Stigma Against the YA Category

The criticism of the young adult books category that occurs within the greater books community is annoying.  Worst of all, the people criticizing YA don't understand the YA category at all and completely misrepresent what it is as they complain about it. 

These people claim that any kind of book can be lumped into the YA category.  They say that YA books have a simple writing style with shorter sentences and basic vocabulary.  They say that YA books have certain kind of themes, like teenage angst.  Most importantly, they feel that YA is just a marketing label and has no meaning.

These comments are insulting to fans of the YA genre.  Books of varying reading level comprise the YA category.  YA isn't just a marketing label.  If people understood what the genre truly is, then they wouldn't make that kind of statement.

It's widely known in the books community that a significant percent of young adult book readers are adults.  I suspect that this is why young adult books get bashed.  I mean, adults are reading YA?  The horror!  How dare they do that!

Strangely, children's books do not get bashed.  Are book enthusiasts unaware that some adults read only children's books?  I guess not.

I read only children's and young adult books.  This is because I like the innocence of youth.  I want to read stories about characters whose lives are uncomplicated without all the adult problems.  The characters aren't married or divorced.  They aren't worried about their careers.  This kind of book is total escapism.  What's wrong with that?

From The Decade in Young Adult Fiction (quoted to point out the fallacy):

A large portion of the [young adult] genre has always relied on formulaic story lines and high volume, going back to "Carolyn Keene," the collective pseudonym of the many contracted authors hired to write Nancy Drew mysteries from the 1930s onward.  It just wasn't until the 2010s that this kind of fiction showed itself capable of selling in the millions of copies.  Veronica Roth's Divergent trilogy, set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago, sold 6.7 million books between 2011 and 2013.  Copycats proliferated.  Bonanzas are rare in book publishing, but this was a bona fide one.

2011–2013: The Divergent trilogy demonstrated that a dystopian YA trilogy that wasn't The Hunger Games could sell more than 6 million copies.  2012: The Hunger Games movie released. This movie suggested that dystopian YA could be as profitable a multimedia property as the fantasy worlds of Harry Potter and Twilight.

Adult readers were a significant source of the boom.  In 2012, Publishers Weekly reported on a study showing that 55 percent of books intended for a YA audience (readers aged 12 to 17) were bought by adults, and 78 percent of those purchases were for the buyer’s own reading. The largest segment of this group, 30- to 44-year-olds, were responsible for 28 percent of YA book sales.

The article is interesting but wrong.  First of all, the very mention of Nancy Drew shows that the author doesn't know what YA is.  The only Nancy Drew books that are young adult are the Nancy Drew Files, Nancy Drew On Campus, and the River Heights series.  Most people in the general public have never heard of those three series.  What everything thinks of when they hear "Nancy Drew" is the original series, which consists of middle-grade mysteries.  They are not young adult books.

Now, some of you are probably saying, "Wait!  Nancy Drew is 18 in those books."  Sure, but Nancy Drew first entered publication nearly a century ago.  Those were different times.  Children's books from that time often featured characters who were older teenagers.  The modern Nancy Drew books are middle-grade books, even though Nancy is an older teenager.  The original books are classified as middle-grade books as well, since the content is consistent with what one expects from middle-grade mysteries.

The article erroneously includes Harry Potter as a young adult series.  I have seen many comments made by book enthusiasts saying that Harry Potter is young adult.  This is incorrect.  The belief that Harry Potter is young adult shows that these people have no idea what YA is.

Like the original Nancy Drew books, Harry Potter is a middle-grade series.  Middle-grade is a category for readers who are younger than young adult.  Harry Potter is 10 years old at the beginning of the Harry Potter series.  YA books do not feature children who are 10.  It's irrelevant that Harry ages up as the series progresses.  Harry Potter does not suddenly become a young adult series in the last few books.  It's still middle grade.

People also have this odd idea that Harry Potter, which is a middle-grade series, somehow made the YA category popular.  Then what about these books?

Click on the image in order to see it clearly.  Check out the top spines.  Each book has either "YA" or "Young Adult" on the top spine.  These books are all from the 1980s.  I am a Gen Xer, and we loved our YA books.  We still love them.  

The YA books of the 1980s were very popular.  Bookstores like Waldenbooks had large displays of YA books.  It's ridiculous to say that YA books were not popular until after Harry Potter became popular and that no young adult book or series was a runaway success until the 2010s.  

From David Streitfield's article Issues published in the Washington Post on June 25, 1985:

"Chain bookstores tend to be supermarkets of books.  For teen romances, they're a mechanism to force the titles out," says George Nicholson, editor-in-chief of books for young readers at Dell, publishers of Seniors.  "They make shopping easy, and they don't intimidate kids.  There's no one at the checkout desk saying you shouldn't buy this or buy that."

And [youth] are buying these series in tremendous numbers.  Sweet Dreams, with 88 books published, claims 19 million copies in print.  Wildfire, with 70 titles, says 10 million have been sold.  After 21 books, Sweet Valley High has 8 million in print.  Cheerleaders, with only six books so far, is averaging 100,000 copies each.  In a generally stagnant book-buying market, sales figures such as these are immensely attractive to publishers.

While each individual title did not sell in the millions, each of these series collectively sold in the millions, and this was back in the 1980s.  People just don't get it.  YA books have been around for a very long time and have been tremendously popular.

From my post The Growing Pains of a Facebook Group:

I understand that the real problem is that these people think that children's, middle-grade, and teen books are all the same... 

A 10-year-old girl who is beginning to like boys is not at all the same as a sixteen-year-old girl in a relationship.  I am not interested in the trials and tribulations of a 10-year-old girl.  I only wish to see the books featuring older teens.  

5th grade isn't the same as 11th grade.  Think about it.  Would you take a group of 5th grade students and force them to attend all the same classes as a group of 11th grade students?  They'd all take English together, etc.  It makes no sense.  Why do people think that books aimed at 5th graders are the same as books aimed at 11th graders?  They aren't the same at all.

From my post Keeping a Facebook Group from Being Boxed In:

I have figured out how to clearly describe the focus of the Vintage Teen Books group:  pre-2000 young adult books that feature characters of ages 15-19.  All books that fit the criteria are fine, regardless of whether they feature werewolves, prostitution, or light fluffy romance.  

That's it in a nutshell.  True young adult books feature teenagers, usually older teenagers, in various situations.  The teenage situations almost always include dating and romance and various social issues.  If a book doesn't feature teenagers in these kinds of situations, then it isn't a young adult book.  This is why the Nancy Drew series isn't young adult; Nancy doesn't deal with any social issues.  She does have a "special" male friend, but the relationship is platonic.  Poor Ned will never get more than a chaste kiss. 

When I say that I'm a fan of young adult books, then I mean that I enjoy reading books that feature teenagers as the protagonists and include the types of situations appropriate for teenagers.  No other books are young adult, regardless of what anyone says.

Yes, teenagers might read some books written for adults, and they might also read some middle-grade books.  True YA books are not what teenagers might read.  True YA books feature teenagers as the protagonists along with the social issues.  It's that simple.

In closing, I want to point out that it's okay not to like the YA category.  However, I fail to understand why people force themselves to read YA books when they don't like them.  YA books are for those of us who enjoy them.  If everyone else will stay away from them and quit bashing the books and insulting us, then we can all live in peace, enjoying what we like.