YA Lit -- Not Just for Kids Anymore

Sex, drugs, and other "problems of the month" persist as subjects of Young Adult books, but, according to booksellers who recently spoke to BTW, the YA field is growing more fantasy titles, getting more fuzzy about labeling, and appealing to more adults.

"It's gotten edgier," said Valerie Lewis, co-owner of 24-year-old Hicklebee's in San Jose, California. "The line between adults and young adults is thinner than ever."

Instead of hinting at sexual situations, books are more explicit and detailed, she noted. YA stories used to refer to kissing until dawn. What was implied is now more explicit in detailing what went on until dawn.

"The interesting thing," she said, "is that adults are starting to read more YA novels. I think it's because YA novels get to the point faster. Adults who discover Young Adult books really get into it."

At the same time, Lewis explained, "When you have a children's store, the trick is to get a teenager to walk in the front door."

The YA name itself, she said, is part of the problem: "I don't think it's what young adults consider theirs. The term is used by teachers and librarians. But kids don't come in and say, What do you have for young adults. They want to know what you have for teenagers."

Lewis explained, "People buying YA books are mostly parents, grandparents, teachers, people working in literacy, plus some kids coming in. It's probably the trickiest section in the store in terms of getting the right book with the right kinds of communication into the right hands."

At Chinook Bookshop in Colorado Springs, Assistant Manager Meg Sherman is not "seeing as many issue-oriented books as before." If she does, she said, "they're writing it in a less harsh way than they have. They're making more of a story rather than trying to get the issue across."

Her YA section is positioned close, but separate from the younger kids books, a conscious decision to remove Young Adult from Younger Reader. She also uses a "Teen" section sign. "Our division is made around the 12-year-old," Sherman explained.

The last several years have brought on the Harry Potter syndrome, resulting in increased interest in books about wizards or spells, she said. "That's the biggest increase we've seen in terms of a genre."

Her staff reads many more teen books now. Also, she continued, adults read the Harry Potter books, "and we've seen it with A Series of Unfortunate Events -- adults read those. We often put teen books into adult hands. We don't hesitate to do that, and we do that occasionally with the young adult books, too."

As the children's book buyer manager, Alison Morris at Massachusetts' Wellesley Booksmith sees "the quality of the literature is improving so much it would be hard to say these books are about issues so much as they are about character."
On the whole, she maintained, "Things are lightening up a bit."

She finds that a good YA novel is not all about drugs, but "it may be about an adolescent girl and in the course of the book she might have to make a decision about whether or not she is going to use drugs. But I think the point of good literature has to do with how well we connect with the characters. More and more, young adult literature is improving by leaps and bounds."

Morris faces the diurnal struggle of many booksellers -- how to capture the young audience: "They don't want to necessarily think of themselves as young. They certainly don't want to be associated with books that in any way they perceive as babyish."

Young adults, she finds, are not fazed about going to a YA section if they know the section has books that they can relate to their own lives.

Still, the term YA is a challenge. "Someone in the eighth grade may not object to being called a teen," she said, "but by senior year in high school, they probably don't want to be referred to as teen because it implies something younger than what they are."

The "cool" factor becomes a fluctuating barometer. "It may not always be cool to admit to your friends that you're reading," Morris said, "especially in high school. The last thing you want to do is to be labeled something that would brand you as uncool. So … a lot of kids downplay that they're smart, or they downplay the fact that, in their free time, they might be involved in something intellectual. Junior high is tricky. But in the later years of high school, there's a shift that it's cooler to be smart."

Nevertheless, a facet of the cool factor is that many YA books reflect real life situations and attitudes. "So if a teen can say, Oh, I read this book about a kid addicted to heroin, that probably doesn't sound as uncool as talking about reading the classics, for example. So some YA novels can do more to make reading cool," Morris said.

At six-year-old Flying Pig Bookstore in Charlotte, Vermont, co-owner Josie Leavitt likes to see kids "read books at the right age. Because if a 10-year-old skips the middle grade stuff and goes right to young adult, they're missing a huge body of work that they'll never respond to again. So we're not pushing anybody into adult books."

For the most part, she said, "Kids are really good at self selecting what is actually going to be most appropriate for them. They read the back cover, they read a couple of pages, and they say I'm not ready for this."

YA books, nevertheless, still involve intense topics -- a suicidal football star, city girls trying to lose their virginity, abusive relationships, group counseling for a boy who has been hitting his girlfriend, a boy's perspective in dealing with a violent girlfriend relationship.

"But," Leavitt said, "I'm also finding that kids really don't want to read those books."

On the other hand, crossovers between adult and young adult reading flows both ways. She has seen some teenage girls reading and loving The Lovely Bones and books by Barbara Kingsolver. "We'll pepper our young adult section with adult books that don't really have an issue content so the parents will relax a little," Leavitt explained.

She also finds that "some adults are shopping in the Young Adult section now, partly because a lot of Moms caved in to peer pressure and got their young daughters The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and wanted to read it, and then they loved it!"

Overall, Leavitt said, the best selling section is for middle school readers. When kids can drive, it's not so much fun to go to Flying Pig anymore, she said. "So we don't retain as many young adult readers as we'd like. We're constantly striving to get them back in. When they get to be 17 and 18, we get the real readers back."

Sharyn November, senior editor at Puffin Books and Viking Children's Books, launched her own fantasy/science fiction line for teenagers and adults last year called Firebird. She consults her teen advisory board and talks with teens every day. "They keep me honest, they keep my writers on their toes, they demand the best, and they demand just good writing," explained November.

Young people will always read kids books, she said, "and some are reading adult books already. Basically, they're in the midst of a lot of different parts of their lives. As a result, their reading is enormously eclectic.

"You look for a window, you look for a door, you look for a voice that will make sense to you," November said. "If Catcher in the Rye were published today, it would probably be published as a young adult novel."

Conversely, November noted, "I know adults going into the teen section to find good fantasy and science fiction. Lots of books written for teenagers are better written in the sense that you have to hook a teenager instantly."

Teenagers, she emphasized, recognize and reject writing that is condescending. "They are smarter than people think," she said. "They'll put the book down right away. They won't finish it."

November will get a chance to do some handselling herself. She has decided to fill in a gap in her publishing career, by becoming a summertime bookseller at Flying Pig, where she'll be found in the frontline trenches of bookselling.
--Steve Sherman