Articles! PW's "New Adult" and YALSA's "The Next Big Thing"
I love that YA has started to come into its own this past decade or so! There seems to be so much more variety and selection than I remember from when I was a teen, and I feel that YA's reputation as a lesser form of literature is definitely improving. It's great that Adult fiction authors are more and more writing in YA and even Children's fic. Not only do the authors get to cultivate young readers for life, but those readers who move from Children's to YA to Adult with the same author may be more likely to make a successful transition into Adult fic more broadly, which is great for authors, publishers and libraries. I think the label "New Adult" is a useful one for marketing and for descriptive purposes, but I don't think we need to create a new section in libraries that is strictly New Adult, since it is really just a transition slide between YA and Adult and (as one of the articles mentioned) that transition is very fluid. To me, the profile of YA as a section is finally starting to mirror all the characteristics of Adult fic, just maybe with younger characters and less explicit sex and language. There are scifi, fantasy, romances, mysteries, thrillers, urban fic, literary fic, and everything in between, often all bunched together in a single book. Adults reading YA and YA reading Adult--everyone is reading more, and how can that be bad?
Posted to Erika T. and Melanie D.
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