YA grows up

Madeleine L’Engle once said she wrote young adult fiction because “you have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” If the 1963 Newbery winner were alive today, she might be surprised to know that these days mostly grown-ups read novels ostensibly written for 12- to 17-year-olds.

Over the past 10 years, juvenile fiction sales have exploded—from 23 percent of the book market in 2004 to 37 percent today—and drawn nearly equal with adult sales. While some might hope this surge results from a newfound love of reading among high schoolers, it’s adults, not teens, who are driving it. According to Nielsen Books’ 2014 survey, 65 percent of Young Adult (YA) book buyers are between 18 and 44 years old—and most of those are between 30 and 44.

Many within the publishing industry debate whether YA is even a useful designation anymore. For example, several of Ruta Sepetys’ foreign publishers categorized her first book, Between Shades of Gray (not to be confused with Fifty Shades of Grey), as an adult title, but she told me she debuted as a YA writer not to join a trend—she felt from the beginning her story of a Lithuanian girl sent to a concentration camp in WWII should be targeted toward teens: “Adolescence has a raw complexity of heart and mind. The paradigm of a teenager in exile is very different than that of an adult.”

Sepetys says the defining element of a juvenile narrative can be subtle but often comes down to point of view. Her book and a similarly themed adult novel like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See are mostly different because hers is written in first person while Doerr’s is in third: Readers of her book are “in the head of a 15-year-old girl, experiencing the story through her eyes, rather than watching from afar.”

But why are stories told by teenage characters suddenly drawing so many adults? Some cultural critics claim that portends nothing good for American literacy: One prominent naysayer, Slate contributor Ruth Graham, caused an industry-wide stir several months ago when she wrote that adults who read YA should be embarrassed by their choice in literature because YA books are fundamentally unrealistic and uncritical by nature. Though most of the responses in major outlets slammed Graham, renowned New York Times film reviewer A.O. Scott came to her defense, tweeting that the rise in YA fiction is the result of a “cultural devaluation of maturity.”

Moriah McStay, author of Everything That Makes You, a speculative novel that follows the two possible lives of a high-school girl who both suffers and avoids a disfiguring accident, wonders what kind of YA Graham and Scott have been reading: “There are plenty of adult novels that are unrealistic or gratuitous. Why go after Sarah Dessen and not Nicholas Sparks? Because Dessen doesn’t have sex in her books?”

McStay says she was initially drawn to YA as a reader because its constraints often make for tighter storytelling: “In YA you don’t have a lot of time to describe the rolling meadow or the scent of jasmine. Not that there’s no room for that, but as a whole there’s little patience for lyrical self-gratification or dangling plot threads.” She points out that if some celebrated books, like Catcher in the Rye or Little Women, were published today, they would most likely be YA.

‘In YA you don’t have a lot of time to describe the rolling meadow or the scent of jasmine … there’s little patience for lyrical self-gratification or dangling plot threads.’ —McStay

Courtney Stevens, a former youth minister whose debut, Faking Normal, concerns a teen struggling to overcome rape, thinks the popularity of YA among some adults and the disregard of it among others could be simply a factor of differing life experience: “I compare it to high-school reunions, and how they represent a way of looking back that we don’t do for other periods in our lives. They’re a way of processing how we become who we are. Coming-of-age stories will always be important because there’s nothing like falling in love for the first time or making your first big mistakes where the consequences may be severe. Maybe for the Slate writer, that period of time wasn’t defining for her, but for many other people it is.”

It’s difficult to find demographic data for specific titles, but every author and editor I interviewed, including an editor at a Christian publisher, dismissed the idea that the rise in adult readership might push YA content into darker or more complex directions.

Sourcebooks editor Aubrey Poole believes the primary factor driving the YA trend is a loss of stigma: “Adult readers are finally seeing that these ‘books for teens’ were already challenging and complex. … The added attention and revenue mean editors get to acquire more YA projects across the board, which means more outstanding novels, which leads to more attention and sales. It’s a feedback loop.”

The fault in our classrooms

Young adult fiction’s pre-eminent author today is John Green, whose novel-turned-movie The Fault in Our Stars has earned over $300 million since its debut last summer. While concerned parents may be aware his fiction and movies often glorify teenage rebellion, they may not realize Green’s influence in the classroom.

Green and his brother Hank are the creators of Crash Course videos, which introduce academic topics like literature, history, and human anatomy to teens. Sadly, Green’s ironic, liberal perspective is itself a “crash course” in a worldview that promotes evolution, feminism, and same-sex marriage.

In January, PBS began offering the videos on its LearningMedia website, promoting them as “awe-inspiring” classroom resources. Green now has more than 3 million YouTube subscribers, and his “rock star” status means many more students will swallow his philosophy whole. —Emily Whitten