The Shaming of Adults who are YA Readers/Fans

[Danny McG]

Looking through all the comments in this thread and one thing strikes me that nobody has mentioned. It works both ways with teenagers feeling obliged by peer pressure to (you must conform) fit in by reading 'their' books.
Example is from last year when one of my YA's was 13. Almost a forty minute school bus ride each way so a goodly number read books on these trips.
Mine was steadily working through my sci fi collection and was halfway through Asimov's Second Foundation. "Why are reading that old people's rubbish? We are ALL reading Hunger Games Mockingjay"
From that day until now my kid reads the current trendy YA stuff and doesn't so much as glance at my overloaded sci fi shelves.
Powerful persistent peer pressure prevails!

 

[Judderman]

At least you helped get his interest enough so he made it through some of your collection. Perhaps when he is out of high school he will dip back into it. So much of school is related to peer pressure to conform.

 

[Alex The G and T]

Oh, keep the faith, Danny. Never push; plant suggestions and allow the seeds to grow.

All of the school field trips and parent's nights I attended; there was this one blindly boastful mother, always on about how brilliant her boy was. I could never have a normal conversation with her; she was always just too brim-full of her own offspring's brilliance.

One parent's night in the classroom, about 4th or 5th grade; we parents were scanning student artworks, "essays", et al, festooning the classroom.

Along the chalk rails, the students had placed their current reading, next to their TBR book. Mostly displayed were Animorphs, Goosebumps... I dunno, whatever else was popular at the time (Long before Eregon, or Hungergames.... whatever.

Mrs Boastful was all full of pride over her kid's Harry Potter I; on deck, I don't remember... Harry Potter II or Dr Seuss... Coincidentally, my daughter's books were adjacent. Mists of Avalon; on deck, Lady of Avalon. When I pointed them out; Mrs Mom hadn't a clue what she was looking at. My daughter had been done with what her peers were pushing, including HP, long since.

The point being, that an avid reader in the house, is going to burn through the Pop stuff pretty quick; and be looking back to your shelves for something more to read, soon.

 

[Kylara]

I think interesting ones to look at in regards to YA, what makes it YA or Adult, and the different delineations are the Mistborn trilogy by Sanderson, and the Night's Angel trilogy by Weeks. Both have MCs who are ung (and grow up), both have the typical YA failed romance type thing and the flawed 'father' figure, as well as the usual action/reaction etc. At uni I did a whole seminar presentation on this and concluded it was the endings that make them considered adult not YA. Both first books have flawed 'happy' endings that aren't, and the subsequent books deal with the mess the characters made in the first. It's hard and unrewarding and so many mistakes are made and it doesn't end neatly with ends tied up and everyone happy. They just end, like things do. YA can be considered successful YA if each book has that neat 'happy' (and I don't just mean emotionally, but concluding a plot neatly and successfully a la HP 1-7 even with a bigger plot behind the scenes) ending and the characters have achieved. In both books mentioned above they fight 'the system' aed 'win' only to realise they didn't fully understand or appreciate said system and that maybe it was there for a reason (whether morally/ethically good or not). And that is something I feel classified YA does not want to deal with. You fight the system and win and fight another worse system and you win again, systems are always evil along with those implementing them. Etc etc.

I think the concept of YA often includes a 'happier' less conflicted (complicated) story that occurs with young adult aged protagonists. Those with more complicated 'real life results' and without the satisfying (for the 'happy' ending where everything is fixed and perfection ensues) nature of the end you have yourself an adult book with young adult protagonists.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Mistborn trilogy by Sanderson, and the Night's Angel trilogy by Weeks.

I found these to be specifically YA - their focus is on young people growing up and trying to understand the relationships they have with the world and other people.

Whether they are violent or sexual is irrelevant is that violence or sex is not asking deeper questions about life. Whether the story ends happily or not is irrelevant IMO.

This is why I also found Mark Lawrence's Prince of Thorns to be YA, too (which I read just after the other two) - for exactly the same reasons as above.

You only need to pick up most any David Gemmell to see how he handles issues such as violence, sex, death, and morality, to see there is a massive gulf between what he's writing compared to Final Empire and Way of Shadows.

IMO adult fiction asks questions and makes statements on deeper issues outside of the immediate personal experience. YA asks "Why did my friend die?" while adult fiction asks "What is death?".

 

[Danny McG]

A book that deals with growing up..
Ender's Game.
Probably read by a lot of adults until the explosion of interest following the cinema release.
Then a lot of teens got into it ( am basing this on middle brat's friends reaction) and it became an intro to genre for a lot of them.

 

[HareBrain]

IMO adult fiction asks questions and makes statements on deeper issues outside of the immediate personal experience. YA asks "Why did my friend die?" while adult fiction asks "What is death?".

No distinction between YA and adult is going to be watertight, but I think that's a pretty good one. But I always seem to come back to the same contrary examples: Alan Garner's The Owl Service and Red Shift. These don't have neat, upbeat endings, and they ask (IMO) deep questions about the world beyond immediate character experience. But I would firmly put both of them as YA -- even though I found Red Shift difficult to grapple with even as an adult, and one (and maybe two: my memory is a bit sketchy) of its POVs isn't even a kid.

My own tentative definition, for what it's worth, would be that in a YA story, the story-world feels centred on the young characters, even where it is their enemy. In an adult story with young protagonists, the story-world is not centred on them; they usually feel incidental to the world at large, even if they are the story's central characters.