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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Young Adult Fiction?

  
 
All Acting Regiment
14:25 / 16.07.05
Now, I've noticed several people on here mention "Young Adult" fiction; certain authors write it, certain bookstores seem to set apart special areas for it.

Granted that it's not something I'm very familiar with, something about this concept makes me feel uncomfortable. I'd appreciate it if you read the rest of the post then gave your opinions. I'll be using quite a lot of emotive language, which may or may not be misplaced.

Don't get me wrong, it would be good if more YA's did read books- as always- but I feel that labelling certain fiction as YA seems to be saying that because certain readers are young, their interest will be limited to certain areas. This just seems wrong: "yeah, get 'em reading, but bear in mind they only want to know about X and Y. No, Dwayne, put down that Primo Levi. It's not young adult."

And as for areas of bookshops being devoted to a certain group in society: how would you feel if there was a sign up saying "Books for whites" or "Books for blacks"?

To sumarise: these are adults. Certain tendencies in interest granted, why have their taste second-guessed? Why put restrictions in place? (And does this happen?)
 
 
Cat Chant
15:47 / 16.07.05
Well, two things, first of all. Do you object to children's books being shelved roughly by age? Because YA books are basically those books which come between the "8-12" age range and the adult fiction. I have been reading a mix of children's, YA and adult fiction pretty much since I was ten or eleven, and continue to do so (although these days I read much less adult fiction). I mean, do you object to the idea of writing books for teenagers? And if so, do you object the idea of children's books? Or at what age should children stop having "their own" books? (This is pretty culturally variable - France, for example, doesn't really have a separate set of "children's books" after you learn to read. England has one of the strongest traditions of children's literature in the world.)

But the main thing I'd argue, is that - again, like "children's literature" - Young Adult fiction is a genre of fiction. A YA book is one which conforms to the generic requirements of YA fiction. Like (other) children's books, it may in fact be read by anyone of any age (see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), but it will share certain characteristics with YA books and it's likely that the author will have written it, and many/most readers will read it, with a consciousness of its generic position in the tradition of writing for young adults. There's a certain tension between the idea of YA as defined by genre markers and YA as defined by its readership/its market, but no more so than children's literature (or indeed terms like "chicklit" - does the word "chicklit" suggest to you a similar "demeaning" assumption that women can only read Bridget Jones and/or that Bridget Jones is not for men, Legba?)

labelling certain fiction as YA seems to be saying that because certain readers are young, their interest will be limited to certain areas. This just seems wrong: "yeah, get 'em reading, but bear in mind they only want to know about X and Y. No, Dwayne, put down that Primo Levi. It's not young adult."

Really, I'd recommend reading some more YA fiction if you think that either its quality or its content is "limited". Primo Levi isn't often shelved with the YA books, but Anne Frank's Diary is (and, in general, there are a ton of YA books on the Holocaust, some of them probably very good). YA covers most of the same sub-genres as children's and adult fiction - fantasy, science-fiction, "problem" or "relationship" novels, murder mystery, horror, thriller - and has as wide a range of tones (gritty realism, magical realism, humour, surrealism) and quality (from the very very bad to the very very good) as either children's or adult.

how would you feel if there was a sign up saying "Books for whites" or "Books for blacks"?

It's not unusual for libraries and bookshops to have Black Interest or Afro-Caribbean Interest sections, I've found. Again, it's the difference between books which are generically marked by their position in a particular tradition of writing, and books which are "for" certain markets/populations.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
21:37 / 17.07.05
Good points, some of which I agree with. But:

Well, two things, first of all. Do you object to children's books being shelved roughly by age? Because YA books are basically those books which come between the "8-12" age range and the adult fiction.

(Thanks for this explanation, Deva. I didn't know that YA meant "teenagers". On with my post.)

Well, Children of 6 read better than children of 3, for example; so it would seem logical to shelve books for them in different places.

But. Is someone still a 100% child after the age of 12? Yes, definitely, in many ways. Relevantly to this, their reading stamina is an issue. But: intellect? Interest? See, I'm not sure you can define them as "children" in terms of books without playing along with assumptions.

or indeed terms like "chicklit" - does the word "chicklit" suggest to you a similar "demeaning" assumption that women can only read Bridget Jones and/or that Bridget Jones is not for men, Legba?

Perhaps not to all women, but certainly it is part of a trend where people are encouraged to read only a certain socially acceptable set of books. Have you ever read the "Book Reviews" section of the Sun?

Further, I think that Young Adult- as a part of Children's Books- is much more separated; a much more exclusive area of the bookshop. In terms of the determining aspects of labelling, it's audience is given less room to make other choices. All women are not "chicks". All young adults are "young adult".

There is not a "Women Only" or "Blacks Only" part of the bookshop, but there is a "Young People Only" section; and by means of a dichotomy this exlusivley young area turns the rest of the shop (the rest of literature) into an "Old People Only- Young People Not Allowed" area.
 
 
Shrug
23:43 / 17.07.05
I don't think that is condescending to market books as YA and I imagine that people find it a good thing that books are written specifically with that tumultuous age group in mind.
As with video certifications for parents it is probably beneficial to a certain extent that there is some content guarantee to it.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:34 / 18.07.05
There is not a "Women Only" or "Blacks Only" part of the bookshop, but there is a "Young People Only" section; and by means of a dichotomy this exlusivley young area turns the rest of the shop (the rest of literature) into an "Old People Only- Young People Not Allowed" area.

I don't think that's true, though. At all, in fact. As an old person, I frequent both the YA and other sections of bookshops pretty much without prejudice; I don't tend to visit the children's section, but that's generally because children's fiction is of less interest to me.

The key term, I think, being "interest". As Deva said, many bookshops have women's interest, black interest, gay and lesbian interest sections. There is no law preventing people who do not fit these profiles frequenting these sections. Likewise the YA section; I have yet to see anyone hustled out of a YA section by security, and indeed, again as Deva has pointed out, some notionally YA fiction (Rowling, Burgess, Garth Nix, Mark Haddon) is specifically being made available to and marketed toward adults also. If the borders are permeable that way, why not the other way also?

So, no. I don't think your distinction makes sense. The Youn g Adult section is no more "young people only" than the history sectiion is "historians only". It handily contains books which, it is thought by publishers, may address some of the specific interests of teenagers - often although not exclusively being a teenager. If your complaint is that somebody who is reading Melvyn Burgess ought to be reading Middlemarch, then that makes a kind of sense, but the fact remains that they might just feel more like reading Melvyn Burgess today, a feeling not necessarily related to age.

Coouple of supplementary questions:

a) If you didn't know that young adult sections were generally aimed at teenagers, who did you think they were aimed at?

b) Why did you choose the name "Dwayne" for your example?
 
 
Cat Chant
09:07 / 18.07.05
But. Is someone still a 100% child after the age of 12? Yes, definitely, in many ways. Relevantly to this, their reading stamina is an issue. But: intellect? Interest? See, I'm not sure you can define them as "children" in terms of books without playing along with assumptions.

Can you explain this a bit more? For one thing, the reason Young Adult books are called "Young Adult" is precisely so as not to define the over-twelves as children (and certainly not as "100% child"). For another thing, could you go into a bit more detail when you say "Intellect? Interest?" I suspect you have a set of assumptions about what Young Adult books are like (limited in range of interest, written for an "intellectual" range lower than adult) that are just not true.
 
 
Cat Chant
09:10 / 18.07.05
there is some content guarantee to it.

This isn't really true either - see Melvyn Burgess's stunningly good and amazingly sexually explicit Doing It (also see his Junk for a Young Adult novel about heroin addiction and prostitution). Young Adult books are not sanitized, any more than they are stupid. (Well, some of them are, obviously, but that goes for all genres, really.)
 
 
Jack Vincennes
11:55 / 19.07.05
Just re-read this post and realised it's a lot more personal anecdotage than I'd usually like in an ontopic thread, will amend / elaborate if mods think it's necessary!

To be honest, I don't think it's unfair to assume that there should be some kind of literature to fill the gap between (for example) The Babysitter's Club and Orlando. There are lots of things I read when I was in the YA age range which I'm now only just starting to re-read (or starting to want to re-read) because I didn't get as much as I could out of them the first time round, Orlando being a case in point. And whilst you say reading stamina is an issue. But: intellect? Interest? See, I'm not sure you can define them as "children" in terms of books without playing along with assumptions I'm not sure that all of those assumptions are unfair, if only because many people in that age range may not have a meaningful frame of reference for all 'literary' fiction, whether that frame of reference is historical, or literary, or philosophical. Whilst I agree that it is possible and advantageous to do the research oneself, I was always rather reassured that there were books available for which I already had a frame of reference.

There is also the fact that there is so much less commitment involved in the act of starting to read a YA book -I remember feeling that if I gave up in the middle of Martin Chuzzlewit I should have Failed To Read A Masterwork, whereas YA novels provided something to read (hurrah for interpreting printed matter!) without any kind of (self-imposed) pressure.
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
05:04 / 20.07.05
The Familial Cistern wrote
I don't think that is condescending to market books as YA

how much of the YA market is a marketing device? Like the creation (or discovery, depending on your bent) of the "tween" market.

More than anything, I suspect that the YA market features characters the same age as the intended audience. Not all youth are necessarily interested in reading about characters *intended* to be sympathetic.

In the grand scheme, a story's a story's a story, and the labelling makes it easier to find what you want in the library/bookstore. It doesn't define the work or the reader.

so why let it?

ten ix
 
 
This Sunday
05:23 / 20.07.05
Have to confess, when I was about ten/twelve, I was terribly embarrassed to be thought of as reading anything that was marketed as YA. I could read Winnie the Pooh or Naked Lunch in public long before I could openly crack something held in a - what would you call; Scholastic Cover (TM)?
I have, over the years, had to come to terms with this, and realize that it's just a marketing deal, like 'magical realism' and has no bearing on the actual contents or their quality. I know this, but can't shake the ambient paranoia, y'know?
Partly, I never did - and stil don't - enjoy being talked down to by an inanimate piece of prose or its author, but I treat that as a flavoring, now, as opposed to something personal. If I can read Ada's ficto-author as a pretentious bastard all in his own right and separate from Nabokov, than the same interpretation can be applied to the Potter-verse's boarding school promotional conformist lesson-plan-will-save-the-day atmo, right? It's BS, but it helps.
I've had friends try and - even these days, when we're all far too old, or should be - try and sell me on Babysitter Club, Sweet Valley, and other group-o-school-age-troublemakers-with-too-many-big-plans, but they never really take. The bunny-vampire and paranoid cat novellas never took. The things with overt lessony morals at the end (even if it's 'the dog has to die' or 'this is a hatchet, and this has been three hundred pages on this hatchet' or 'You can't kill the Jesus-Lion you stupid frozen old pedophilic psycho') grate, but I can get through them if there's something else there.
It actively and absurdly traumatises me that there are - supposedly adult - people reading Sweet Valley High books, but then, I read longunderwear superpeople fight comics, so... and Winnie the fucking Pooh, which I can't hate no matter how cutesy and idiotic those books can get. Really, I haven't a leg to stand on, and should be criticising anybody's reading choices.
1900 to 1930s YA-styled fictions entertain me immensely, though. These sort of things where y'know a maid spends two-hundred pages looking for love, finding love, crying her eyes out because said love is getting married to somebody else, then goes off and solves some sort of ridiculous mystery with friend while vague subtexts abound; boardingschool boys beating the shit out of each other to build character, skipping class, having adventures and solving ridiculous mysteries with friends while vague subtexts abound.
But, in the end, I'll take (to quote Moorcock) a Sade or a Wodehouse. They, too, may be preachy and/or moralistic at points, but at least they've got verve. And I despise the word 'verve', so there you go.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
07:02 / 20.07.05
Notwithstanding the fact that kids should all be reading 120 Days Of Sodom instead, it strikes me as noteworthy that the people who are taking issue with Young Adult Fiction in this thread haven't been very forthcoming about specific books, and what it is they don't like about them...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:46 / 20.07.05
I have, over the years, had to come to terms with this, and realize that it's just a marketing deal, like 'magical realism' and has no bearing on the actual contents or their quality.

Notwithstanding further the preponderance of the first person in the above, I'm interested by the question of whether that's quite true, either in the case of Young Adult or magical realism. Magical realism is a term used to describe a certain approach in a book, whereas Young Adult is a publishing category. Both have a bearing, or more precisely make a descriptive comment, on the contents of a book, neither on its quality.

Something else that seems to be emerging is that the gold standard of what consitutes "young adult" is increasingly open to question. I'm not sure I followed the burden of DD's comment, but I wouldn't think personally of Narnia as a YA book. The Babysitters' Club is 8-12, AFAIK, and Sweet Valley High is such a diverse brand that it's hard to nail it down. I would add, however, that Sweet Valley High books are also generally not very good, in the same way that Tom Clancy-brand books are, in my limited experience, not very good.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
10:22 / 20.07.05
The Babysitters' Club is 8-12, AFAIK, and Sweet Valley High is such a diverse brand that it's hard to nail it down

As someone who wasted hir youth (but not hir young adulthood) on both brands -yes, BSC is certainly 8-12, hence my comment above about YA books filling the gap left once one has grown out of this series. Sweet Valley High ranges from Sweet Valley Kids, aimed at 6-9 year olds, to SV High and SV University. From my experience the latter two are aimed at the same, 8-13 kind of age range, the difference between the two being that SVH contains mostly descriptions of snogging* and SVU contains sex. SVU is for 10-13 year olds who consider their tastes to be a little more racy.

*This doesn't mean, "the sexual content in SVH books is limited to snogging", it means that page after endless page is just descriptions of snogging. They are, as Haus mentions, not very good.

Perhaps not to all women, but certainly it is part of a trend where people are encouraged to read only a certain socially acceptable set of books. Have you ever read the "Book Reviews" section of the Sun?

No, I haven't, but I'd be interested to hear about them as I'm not sure they'd influence my reading habits, or what I felt pressured to read, one way or the other...
 
 
Ex
16:13 / 21.07.05
A couple of points: firstly, although young adults may feel they can't tackling 'older' books, I suspect they'll often receive encouragement for doing so, whereas before this latest Harry and the Curious Materials enthusiasm, I'm not as sure that the reverse was true.

If we do believe the ‘ideal’ reader would be dipping in and out of all kinds of things, not being kept away from enjoyable texts by genre boundaries, I understand that any kind of genre classification will lead to people getting stuck in ruts - I would like to see libraries and bookshops arranged so there was a degree of progression, or handy pointers between sections (like the 'Enjoyed this? You'll explode over THIS!' bookmarks that my home library supplied). And cross-contact on book discussion boards and the like. But if not, then YA is not a bad rut to be stuck in.

Which leads to my second point: I tend to think of 'adult literary fiction' as a really constricting genre as well, and sometimes more so than 'Young Adult'. As Deva points out, YA is made up of subgenres, and so is ALF, and these have their own rules and guidelines. To give one example, my pet peeve is that very few adult writers get to blend fantasy and ‘reality’ successfully (yes, magic realism does it, but that feels less of a solid tradition than YA has). I can add more peeves later when I’ve thought of specific novels. There are times when I feel very frustrated by the genres that make up 'adult literature' and really think that YA has got the better end of the deal in terms of range and opportunity.

My only fear is that like the gay and lesbian interest sections, if a writer becomes a breakthrough 'mainstream' (straight) success, they get whisked out of that corner and displayed elsewhere – so what is left in the G&L interest section is bad G&L texts. Not my experience, but the complaint of a bookselling chum, that all one is left with in G&L is the Spartacus Guide and the least successful of the lesbian detectives.
But YA fiction has broken through to some extent and still appears in the YA section, so I’m less worried about that than if you’d asked me before His Dark Potter Dog.
 
 
rizla mission
11:12 / 28.07.05
This "young adult" classification grates with me too.

When I was a teenager, I read grown-up books and would have been pretty pissed off by the idea of an author 'writng down' to my age-group.

Which is not to say that these books aren't worthwhile, but just that....

..if you're gonna write a children's book, within the established conventions of children's fiction, fair enough. But if you're gonna write a book that deals with "grown-up", real world type stuff outside those conventions, that's adult fiction. I don't see why it should have a different, somewhat patronising, classification just because it (presumably) looks at the world through the eyes of young people.

I'd say; let it loose among the general fiction and let it sink or swim according to it's merits and it's potential to find an audience.
 
 
Quantum
11:37 / 28.07.05
like "children's literature" - Young Adult fiction is a genre of fiction. Deva

I agree. We may as well say 'Let sci-fi/fantasy take it's chances in the fiction section, sink or swim'. The purpose of the classification is to make it easier to find a book you might like.
I'll be honest, I go to the YA section for Diana Wynne Jones and Eoin Colfer,and don't tend to stray much, but at least I know where to find them. I got into Eoin Colfer because it was near the Hare Potty books (and the spangly cover and cipher footnotes of course) and I'm glad they were shelved together.

And by the way DWJ blends magic and reality together very well, thank-you-very-much, and magical realism as a genre is descended from the south american authors (Borges, Garcia-Marquez etc.) AFAIK.
 
 
Ex
12:57 / 28.07.05
Quantum - sorry, I was saying that YA fiction does get to do that, adult mainstream fiction less so. So yes, DWJ, Jan Mark, Susan Cooper and others all do really cool stuff with reality/supernatural borders.

And the magic realism thing - yes, AFAIK also, south american authors have been the big names. This may be a really crass overstatement, but I feel as though the reading public (and the associated marketing) do 'magic realism' generally only in specific instances: two being if it's the work of a postcolonial novelist and somewhat outside the usual lit fic setting, or if it's part of a postmodern experimental weoooh 'look at my slippery wordplay' novel (now going out of fashion). Or both.

So although readers can enjoy the supernatural in a more-or-less realist novel, it's being sold in quite tight categories at the moment. Is that true? Is there in fact a lot more semi-supernatural work out there than I know about? I can think of Paul Magrs who writes realist novels some of the time, and then has some odd supernatural elements in other novels, but not many otehr people are springing to mind.

At first I was thinking that YA has less generic division than adult fiction and is therefore more able to mess around, but I think that's a lie - there are also 'standard' methods or formulas for handling magic in YA fiction (and some of these I really dislike, and some of the formulas I usually like are sometimes written by authors I cannot stand).

Maybe it's just that there's a different kind of generic seperation at the YA level, and that when things get re-divided into adult categories (detective, fantasy, 'literary') some categories just get squidged out or chopped up.
 
 
Quantum
16:04 / 28.07.05
postmodern experimental weoooh 'look at my slippery wordplay' novel Ex
Ah, I see what you mean. That's certainly the case, I just reflexively class them as postmodern and not magical realist (because I'm pro-MR and they tend to be up their own arse).

I tend to think of 'adult literary fiction' as a really constricting genre as well, and sometimes more so than 'Young Adult'
Possibly, although I'd still tend toward the 'genre as buyers guide' view. I think YA has different subgenres to ALF (good example being the more obvious boy/girl split in YA) but they're just as constricting, YA fiction tends to be just as formulaic as adult, or more. As you say 'there are also 'standard' methods or formulas for handling magic in YA fiction'.

my pet peeve is that very few adult writers get to blend fantasy and ‘reality’ successfully
You're certainly not wrong there. Most adult supernatural stuff is rubbish (Bitten) in fact the best IMHO is DWJ's adult stuff (Sudden Wild Magic for example). I think that's why Rowling and Pullman are so attractive to adults.
This is also one of my pet peeves. I'm a failing writer (of course) but my grand ambition is to be part of a new movement toward 'Realist Magic' fiction, novels and stories with a background of occultism or magic. Stories of thaumaturges falling in love, the heartbreak of losing a familiar etc. The lack of good magical fiction makes my blood boil, the only answer is to write it.
 
 
Tom Coates
13:20 / 31.07.05
Maybe a useful question to ask would be how comfortable we might feel with a type of book (and a section of bookshops) aimed directly at pensioners, or people over sixty? Would books labelled "for Senior Citizens" be disrespectful or insulting? I mean, there would clearly be space their for a sectionalisation - presumably the over-sixties have different priorities, greater experience of bodily collapse, potentially worse eyesight, conceivably more interest in nostalgia, less interest in sex than some other age-groups. They may even be less intellectually agile (although I wouldn't want to say that to my parents or my exploring mad travelling to the Caucasus / Iran on botany expeditions aunt).

Somehow though, aiming a kind of section of the bookshop towards them, or having dedicated 'old people's books' publishing arms does not seem that common, and I think rightly so. Is Young Adult any different?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
13:09 / 01.08.05
Yes. Next question?

Which, to be little less flip about it, is to say that most of the differences you've gone for there are physical differences, and the rest are speculation. Which I think is key - apart from being old, there's not a lot to tie older readers together. Whereas YA sections are designed not only to address a commonality of age but, I would suggest, a commonality of experience. To take your aunt - she can go off to the Andes, and will probably take a different kind of reading matter with her than a 60-year-old structural engineer who has spent 35 years building bridges. Obviously, teenagers are growing up in lots of different social strata and situations, but they are also experiencing many things which are reasonably uniform - changes in their bodies, emotional upheaval, school, an increasing desire for autonomy and resentment of parental control... and a Young Adult section is, I think, useful for containing and providing easy access to novels which are aimed at dealing with or in the context of these reasonably universal experiences.

Of course, you can do that in lots of different ways, and that's where a degree of discrimination comes in on the part of publisher, bookseller and reader - and, for that matter, author. Burgess is one person who is pushing the boundaries of what is appropriate topic or treatment for YA fiction, and at the edges I think that YA and "adult" fiction pretty much merge. For example, Philip Pullman's Victorian adventure stories are satisfactory both as YA novels and as novels, I'd suggest. The same might not be said, however, of, say, Future Track 5, but YMMV.
 
 
hapax legomenon
08:08 / 09.08.05
Maybe it's symptomatic of North American culture's discomfort with maturation and its search for a refuge in a nostalgia-distorted form of infantilism. We would like to shelter the young from adulthood for a little while longer, even if they themselves seem eager to grow up. We know what's best.

Young adults (whatever that means!) are, in my experience, very capable and willing to encounter undilluted literature in profoundly meaningful ways.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:07 / 09.08.05
I suggest, oncespoken, that you read the preceding thread, identify points within it that you feel are pertinent to your position, and then respond to them. In this case, for example, the possibility that teenagers may also be reading Middlemarch has been covered at some length above. You might also take into account, for example, Deva's example of Melvyn Burgess as a writer who is using young adult fiction to explore the teenage experience of subjects - heroin use and sex, for example - the adult description and experience of which may be far less resonant or useful to a younger readership.

Finally, if you have no idea what "young adult" means, a good start might be to ask, or to see if it has been discussed further up this thread, and go from there.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
10:04 / 09.08.05
Young adults (whatever that means!) are... very capable and willing to encounter undilluted literature in profoundly meaningful ways.

And so, I like to think, am I. But it so wrong to read purely for fun? For every one book I read which is Worthy and addresses the Human Condition in its more Septic Aspects, I read about five which concern themselves mainly with issues of mistaken identity, chorus girls and people hiding in wardrobes. Are these 'undiluted literature'? If they aren't, should I stop reading them? If they are, why is my reading something silly and aimed (nominally) at adults a more worthy pursuit than someone else reading a YA novel which deals with something serious (examples upthread)?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
11:20 / 09.08.05
As a side note- Now that I've read this thread, my opinions are slightly less extreme than expressed in the first post. Thanks to all for contributing.

1)

But is it so wrong to read purely for fun? For every one book I read which is Worthy and addresses the Human Condition in its more Septic Aspects, I read about five which concern themselves mainly with issues of mistaken identity, chorus girls and people hiding in wardrobes.

Remember, mistaken identity and hiding in cupboards appear in Shakespeare; chorus girls appear in Eurypides. No, it's not wrong to want to read purely for pleasure, nor is it wrong to read less challenging books. In fact, a lot if not all of "light" cultural artefacts still deal with the human condition in one way or another.

However, I think it is a bad idea to limit yourself to one "kind" of anything- be it only watching sci-fi films, or only reading fantasy books or whatever; to my mind reading only "easy" books seems to fall into the same category of experience as beleiving only in "easy" politics or "easy" attitudes (such as over-simplification and demonisation)- while of course I'm not equating readers of (e.g.) Harry Potter with BNP supporters (two very different demographics), there does seem to be a consistency in the wilful disinterest in the more complicated or challenging possibilities within their separate areas (literature and politics).

I think it's this "limiting" which is the issue here, though specifically the "limiting" which is perceived to be applied by those responsible for providing the YA's with their books.

2)

Haus says A Young Adult section is, I think, useful for containing and providing easy access to novels which are aimed at dealing with or in the context of (teenage related themes).

Indeed, I'm sure they are useful for containing these books, and that's fine, but there are two things that still cause me bother: the lazy assumption (not aimed at Haus, this) that teenagers only want to read about things that are somehow "relevant to their age group"- as if somehow they are incapable of relating to the older characters in, say, The Human Stain- and further to that, this element of separation from adult books.

Why is Junk, by Melvin Burgess, a book about Heroin which appears in YA sections, automatically superior to Trainspotting, by irvine Welsh, if the reader is below a certain age (according to booksellers)?

Answers on a postcard, please. Unless you want to say that Trainspotting glorifies drug use and therefore isn't suitable for impressionable teenagers, in which case I don't think we can find common ground.

3)

I've said this upthread, but surely, by labelling some books as Young Adult, you label the rest of them Non-Young Adult by default? Does defining thesis not always involve the inevitable definition of antithesis?

Note that I am not accusing booksellers of turning the nation's youth into Rowling-ist fundamentalists; I'm just trying to examine the inherent dichotomy in the labelling of "Young Adult" books, and assessing whether it could become a problem in future.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:06 / 09.08.05
chorus girls appear in Euripides.

No they don't. Choroi of girls appears in Euripides. Very different thing.

I think the thesis/antithesis model breaks down, to an extent, because we've already established that the distinction is not absolute - young adults read outside the young adult section, and non-young adults read within it. When you talk about Harry Potter (which, incidentally, I'm not sure _is_ a YA book), you're talking about a book which is not only read by both children and adults but is specifically marketed at both young adults and chhildren. So, Potter is not "labelled as" either young adult or non-young adult by default, and your thesis-antithesis construction collapses noisily.


Indeed, I'm sure they are useful for containing these books, and that's fine, but there are two things that still cause me bother: the lazy assumption (not aimed at Haus, this) that teenagers only want to read about things that are somehow "relevant to their age group"- as if somehow they are incapable of relating to the older characters in, say, The Human Stain- and further to that, this element of separation from adult books.

I think that this continues to depend on the assumption that young adults are corralled into the young adult section and not allowed to read Philip Roth. This is not the case, and has already been addressed in this thread. Unless you can come up with some convincing proof that teenagers are being excluded from browsing the shelves of bookshops outside the YA section, your thesis-antithesis again simply does not function as you want it to.

So, to compare Melvyn Burgess with Irvine Welsh... well, I haven't read Melvyn Burgess, so I won't try to compare the two. However, I don't see anything hugely controversial in suggesting that a teenager might at some point prefer to read a story in which heroin use and its effects are related more closely and recognisably to their own experience of being a teenager, just as in Andrea Newman books the action is closely related to the experience of middle-class adults. I don't think that disqualifies a teenager from reading Trainspotting or A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, if they want to be bored titless. I think you're fixating on the idea that the Young Adult classification is exclusive and stops teenagers from reading anything else, and I don't think that's the case, any more than reading Bridget Jones' Diary disqualifies you from reading Pride and Prejudice. For a rounded approach, you might in fact want to have read both.
 
 
hapax legomenon
17:13 / 09.08.05
You might also take into account, for example, Deva's example of Melvyn Burgess as a writer who is using young adult fiction to explore the teenage experience of subjects - heroin use and sex, for example - the adult description and experience of which may be far less resonant or useful to a younger readership.

I haven't read Burgess, unfortunately, and I wasn't suggesting that great books cannot be found in the YA section of a bookstore.

It seems to me that younger readers (of any age) should be directed to good books that (for example) deal with pubescent drug use and sexuality is by their peers (of any age)--that is, people who share a familiar intellectual or emotional community with them.

There are several problems I associate with the YA classification:

(a) it often projects a very skewed, idealized notion of "young adulthood", which does not resonate with young adults so much as intruct them in how they ought to relate to their own "young-adulthood".

(b) it's confining. It mirrors our education system, in which children graduate from one grade to the next by year and are designated books and topics accordingly. Younger adults cannot be compressed into a homogenous reading group without doing violence to the individual's private curiosities and abilities.

I realize there are no physical barriers preventing a young adult from straying into the general fiction section of a bookstore; there exists, however, an immense cultural apparatus which dictates to children: this is what you relate to; this is written at your level, and this is too complex for you. The YA classification is (I feel) a part of this apparatus, which represents what I feel to be a cultural fear (and laziness) of recognizing children and "younger adults" to be as infinitely complex and multifaceted as any human being.

If there is a category of books that is positively designated as "young adult", it follows that other categories are implicitly and negatively designated as not for young adults. This creates invisible barriers. The distinction implicitly communicates to younger adults, I think, that we as adults do not trust them yet to brave the adult literary world, or perhaps that we are afraid to see them grapple with the voids of human experience for which we, as their parents or teachers, have no easy answer for.

I think the distinction between "general fiction" and "adult fiction" ultimately serves the interests of parents and school-boards far more than it does those of "young adults".
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
17:39 / 09.08.05
More tomorrow, as am out of time, but briefly: I just don't see it that way...

My feeling about YA is that it is a broad genre which deals primarily with rites of passage (specifically, rites that people often undergo during their adolescence or youth more broadly speaking), and is aimed primarily at people going through those or similar rites of passage. This doesn't mean that other people don't read it, and it doesn't mean that the people at whom YA is aimed can't shouldn't or don't read anything else. It is just thought more likely to appeal to those people. I think the importance of those rites of passage, whatever they may be, in people's lives explains the appeal of YA to other (older or younger) readers.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
21:59 / 09.08.05
I think that this continues to depend on the assumption that young adults are corralled into the young adult section and not allowed to read Philip Roth. This is not the case, and has already been addressed in this thread.

Indeed - in fact, a 12 year-old might be advised that while pornography of a visual nature can be problematic to obtain even in the age of the internet, any 12 year-old can easily purchase a respected novel featuring explicit prose depictions of all kinds of sexual activity, or even browse them in your local Ottaka's (bulges in trousers notwithstanding). Perhaps this motivation might drive the young adults to experience literature in all its glory.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
00:52 / 10.08.05
I've said this upthread, but surely, by labelling some books as Young Adult, you label the rest of them Non-Young Adult by default?

I actually agree with this but I notice that you haven't explained why this labelling is negative. Haus and Flyboy have already stated that there are no invisible barriers to other areas of the bookstore and the general content of these shelves has also been fairly detailed in this thread. For me the YA section is a guide to literature written with a certain age group in mind and nothing else. I read a lot of YA fiction between the ages of 8 and 11 and then moved swiftly into a phase where I read heaps of Science Fiction from the adult shelves with the odd YA categorised book (DWJ, Margaret Mahy, Michelle Magorian etc.) thrown in and a few classics like Jane Eyre.


an immense cultural apparatus which dictates to children: this is what you relate to; this is written at your level, and this is too complex for you.

I think you're mistaking cultural apparatus for a guide to literature that you may or may not be interested in. That's not to say that other people, those who are meant to be wiser can't make that mistake as well but it's foolish to ignore the practicality of having an age guide when there are so many children and teenagers who are only just learning their way around bookshelves.

Why is Junk, by Melvin Burgess, a book about Heroin which appears in YA sections, automatically superior to Trainspotting

The answer is that it's not superior but it might be more interesting to read if you're a teenager who has no experience of the world that Trainspotting inhabits.

Practically speaking YA shelves are far easier to navigate then the fiction shelves in any bookshop. Would you really want to scramble your way, at the age of 8 or 13 or 65 through the novels in the fiction section to find a story based around the issues that YA encompasses? All children's fiction is separated into sections, do you want picture books to go in with the novels? Bathtime books to go in with the picture books?
 
 
Cat Chant
08:58 / 08.11.05
aiming a kind of section of the bookshop towards them, or having dedicated 'old people's books' publishing arms does not seem that common, and I think rightly so. Is Young Adult any different?

To be honest, Tom, I think the only reason we have so much Young Adult and no Older Adult fiction is that our culture fears age, overvalues youth, and likes to present teenagerhood as emblematic of the human experience (cf Buffy and every high school movie ever). In fact, more Older Adult genre stuff is becoming available (see Now We Are Sixty and its sequels) as people live longer into retirement, spend more money, and generally get a little bit more representational clout.

The YA classification... represents what I feel to be a cultural fear (and laziness) of recognizing children and "younger adults" to be as infinitely complex and multifaceted as any human being

I really strongly disagree with this, but I'll need to come back to it later. In the meantime, just to clarify what you mean - do you think the existence of the Women's Press (usually shelved with mainstream adult/literary fiction, but the books are easily identifiable from some distance away because of their distinctive stripy spines, so self-segregating to an extent) represents a cultural fear of recognizing women to be as infinitely complex and multifaceted as any human being?
 
  
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