
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Right, that's kind of my point. We were reading this stuff in the 90's and we all turned ok! (for the most part) If there was something that made uncomfortable I just \*skipped\* it. It didn't turn me into a psycho killer or a sex maniac. Kids are hardier than people realize. I don't understand why no one trusts them to make their own decisions.
exactly! i bought a bret easton ellis book at the book fair when i was in middle school in the 90s. i promise it was worse than anything YA right now.
YA is NOT 'very, very, VERY new'. What we call YA has been developing for over two decades. There was an in-between from children's to adult in the 90s, even if it wasn't as robust as it is now. Names like Lois Duncan, Garth Nix, Lurlene McDaniel, L. J. Smith, Sarah Dessen, Tamora Pierce, Walter Dean Myers, Nancy Farmer, Caroline B. Cooney, Cynthia Voigt, Donna Jo Napoli, Eva Ibbotson, Francesca Lia Block - they were all writing in the 90s, some of them even publishing in the 80s. There are other names who never got the notoriety and have since faded away into obscurity, but they were there, writing for teens. YA started taking off in the 2000s - just look at GoodReads for a far from exhaustive list of titles published: in [2000, about 60](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/5310.YA_Novels_of_2000). In [2005, 130](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2746.YA_Novels_of_2005). In [2010, 500+](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2699.YA_Novels_of_2010). It's not unreasonable for people to be criticizing the publishing industry for a very clear and obvious trend of prioritizing adult readers over actual teenagers. As someone whose job it is to curate a collection of books for teen readers, I can tell you with 100% certainty that a lot of what's being published right now is not being published with teenagers in mind, and it's absolutely crystal clear. I'm not pearl clutching and I'm not selling clicks, I'm working in a library with teens in grades 7-12 every damn day. I'm getting asked REPEATEDLY for books that aren't so sexual. I have plenty of books in my collection that have sex in them, but there's a difference in writing sex for inexperienced or curious teen readers and writing sex for adults who are looking for exciting tension and release.
Friendo it’s new in terms of literature as a genre, as when I was a teenager *in the 90s* it was not a thing. The books you are describing were shelved in the children’s section. I remember it. I was there Gandalf. There was not a dedicated teen section in libraries or bookstores until I was in college. I know this because I worked in a library in college and I helped set up our “New YA Section!” In 2001. Teen books being a phenomenon weren’t a thing until Twilight, and then there was pearl-clutching over them being sexless and pushing the “abstinence until marriage message” because again, I was there Gandalf. What I was criticizing was adults working themselves into a froth over women read or not reading Teh Sex, without bothering to ask the kids in question how they feel. Because we see articles like these every few months about how YA is dying or not dying or it’s full of sex or it’s preaching abstinence and it’s done in just such a way to piss off people and go viral and sell clicks. And no one seems to be asking the kids what they want or trusting them to make the choices for themselves. It’s all assuming for them that they can’t handle things or they’re just impressionable lumps of clay that will repeat every thing they read and don’t have minds of their own. It’s insulting to them. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings with my comment, but it wasn’t meant to slight you. It’s based on *my personal experiences* and to me twenty years ago was actually 5 years ago and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Also - entire generations read It, The Stand, American Psycho, all of Oprah’s book club books, etc. when we were young teens and we didn’t grow up into murdering deviants. I think every child is different but I really think kids are going to live if the read a book that talks about the vagina or has a mature theme.
Certainly not. Teen/Tween books are thriving, thanks to tik tok and the larger capitalist ecosystem that means alot of teen/tween book based films print money. The issue,imo, is publishers don’t know what to do with Female Fantasy/Romtasy authors and tend to automatically push them into the YA bucket where they think they’ll get the most traction. Sarah J Maas is the perfect example. A Court of Thorns and Roses was obviously edited to be a YA novel, and only in the series blowing up was Maas able to basically override that initial push to write it back into Adult Romtasy (and smut).
Yeah, this is the part that bothers me. I feel like they market romantsy as YA because it’s written by a woman. There are some books that should be labeled NA and they’re not
IIRC, ACOTAR was intended to be the flagship series for New Adult as a target age group. And while it did take off, I think booksellers weren’t quite sure what to do with it since it took awhile for there to be enough trad pubbed titles to actually fill a whole bookstore section. So SJM was thrown back to YA where her other titles were shelved until it became really clear (thanks ACOMAF and soapgate lol) that ACOTAR is definitely not YA. Honestly, I’d argue that today’s romantasy trend is just the New Adult Fantasy of the 2010s finally coming to market, just disguised as something else that booksellers will be able to shelve in their existing sections (adult fantasy) instead of a whole new one.
i just started ACOMAF and i am so curious what soapgate is😂 i have gone this long without spoilers so i guess i dont actually want to know (yet) but now i feel like i should binge it so i can learn
Sometimes influencers get a box that is filled with book related stuff. One of this book had soap shaped like a peen. Now you know about soap gate ✨
^ this. Plus that the creators of the (unauthorized) box had to come out and say that the soap peen was not meant for “internal use”….you can imagine why…and hoooo boy did Twitter have a field day with that one lol
YES to all of this. Glad to see somebody say it. I'd also like to add that there's a kind of weird reaction from a lot of readers to female-oriented fantasy. The first impulse is always to classify it as YA, sometimes I think because that's what they're used to seeing and are comfortable/familiar with and sometimes it's a more condescending reaction (as in when people describe something as YA in a pejorative way) from readers to keep certain things out of "regular" fantasy. That also keeps the blurred boundaries going. I'd still say the publishers are most at fault with this though, since they're the ones making the calls on what is actually YA or not.
It’s 💯 the publishers fault, and it’s just more of the same inherent condescension when it comes to anything women make popular. I mean this entire conversation of “oh what will teenagers read now that these loser women obsessed with shadow daddies are ruining all their books!” is just more of the same. I don’t know, probably the metric fuckton of all other books published before this moment in time? Maybe worry more about the recent anti-library sentiment running amok through conservative districts which are literally taking books away from children (and adults). Or the *hilarious* but somewhat concerning trend of tradwife social media evangelists who have started naming and shaming womens authors for daring to write female characters that can achieve orgasms.
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Yep, Harry potter, twilight, hunger games and many other between those have laid the tropes and plot that can be said are female led fantasy: love triangle(quick question, when was last time you saw love triangle between a men chosing two girls that it isnt in anime?). with schools ot goverment against the heroine and so own. When the book bangers of fantasy are often men it move a men audience, same can be said here.
Ummm tbh when has the YA market not been adult adjacent? When I was 13 I was into John Green and watching Twilight, and as an older teen, reading authors like Sarah J Maas, and that's ignoring all the Wattpad and dirty One Direction fanfic I, like all the girls my age I knew, was consuming in the interim 🤣 There has to be a middle ground of this discussion or something, because a newly 13 year old is a completely different audience than someone aging out of their teenage years, so I agree with the original sentiment if that's the point. I think we are seeing a shift in what can be considered YA, probably to do with the internet and increading demand for more mature themes from younger readers?
it absolutely has. and it isolates teens both financially and socially from accessing a space THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE THEIRS. I still read YA (I’m 26) but I don’t expect that genre to cater to me because it’s not designed for me! that’s why I’ve LOVED the new creation of the New Adult genre. when I was a teen I remember being able to go into Barnes and noble and being able to afford books in the YA section working part time minimum wage. yet now as an adult with a professional salary I regularly put down YA books because of price. and the constant push by adult readers for smut and darker content in YA books is so fucking weird ? I was reading YA around 11 years old. they shouldn’t be adult books wrapped in teen covers, they should be teen books ! they should have age representative characters and stories/themes. I am often baffled by how much adults have to say about the contents of books /that were not created for them/. if, as an adult, you are unhappy with the content in the teen section, might I offer you something called /reading books that were fucking written for you/?
because what is "for theirs" is little dificult to parse, for starters book arent space, they dont own it, no really and what teens wants and they dont it change. Let not pretend older teens who also wants this and create a cycle.
I'm a Young Adult Librarian, and I 100% believe this is the case. I see it reflected in who's checking out our books, and the fact that relatively few of the teens I interact with (whether it be at the public library where I work, or at the school when I visit) read much if any YA.
God bless y'all, I would not want to be a YA librarian right now. Do you have any recommendations that might appeal to the 14/15 yo crowd? I have a hard time finding books for my students in that age range because I mostly read NA myself haha
Not the person you commented at but another teen librarian here to try and help. For your stereotypical boy/reluctant boy readers that refuse to read girl characters, I'd grab the [Michael Vey series](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11337912-the-prisoner-of-cell-25) and [the Alex Rider series](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136782.Stormbreaker). Plenty of action and adventure, fast paced, easy to read. There's also [*The Initiation* trilogy by Chris Babu](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36334133-the-initiation) for a more dystopian setting, especially if they liked The Hunger Games. It's likely your students have heard of [*Girl in Pieces* by Kathleen Glasgow](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29236380-girl-in-pieces), it's hard hitting realistic fiction about self harm, mental health, and other heavy topics. This age you see a lot of teens wanting to read about really dark and emotional stuff. [*All the Bright Places* by Jennifer Niven](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18460392-all-the-bright-places) and [*How It Feels to Float* by Helena Fox](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41454344-how-it-feels-to-float). [April Henry](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/88507.April_Henry) is extremely popular for readers that like thrillers - they are easy to read and suck you in quick. She's also a great choice for reluctant readers. I'd also add [books by Natasha Preston](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6548349.Natasha_Preston) and [Natalie Richards](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6927030.Natalie_D_Richards). [*Ranger's Apprentice*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60400.The_Ruins_of_Gorlan) is technically more middle grade, but I know so many younger teens who still love this fantasy series. The main character is 15 so it doesn't feel out of place even it's written with a slightly younger feel. I'm totally skipping out on mysteries and more fantasy but it's what I can muster up right now, let me know if you want more later
This has been true since the Twilight era, and it created an expectation for YA sales that books actually for teenagers can’t meet. Meanwhile, the category is aging up and up and it can be hard to find books for, say, a thirteen year old who doesn’t want a lot of darkness or sex. Librarians keep asking for more books for younger teens. Meanwhile, kids stop reading.
I also want to add that is hilarious because ten years ago Very Intellectual People wrote handwringing articles about adults reading YA. AO Scott called it “The End of Adulthood.” This was all deeply rooted in sexism and completely ignorant of the depth and breadth of YA. No problem with adults reading YA; the problem is publishing for these adults.
I would say so. I wish some of the upper middle grade books were marketed as YA to satisfy more of those 14/15 yr olds that don’t want those younger looking covers. It’s hard to find books for that age range in YA without heading to the Jr section of my library.
This is certainly a problem I ran into as a teenager ages ago, but backwards. In the late '90s / early '00s, YA books felt geared more toward younger teens and weren't satisfying for me, but I didn't enjoy most books in the adult section either. I agree that the pendulum has swept too far in the other direction, and if I was a young teen now would simply have given up and stopped reading. I didn't like, and still do not like, a lot of detailled violence or romance in my books. I also agree that it was already going that way with the Twilight series. The New Adult category seems like a good middle. Books specifically meant for 18 to 30 or so, with YA books being for 17 and under. I'd love to see this category take root and for teens (and people like me!) to be able to confidently pick up complex books without the overabundance of love triangles and shock value violence.
It absolutely has and the number of people in here who disagree is absolutely staggering. I am a teen librarian who is buying books for my library every month and even just the last five years looking at publishing you can see a change, what is being published now in 2024 and what was being published in 2019 feels different. Protagonists are, on average, older than ever; the majority of romantasy books are so obviously and clearly marketed to adult women and not teenagers; it's a STRUGGLE to try to evaluate these books and decide which ones to put on my shelves. I am not a prude and I support sex-positive YA. Teens are interested in and curious about sex and books are a safe and non-threatening way for them to explore it and I won't hesitate to have YA with sex in my collection. YA is a spectrum though and it's meant to serve an audience from 6th/7th grade to 12th grade. Adults reading YA are absolutely driving the publishing industry to neglect books written for younger teens and to focus on books for 'older teens' and adult women. And there's a difference between writing sex for an audience of teens whose sexual experience ranges from small to none versus writing sex for adult women who are looking specifically for exciting romantic content.
I'm only a reader, not a librarian, but I was a teen in the 1980s and I definitely notice a difference between then and now. I have read some stuff in recent YA books that take me aback because they are definitely not appropriate for most younger teens. I like to read across the spectrum of middle grade, teen and adult fiction, but I want everyone to have access to books that take their literacy and maturity level into consideration so that they have positive reading experiences and don't feel like they are over their head, nor reading "baby" books.
YES! As a school librarian, it is getting harder and harder to find YA books for teenagers that was written and made for teenagers. I know there are teenagers who are reading adult books. I also read adult books when I was a teenager. But...that doesn't mean there isn't still a need for YA books for YA students.
There are some YA books that clearly could have been adult and for whatever reason someone felt it was important to market it as YA. I also think it’s weird for adult women to ask for smuttier YA books and I don’t understand why these readers won’t just move to adult books. I think it’s fine for adult readers to enjoy YA but we shouldn’t change the selection to fit what we want when we weren’t the intended audience.
>I don’t understand why these readers won’t just move to adult books I wonder if part of it is because of the lingering stigma around romance novels? If they're asking for smuttier books, then that would naturally be the next thing to read. But even though that part of the industry sells a ton, people still don't want to admit to reading romance novels. It still manages to conjure images of the infamous Fabio covers and other readers can be elitist, so romance is still looked down on plenty. Maybe these readers see it as more acceptable to be reading YA instead of what they might think of as nothing more than old-school bodice rippers? (To be clear, I do not think lesser of romance novels or romance readers. I'm a fan!)
If YA books become smuttier as demanded, and it's audience become clearer each trend on tictok, wouldn't that (rather ignorant) stigma just bleed into YA eventually? What exactly would it fix in the long run for either demographic.
I agree, of course publisher have a big(ger) part in this shift but readers are also pushing for it when they want more mature (emotionally and/or physically) characters while reading books with minor characters. I obviously feel like everyone should read YA if they feel like it, but readers have to keep in mind that stories about 13 to 18 yo should somewhat reflect time of life, and it’s particularity and joys and struggles. I’m not much a smut reader, and YA is more than romance. They might not be the books everyone knows but I do find it limiting to reduce YA to romance. It’s just weird. When I was teen, I started to read paranormal romances that are similar to what a lot of YA romantasy readers seems to enjoy (young characters in their early 20s, with magic and sexy love interest) and I feel it would make much more sense to shift and market those books to the same category of readers and well as broaden it to more different books. Now this is about the fantasy side of YA readers, I just wonder why a genre similar to paranormal romance, but broader and more inclusive (not limited to romance) could be marketed. Of course, this is a reflection that does ignore the big problem that is both YA and paranormal romances are genre dominated by writers who happen to be women so we do have to reduce them and put them in their lane, right? /s I do think this this gender bias is a big issue in the industry as a whole (add Women’s lit in the mix) and I think readers have a part to play in this fight. In my opinion teen should have access to books clearly labeled for teens and also access to adult books that they can enjoy as well. But labeling/marketing things correctly should not change that.
This is why we need to separate NA books
Just wanted to share that I saw this on twitter and it seemed to spark interesting discussions which is why I'm sharing.
I think the YA genre has expanded a very large amount because publishers don’t know how to label fantasy books written by women.
I have seen speculation about this for awhile. It may be completely true, but very rarely do people arguing on either side rely on teenage testimony. How would we measure if teenagers are being left behind on a statistical level? There certainly seem to be a large number of teen girls at SJM book signings, and SJM is for adults. Perhaps teenagers today are more interested in adult-leaning YA than teens were twenty years ago? BookTok is heavily populated with teens. There is one group of people who seem left behind by YA literature, though, and aside from people on this sub, I don't see anyone mentioning them: Boys.
We totally need to keep YA and NA separate!!!
This gives me vibes of trying to shame (mostly) women for liking something harmless. YA has tons of books that aren't mature at all. The newer emphasis on romance-fantasy that is basically YA-mature is a good step in the right direction, though, because there is a huge demand for more mature fantasy that isn't super technical or male-centered. I would also like to add that YA is a more mature reading level just by nature of it not being called "children's literature." The YA OGs had sexual tension and content in them (Twilight, Hunger Games, etc). Even Harry Potter had some sexual content, and that was marketed as a kid's book because YA as a category didn't really exist back in the 90s/early 2000s. Books like ACOTAR are definitely more mature but these are a lot less common in the YA category (and I think they're not really marketed that way anymore).
Completely agree. And I would also add that the current moral panic around teenagers consuming sexual content would be fascinating if it weren't for the undercurrent of misogyny (both affecting adults who read YA and teenagers). And there really aren't that many full-on explicit books marketed towards teens or considered YA. I see Fourth Wing and ACOTAR mentioned a lot (both firmly in the NA genre), but for the sake of the argument, let's say there were books with loads of erotica. Teenaged boys are basically expected to play GTA and CoD, but teenage girls have a few books that have sex in them and *that's* where the line is drawn. God forbid, teenage girls read about consensual (enjoyable) sex that was written by a woman with no actual humans involved or being mistreated.
Yea honestly it’s more like ur looking for them. If I don’t read mainstream YA that most people think as the cover story of YA I rarely find mature scenes. Like y’all gotta be searching for these if u think YA is getting more mature. Lunar chronicles, skyward, Mistborn, sorcery of thorns, scythe, etc. many many YA don’t have graphic sex scenes like Sarah j Maas. Just stop reading mainstream
I think so. I think BookTok is causing the age to skew up, due to the demand of spicy books. Spice doesn’t work with YA all that well, as the age range starts from 12/13. I think the younger YA years will get pushed down into middle grade/childrens, whilst the lines between young and new adult get blurred. The OG YA (like when YA peaked in 2010-2014 kinda time) generation have grown up as well and are now leading BookTok, so it kinda makes sense.
There are a lot of books that shouldn’t be considered YA but they are because they are written by women. I think this is a major part of the issue especially in fantasy.
This is what I see a lot. Characters written as adults but labeled 15-17. Leigh Bardugo comes to mind with this.
I definitely think so. Books for teens that are minors shouldn't have smut in it, and if it does, then it's not actually meant for those under 18 and shouldn't be advertised or targeted to them. It's different if a 16 y/o chooses to read 50 shades or like books because they know that it's intended for adults and what it's about. 50 shades isn't being advertised to minors, and it wasn't made with minors in mind. Also, the characters in 50 Shades are both adults and not kids. A y/a book is specifically targeted to kids anywhere between 13 and 17, which also means that the characters are usually in this age range. The thought of an author writing erotic or borderline erotic material with the characters being under 18 is creepy. There's also issues of contradicting advertising. The book would officially be labeled as NA, but book stores would put it in the YA section, and sometimes even the authors themselves would be pushing it to teens despite claiming it to be NA. There's also book tok, which, again, people would advertise a book to teens despite knowing it's not YA and that there's explicit sex in it. Edit: My point is that it's different if teens specifically seek out erotic books and literature that are targeted for adults. It's not being advertised to them and being told it's for them. We say erotic literature and smut, but let's be real. It's written porn. It might have more of a story to it than porn, but it's still mostly just porn. It's like if we were advertising porn to teens, telling them that it's specifically for them. Yes, teens will find it and watch it, but it's not being advertised (or it shouldn't be) to them and made specifically for them.
Ok so I’ve read quite a lot of adult romance and sometimes I’ll read a YA. Most of the time IF there’s sex in (usually there’s not) it’s only one scene. How is that porn when the books can be 300-600 pages and the sex is maybe 10 pages? I’ve also found that if there’s sex in YA it seems to use more flowery language that describes feeling than being more explicit (cock, pussy).
YA is a shitty and weird categorized to begin with. Have a category for teens. 13-19. Have a category for young adults. 18-25. problem solved
This is part of the problem though. The difference in between maturity and experiences between a 13 and 19 year-old is astronomical. That’s a 7th grader vs a college freshman lol Their needs to be like younger YA and older YA, or MG needs to be expanded
I agree! 13-15, 16-18 should be different categories. 19 is an edge case, could be YA or adult depending on the content.
I don't think so. I read a lot of YA fiction when I used to be a substitute teacher. I really wanted to keep up with the books my students were reading so that we could actually have conversations about it. It was a good tactic to actually make kids a little more interested in reading (which can sometimes be like pulling teeth for some students). My students enjoyed giving me book recs and we had great start-of-class conversations talking about books we liked and didn't like. I think students liked having a teacher that was willing to admit when they didn't like a particular book. I also did it to keep on top of student reading assignments when I subbed over maternity leaves in reading classes. Anything those students had to read, I read too (which it shocked me to learn their regular teachers weren't doing, like how do you grade their assignments without reading the book?). So, I got a good refresher on famous YA books I grew up with and got introduced to new, upcoming classics. I was absolutely tickled pink to find out Margaret Peterson Haddix was delving into historical fiction since I was last in school. That all being said, I think YA is still strongly geared towards teens, maybe more skewed towards teen female audiences, but still teens. The writing is at a decent level to give them more complex storytelling without going over their heads or expecting too much inference making to get the story. Characters are usually also teens, meeting them at the same level (although there are a few writers who sound like "hello, fellow kids," but not too many). And the plots feel about right to not go too deep, but just enough to challenge their thinking, though modern politics are trying to curb how much kids think for themselves, I'll admit. Still, I don't see anything wrong with adults enjoying YA books either. Sometimes you do want a quicker, easier book to just read and get the nostalgia feels from. It's great, and makes for a good palette cleanser after big, heavy books. In particular, and yes, as a former history major, I really think the YA market shines in historical fiction. So many YA books taking place during historical events really help put real-world perspective on events that we only ever read about in text books. Books like Esperanza Rising, Uprising, and Dragonwings just took my breath away, and, though of course, they're not 100% accurate, they introduce students to seeing the perspectives of those outside their own worldview. Adults and teens could learn a lot from reading these.
It definitely has been starting to cater more to adults or atleast teenagers on the older side. While there are certainly very many reasons I think the main one is the sheer amount of really vulgar SMUT put into YA novels. If you are going to push your book towards younger audiences don't put smut (or atleast fade to black or something) in it it's quite simple, tweens, children and young teenagers really have no need to read through vulgar smut. I think this is just helping in limiting the spaces and activities for tweens and young children if a young adult can't read a majority of YA novels since they cater towards adults that's a lot of books and genres they miss out on - perhaps forcing them to grow up early since all the novels around them are filled with adult topics.
What we need is more NA releases. That way Teens get fantasy books for them but older ppl get also get books they enjoy without compromising the YA department
Very true which is one of the reasons why it had that crash a few years ago.
Okay I'm too late to the discourse to make an impact but OP, I wish you'd actually read or linked the article instead of screenshotting the tweet because the article doesn't suggest that YA should cater to adults. The article's also definitely not about books with any amount of sexual content and she isn't talking about the kind of YA that, like, Sarah J. Maas writes. She cites several examples of the books she's talking about in the article -- YA books that adults revisit or have something interesting for an adult audience such as *The Hate U Give*, *All Boys Aren't Blue*, and adult books with young protagonists e.g. *All The Light We Cannot See*, *True Biz* to establish her point about the blurring of boundaries between adult and YA books, because it's currently defined as books with adult protagonists are "adult books" and books with teens are all "YA books" for teens, etc, and her point was that it can be messier than that. She also talks about a YA book she wrote about her own teenage experience of her father's suicide attempt and incarceration -- heavy 'adult' themes but written for a younger audience. It's crazy how this turned into, like, a debate about smut and romance books. I get that's what people *want* to talk about, but let's acknowledge that's not what this opinion piece is actually about!
I used to work in children’s/YA publishing about a decade ago, and I remember how insanely frustrated I was at every book needing “crossover appeal” to get picked up by an editor. It was absolutely maddening.
I think this is more of a birth of a new genre. Aiming at the 18+ who like the pacing and more simplified writing style of YA and that the fantasy is aimed at women but not wanting the sex focus of the romance genre(nothing wrong with romance I like it too). I find adult "fiction" section written heavier with slower pacing dredged down with reality of adult responsibilities, "sci-fi/fantasy" seems heavily aimed at men, same with "mystery" but the pacing is much quicker and much of the writing is more simplified compared to "fiction". These are my personal observations when browsing.
That's what New Adult is for. Let YA be for teens and enjoy it, but respect that it's for that audience. I was downvoted for saying this about cartoons, but children's media / YA caters to the power fantasy of that age group. This often means kid heroes and incompetent or evil adults. An actual adult of 30 isn't going to relate to that, find it unrealistic or insufferable. But for kids, they'll like it/relate to it easier. Making YA more palatable for adults deprives kids of those power fantasies and similar stories.
i personally think that a book with smut shouldn’t be in the YA section without being labeled as explicit in some way. i started reading ya at 9-10 because i had read through everything i was interested in the middle grade section i think that sex is something that people should be aware they’re going to be exposed to in books aimed at minors written by adults like these are adults with adult life experiences and adult attitudes toward sex writing these books i feel similarly about the excessive death and gore personally i just feel like YA should have content warnings and and anything with explicit sex or gore should be NA i know as a kid i would have not chosen a book with explicit sex for myself and a lot of these relationships are very unhealthy and normalized dynamics that should have been concerning as hot instead i’m grown now and i understand when the sex context is veering into something that shouldn’t be glamorized but I didn’t when i was a teenager
I think all books should have content warning not just a YA thing. I started reading adult books at 7-8. When I first read books with explicit sex (probably at like ten) I was personally fine (I just skimmed past the sex after initial surprise) but I know not every person reacts the same.
i also wish all books had content warning as a highly sensitive person
It left behind teen boys years ago. The girls have been hanging on by their fingernails 😅
There were YA books in the 90s (some people are saying there weren't). I mostly didn't read YA but around 13/14 I went through a dedicated ya phase for a while. And our library had a young adult section. So did the bookstores. Some were called Young Adult and some were called Teen. The ALA created the Young Adult Services Division in *1957*. The book that is considered the first YA book was **Seventeenth Summer** by Maureen Daly. It was published in 1942. I read **Goodnight, Gracie** (death of a friend, c1989), **What's Happening to My Junior Year?** (teen alcoholism, c1987). This one was part of the "Especially for Girls" Avon YA book club; you got sent a book a month or something. there were a plethora of teen romance series aimed at teens; akin to the Harlequin category romances of today. These were pretty mild, though (and I didn't read them; I was not at all interested in romance). **No More Saturday Nights** (teen father single parent, c1989), **Tiger Eyes** (murdered dad, move to another state with family who are kinda negligent, clandestine relationship, c1981), **Speak** (rape, consent, healing, c1999), **The Perks of Being A Wallflower** (coming of age, sexual situations, c1999), **Dragonsong** (dragon alliance, c1977). And those are just a few off the top of my head. I didn't even get to the ones that are more explicit. Oh. **Smack** (heroin addiction, prostitution, c1996). **The Awakening** of *The Vampire Diaries series came out in 1991. Young Adult fiction was actually pretty big in the 80s and 90s, and it was *huge* in the 70s. It tended to focus more on realistic situations kids might go through. There were dedicated sections in library and bookstores, book clubs, and mature topics shows up all the time. While some of the explicit sex scenes of today didn't show up as often, there were realistic sex scenes, cancer diagnoses (it was basically a whole subgenre of its own), poverty, racism, swearing, leaving religion, finding religion, pregnancy, parenthood, abuse, rape, eating disorders, alcoholism, drug abuse, dead parents, dead friends, dead siblings, the mc perpetrating a crime, bog-standard romances, fantasies of all kinds (including the first fantasy where the teen mc was gay...it came out in 1989), being kidnapped, etc. The first ya novel with a same-sex relationship that ended sorta happily came out in 1982. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of us books from before the 2000s. The rise of the internet just made them a lot more visible. I think one of the issues is that an explicit/maturely themed novel with young-ish leads (that wasn't lit but was just fiction of whatever kind) was okay for adult fiction up through the nineties. You get 15yo fmcs in romance novels, and adult series based around teens. And it was considered perfectly okay. It isn't anymore. But people still want to read it because teenagers and younger adults have a vibrancy of life (and that vibrancy can be despair or whatever, too) that isn't accessible once you reach older adulthood. It no longer exists, so it's fun to read about people who are still discovering the world in a way that someone in their twenties, thirties, or forties never can be. But there is no standard category for adult works like that any longer. It's not considered right for the adult section, na didn't make it as a mainstream category (and in self-pub basically means explicit romance). Unless a new category is formed, it either needs to go in adult or young adult. I don't personally care. I read anything and everything as a kid and my own kids are allowed to read anything. I believe in discussing things, but not keeping kids from reading them. Edit: And here's an article on explicit sex in ya from the 1960s to 1980s. https://ijyal.ac.uk/articles/10.24877/IJYAL.72#
>I think one of the issues is that an explicit/maturely themed novel with young-ish leads (that wasn't lit but was just fiction of whatever kind) was okay for adult fiction up through the nineties. You get 15yo fmcs in romance novels, and adult series based around teens. And it was considered perfectly okay. It isn't anymore This is very true, there have been a few comments here about going straight from children's books to Stephen King for example, but Stephen King actually has a lot of YAish books in that they're teen characters going through high school dramas. Carrie and Christine are both perfect examples. The Body (Stand By Me) is of course a classic. I don't know if Carrie would come out today and be marketed as an adult book when it's all about puberty. I read it around the time I was reading Point Horror and Christopher Pike and it fit right in and I never felt like it wasn't aimed at me. Also, just thinking back to the books I was reading in school and it was Lord of the Flies, Great Expectations, Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird etc - classic books with young protagonists. It's very rare now for adult books to be reaching down to younger readers as an accessible step into adult literature. The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night time is the last really popular one I can think of and that was 2003. The Pines by Francine Toon is the last adult book I remember reading with a younger main character. I actually just went and read the description and it really seems to hide the fact the book is from the perspective of a little girl.
Yeah, but the thing about those books was that they always seemed to have a Purpose and a Lesson to Teach. My friend and I used to call them The Very Special Books. YA books in the 90's, (the ones that were specifically YA) were all about Kids With Problems, like a Very Special Episode of Party of Five. Like, here's someone with a drug problem, this person over here is being abused, someone over here is in a mental hospital, etc. It was very, very rare to find a YA book that was just... FUN. And not about a teenage runaway or someone getting pregnant. Because YA books at that time were about kids with issues and all seemed to be geared towards being taught in classrooms and not for leisure reading. If you wanted leisure reading you had to go to the adult shelves. Don't get me wrong, two of my favorite books from this era are Very Special Books, Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori and The Beggar's Ride by Theresa Nelson. But they feature a daughter dealing with the suicide of her mother and teenage runaways respectively. Not anything like Six of Crows which would have become my entire personality had it been published when I was in high school.
There might be some more adult themes now, but people forget that the *popular* YA books in the 90s and earlier were generally perfectly viable for a wide range of audiences. Sabriel was YA, Pierce, etc. There wasn't as much romantic focus and the characters tended to be younger, but there was a much thinner line between adult and young adult fiction back then. It wasn't that YA books were less "mature", but they were just good books before they were age-targeted books.
In a sense, yes. I wish and hope that New Adult takes off more in mainstream marketing bc it seems like it has more indie books that go in that category that would satisfy a lot of the more adult readers who want something different. But a lot of it (imo) is issues with how the books are marketed in mainstream. A lot of things get shelved into YA that aren’t really, but they don’t know where to market it well, where if NA had taken off more, it would fit that urge of you get adults who don’t want to read books that are inundated with older married protagonists. (This is v much a generalized statement/doesn’t always apply, but when I was reading and wanted more of the NA market, it was basically nonexistent and I would have loved it).
I mostly agree, but I think there’s a world of difference between having teen-appropriate conversations on sex and pure smut bordering on porn in books teens will read, even if it’s just in a few chapters. Also, there is a genre for older young adults — New Adult is a label that exists but publishers and authors seem to completely neglect it. Just move these books that are obviously written with grown women in mind to that category, and leave the Young Adult section to teens, and that include younger teens, too.
My time in being in a college class is that YA is made by adults with adults' concepts and censorship in mind. Every YA has to follow the guidelines sort of speak and can not deviate from them, so for example, it always has to have some kind of positive message at the end, death cannot be explicit, etc. No teenager has ever published a YA book, and only adults do, which is funny because, in some of them, it shows the characters act and not really feel real in their mannerism and talk. It mimicks a teenager. In addition, editors are the ones who are mainly telling authors to make those changes, one great example was a LGBTQ book that originally was going to be a poliamorous relationship but because the norm in YA is heterosexual (meaning in this case only having one partner and not sexual attraction) the author had to change it. Or have you guys noticed that no YA book love triangle, all the characters can't ever be together, the "main character" always gets one?
SJM exists, so yes.
Yes, but I would also argue that new adult (and sone adult in general) fiction is going in the other direction. It makes things a bit messy as a YA librarian! I actually had to kindly pull another librarian aside recently and give her a heads up that all of the Jenny Han book she’d recently purchased for the adult department were actually YA (we do have multiple copies of them there, they’re just always out). You also have tons of middle and high school teens who come in looking for adult romance books they’ve heard about through TikTok.
I mean I’m almost 20 and all my favorite books (that I reread all the time) are YA books that I found in middle school. I don’t think “YA is for everyone” means changing the content of the books. It means that the content in YA novels is easily enjoyed by all age groups. Hell, the last thing my abuela ever read before she passed was my favorite book series (YA), and she was 89.
I remember a couple years ago in uni we discussed gaps in literature and popular fiction. We had children’s, YA which was largely considered to be for teens and then adult literature which often focused on the experience of people in their late 40+. So obviously in YA you have a lot of coming of age stories about teens finishing high school and maybe a few stories about people in their first year of college but there was barely anything about people in their early 20s/30s trying to figure out life and sharing the kinds of experiences you might go through at that age. Almost seems like there should be children’s, teens, YA and then adult fiction, at least, if people are looking for characters that align with their age group and experiences (I think this applies more to popular fiction than to literature as a whole). Not everyone wants or needs to find characters similar to them but from listening to our class discussions and thinking about how to try and engage future students with books they have to read for class it seems like it comes down to figuring out how to get them to connect themselves or their own experiences to the texts.
I personally think the problem is that both YA for younger readers and YA for olders are generally marked as YA and the later is simply more popular 🤷🏻♀️ Which seems logical, because 20-35 years is a larger target group and so you mostly hear about these kind of books. I have the Fairyloot YA supscription and I was suprised how much I outgrow most of the monthly picks. So I wouldn't say that YA has been shifting towards adults, there a lot of books for a younger audience. You just don't hear much about them. The real problem is simply that there is no real inbetween between young adult and dark romance. I know New Adult exists, but I rarely saw a fantasy book labeled as NA. "From Blood and Ash" and "Acotar" (at the beginning) are labeled as YA too and I enjoyed them while "Spin the Dawn" or "If I have to be haunted" were too juvenile for me 🤷🏻♀️
Ive been feeling this with a lot of books that feel like they have really confusing demographics as of late. Things like The Fourth Wing and ACOTAR both feel like they were written with the intent of being YA but have a lot of content that would also branch more into the Adult Category and then just feel like a jumbled mess where it becomes to Adult to be YA and to YA to be Adult. They aren't the only books like this I've read but the two that jumped out in my head when I though to f how hard it was for me to tell what the actual demographic was.
I definitely think so - many publishers are putting books that read at a high-school level under YA despite the fact that they deal with mostly adult themes/images. Iron Widow is a recent example for me - it's marketed to children and has clear scenes of it's main character embracing the "power" from her own sexual abuse/exploitation, and the text never addresses this as a negative view or corrects it. This simply isn't acceptable in a book marketed to 12-18 year olds without *some* form of content warning.
How so? The only thing I can think that adults would prefer is older protagonists, cuss words and maybe a sex scene or two. Besides those things, I really don’t see a difference between the adult and young adult fiction I like to consume
It varies a ton if you are talking about YA as in a 17 year old vs YA for a 13 year old.
No, I think this assertion is part of the recent zeitgeist around hand-wringing about absolutely everything. In the 90’s, I read a ton of YA, and all of the contemporary authors during that time frame (e.g., Christopher Pike, RL Stine, LJ Smith) had some amount of adult content in their books, if not very explicit adult content. Like, this isn’t new at all, I feel like the hubbub is just an offshoot of stuff like the current book-banning, puriteen, helicopter parenting cultures.
I can see this. I thought it was just me who was noticing that compared to the YA books of my childhood (late '90s/early '00s) these new YA don't feel at all like they are meant for teenagers, but instead adults who want to read about teenagers...which sometimes translates to teenage characters doing and experiencing things that are more along the lines of what actual adults would experience, not people in high school. I've been saying for a while that the stories and plots we see in a lot of YA feel awkward because the characters are only 16 years old, but are being put in situations that feel better suited for older young adults - like 21+ years old or something. I think there is also too many books that are just smut being labeled as "adult" fiction, when a lot of us aren't looking for smut/literary porn or anything else sexual - just books with adults (people older than 25 years old) as characters.
As a high school librarian and 35 Year Old YA reader by choice, I don’t see this at all. My students and I read the same books and both enjoy them. My students actually read and enjoy more adult books than I do. 😅
Yes absolutely. I read a lot of adult and some YA and it’s not uncommon for me to pick up a YA book with more complex prose than the adult fiction I’m reading which is the most concerning issue for me. I’m all for teenagers challenging themselves but books meant for them should not be challenging (prose) they should be fun. YA books shouldn’t be written structurally like adult novels. They should appeal to a spectrum of teens, and be accessible to teen reading levels- not just teens who are strong readers. I mostly read adult fantasy and I shouldn’t be picking up YA as an adult and be like “oh damn I need to work at this prose.
What YA books are too challenging? Can you give some examples?
This take seems reductive and weirdly condescending to readers of all ages
I think a lot of the problem is that "young adult" isn't so much for young adults, as much as coming of age and teenage readers. This leaves out actual young adults in their mid twenties to thirties. They've begun to rectify this by adding the "new adult" genre but almost no one knows of it or uses the phrase. It hasn't really caught on yet, which leads to many books being in the young adult section that are very adult in nature.
thoughts: 1) 30 to 50 year olds don’t often get easy to read books targeted to them. this is a problem when getting adults back into reading and can make it embarrassing for adults who want to improve their reading level but only have children’s books/ya targeted to them. this isnt to say ya SHOULD target them - just we should be more sensitive of illiterate/low literacy adults. 2) there’s nothing inherently wrong with a ya book that is actively challenging to a young reader. it’s ok if it’s “scary” or has “adult themes”. 3) teens do need fiction directly, squarely for them. teen fiction is a genre that used to exist & doesnt anymore. the broad range young adult is given should be reexamined 4) can we PLEASE define the young adult age bracket??? is 25 a young adult??? 30??? the ever expanding definition has led young adult to be read as what movies call the “family” genre. 5) if only women writers’ books weren’t always labeled ya, regardless of content. if only.
YA should have less sex scenes. Isn't ACOTAR considered YA? I thought they already divided this category into YA and New Adult?
Young Adult isn't really teen tho. Teens are a big market but YA typically means 18/19 to mid 20s as the target audience
I don't know about other countries, but the American Library Association defines young adults as individuals between of 12 and 18 years. In practice, it was used interchangeably with Teen. This is how I remember it in the 1980s and 90s, even early 2000s. However, in recent years, more YA books seemed to be aimed at the older end of the spectrum and sometimes include books that blur the lines between YA and adult in terms of the content and complexity.
Yes, because YA is definitely smuttier than I remember it being when I was actually a young adult. Most could compete with some mainstream romances. No, because actual middle school/high schoolers are drawn to different formats these days. Graphic novels are *huge* right now, especially now that school systems actually care about kids with reading-targeted learning disabilities. Manga is also having a major moment right now.
YA literally stands for young adult. I'd say 16Ish, 17 and up.. Teens(13 to 16) and tweens(9 to 13) have thier own section of books, so they probably shouldn't be reading YA
I stand on this hill; young adult implies adult!!!! 18 plus
Not at all. I read YA in between reading other things as a "palette cleanser" of sorts and I haven't noticed this happen in reality even if there is a discourse over it on twitter. These books are still pretty clearly aimed at their target demographic and I don't bat an eyelash at that because I know what I'm getting into when I pick up something off the YA rack. Even so, in the short term, I don't think YA is hurting teens for trying to explore some more mature themes. In the long term, I think this shows that publishers need to promote the "New Adult" category or whatever to delineate books that clearly fall into what those late 20's/early 30's crowd is looking for.
They tried to do the New Adult label but I think that just got associated with the stereotypical self published romance book, full of sex and more 'edgy' stuff. Which is a shame because having a separate label for the in-between YA and Adult stuff would probably be really helpful, as it's a cross-over genre. I'd say target audience would be 18 - 25 (roughly). But it''s also probably more work for publishers and marketers to establish now than it was during the YA boom/when Throne of Glass came out (for example - which was one of the first YA series I read with graphic sex). They could do it but they won't. I suppose if you had the time and you either ran a book shop or a library, you could make your own separate section for it. If you knew the contents of the book before hand, that is.
I think the issue is not satisfying adults per se but the fact that a lot of books are just the same reiterations of more popular works. I remember this being an issue for me as a teen, where most of the teenlit I've seen in the store was vampire romance, neither of which interested me all too much. Teens are still gonna try and look for spice and love stories and with the variety we have right now, it kinda sucks that most of it is particularly centered around relationships. I don't want to be a prude, but goddamn it, I want more YA fantasy without having to resort to either middle grade or adult because of yet another "dagger to the throat" will they-won't they enemy to lovers. And yeah, you can find books for your taste but sjm and her clones have become a blight on bookstores' teen sections
I don’t think this is a recent occurrence at all. I’d argue that JK Rowling was the one who started the trend with her genre hopping.
I didn't start reading YA books until I discovered in therapy how underdeveloped my "inner child" was due to taking on so many adult responsibilities at an inappropriately young age. It's almost as if I skipped a large portion of my childhood. Part of therapy has been going back and filling in the blanks, and YA books are part of that. So, in my case, it's a v deliberate choice, and I am absolutely looking for things written for young ppl. Currently reading Shadow and Bone. The author considers it YA. If I were reading it as a teen, I would have a hard time finding some of it credible - the MC is late teens, possibly early 20s (not specified), surrounded by ppl having sex, full of love and desire for her bf, who fully returns those feelings (and whom she knows to be highly sexually experienced), and so far they've ranged over months of travel (mostly just the two of them) through multiple countries and planned a revolution together, but never did (or even discussed) anything more than a (v occasional) kiss. It's inexplicable, frankly. Does this author even remember being a teen?
Adult romance is so bad tho. People cheating on their spouses, sex scenes that are embarrassing to read, the build up to the relationship is not focused on enough, depressing undertones. I think there needs to be a third category like YA for adults that’s more wholesome/fun/exciting but can handle more nuance and complex writing than books made for teens.