Comments on: Teenagers? Young Adult? Fiction?

By: gwenda

gwenda — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:29:27 +0000

I definitely remember the weird little strip mall bookstore in the tiny tiny town where we went for Sunday lunch every week had books for older teens on a shelf adjacent to the children’s section. (They also shelved VC Andrews nearby, as I remember it.) That would have been in the ’80s, so definitely by then.

Anita Silvey gave a talk on the history of YA at VC last summer, and I’ll dig out my notes to see what she said.

By: » What makes a novel YA? CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

» What makes a novel YA? CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:48:09 +0000

[...] Larbalestier – Australian author, New York resident – ponders this question on her most recent blog entry, sparking an interesting debate. Justine’s most recent titles are set in New York and Sydney [...]

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 11:46:58 +0000

An author is the name ON a book. A writer is the person putting words IN the book.

Many people want to be authors, but don’t spend the time to be writers.

By: Kathy

Kathy — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 05:35:31 +0000

And now, to explain the difference between an author and a writer…

By: Dave H.

Dave H. — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:04:30 +0000

I just read “Magic and Madness” and there’s no question that it’s YA … but I couldn’t tell you why it is YA.

Brittany’s devouring it – maybe that’s a good definition. If our 13-year-old likes it, it is YA. Or manga. Or Sonic the Hedgehog fan fic.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 03:03:38 +0000

I’m not allowed to comment on this topic.

By: sara z.

sara z. — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:56:46 +0000

Yeah – even when I worked in a book store (a chain) in 1992-94-ish, the “teen” section was like a one-foot wide strip of sparsely populated shelf.

By: Justine

Justine — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:33:52 +0000

Sara: There were definitely no YA sections in book shops in the 1970s. I’d like to know when they did start appearing.

By: Delia

Delia — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:57:57 +0000

It’s more a question of flavor than age, I think. There are novels about children (The Lovely Bones comes to mind) that aren’t for young readers. For me, YA novel is always about some part of the process of becoming an adult, integrating (or deciding not to integrate) into whatever adult society the novel posits.

By: sara z

sara z — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:42:40 +0000

As we all know, wiki is NEVER WRONG: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_adult_literature#History_of_YA

This little history may not be 100% accurate, but I do know that the first novels for “young people” were around well before the 70s. But I do think that the YA categroy *as we currently know it* did really explode in the 70s.

And yeah, there wasn’t even really such thing as high school like 100 years ago.

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 13:13:27 +0000

Agreed: really difficult. Even the age of the protagonists isn't really a guide. Scalzi's just been talking about how his latest book, centered on a 16-year-old girl, is intended to be "accessible" to teenagers but not targeted solely at teenagers. Or there's Amanda Hemingway's Sangreal Trilogy, which features teenage protagonists but also has viewpoint characters who are adults (including the hero's mother). And whilst I really enjoyed Flora Segunda I think that if I'd been reading it as a teenager I might have got mad at how stupid and inept Wilce made her heroine compared to the adults around her.

By: jonathan

jonathan — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 06:36:00 +0000

As Justine said, it really is a tough genre to clearly define. I think that more often than not, it mainly comes down to the age of the protagonist(s).

By: Seth Christenfeld

Seth Christenfeld — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 06:09:46 +0000

How about a case like The Book Thief? Zusak’s previous novels were definitively YA. TBT was published in Australia and the UK as an adult novel and in the US as YA, later being released, I believe, in a YA edition in the UK (I don’t know about Australia).

So, is The Book Thief YA or not?