I remember seeing a YouTube video about this once that delved into how, uh, “interesting” both the book and its author are. From what I’ve read of the book, I don’t think I’d call it fine literature.
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It’s below wattpad quality! It’s not fine literature, but it’s amazing that it exists! It’s a fine example of an author trying an failing to make his characters likable. I think she blows up Isreal or something.
I remember reading that Slate article ages ago. Someone else wrote one about adults reading YA and got hammered on Twitter about that time, but I can’t remember her name.
Anyway, I just find the whole thing with adults reading kid books kinda weird. It’s become hip and trendy for grown adults to read middle grade fiction too. I can’t fathom it myself. I started reading books written for adults when I was about 12 and never went back, although I did like some of the assigned reading in high school.
As for the likeability thing, I find I can sympathize with a loathsome character as long as their behavior and attitude is explained in the book. (òᴥóし)
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Child-focused niches are a fairly recent invention in society. I’m not surprised to see children’s lit taken over by adults as we go the way of Children of Men.
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I agree with many of the above. There’ve always been books intended for children, in the “See Spot Run” sense or the aforementioned Hardy Boys novels, but nobody would have taken you seriously had you said you read those books for fun as an adult, thirty years ago. You’d have switched to “adult” detective thrillers, which nobody would complain about.
I don’t really have an issue with adults reading kid’s books—I mean, for reasons stated above I don’t think it’s good for their minds or however you want to phrase it, but it’s not like the action alone hurts me. What does happen though is that elevating the overall worth of YA comes along with denigrating other genres, in a way that would seem blatantly offensive going in the other decision. Anyone can dismiss the classics, as nebulous of a category as that may be, as simple “dead old white men” or verbose navel-gazing, and not be criticized for it. You can’t really say the same for YA without being called elitist—never mind the exclusion of Austen, Morrison, and so on, or how it’s easier than ever before to make the jump to adult fiction.
As a teacher, one principle I emphasize is that one shouldn’t take pride in not understanding something and the inability to understand whatever that is. I’m never going to know all of the My Little Pony lore, nor do I have any interest in anything related to it, but there’s little stopping me from hunkering down over the summer and becoming a brony. There’s nothing there but willpower. Likewise, when my students complain to me that they’re unable to understand/appreciate the books my colleagues are teaching them in class (as they often do, knowing I tend to have opinions on this sort of thing), I emphasize that they aren’t helpless: it’s within their power, if they choose, to internalize the message of The Great Gatsby. They are able to use Sparknotes as a reference, go to office hours, or whatever else—all of those things are preferable to throwing their hands up in the air and walking away.
The point here is that many adults who insist on solely reading YA are doing exactly that. They’re looking at a new food and refusing to try it on principle instead of giving it a bite, and when they do, they blame the food for being inherently gross and not their own preferences. They assume they aren’t able to understand The Great Gatsby or any other book that doesn’t deliver a protagonist one could root for in a bite-sized first chapter because the book is inherently flawed and thus not worthy of consideration, passing the blame along.
I’ll end by saying that this same principle could be applied to how people treat each other’s writing on Wattpad or in the world of literature as a whole, even if it’s not a dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow. It’s a lot easier to assume that the fault comes with the other party if a paragraph of a novel or a 500-word summary doesn’t make sense, or if in some other way another party’s behavior appears irrational. That gut reaction comes at the expense of self-examination, saying that “gee, maybe ‘effusive’ isn’t too fancy of a word for most people” or “is this book boring because there’s something really wrong with it, or do I just not find killer clowns running wineries in space an inherently exciting topic like the author clearly does?”. Just some food for thought.
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Ignoring classics, there’s a lot of really awesome pulp novels for adults out there. They aren’t high art, but they’re fun reads, to be sure!
I’ve heard a lot of people, like @J.L.O, get upset when they see graphic sex scenes in books nominally meant for teenagers. I’m sure I can find a list of steamy YA romance right now.
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It reminds me a lot of the adults who watch kid’s shows because they want a light, low-stakes story but there aren’t a lot of popular adult shows (that aren’t sitcoms), that would fit in that mold.
That’s how you get people in their 30s bullying 13-year-olds on twitter for their Owl House headcanons.
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Of course I get upset at that. I was a precocious reader reading things like tLotR trilogy at 12.
Do you think I needed to read half of what I can write now when I was still riding dirt bikes, boys were shorter than me (and I could beat them up), and I had to yell at cat-calling near-adult males that I’m friggen 12? I was precociously mature on pretty much any front you can think of. Last thing I needed was someone practically worshipping adult relationships before I was capable of holding my own end of adulting up.
And it really worries me because I have a child turning 6 in a month. That means 6 years, and I’m dealing with this crap in MY kid.
Y’all don’t want me to go full Karen here. Lol
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It would be better to call YA Smut “Adult Light Reads” because they don’t make you question your existence.
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But I do remind .myself that none of this is fully new. VC Andrews shouldn’t have been for kids, ever.
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No. Of course, you can have a deep YA novel, but no one will read it, unless you make the depth so freaking subtle that most readers won’t be able to tell, in which case, why bother? Just so one critic praises your book? Critics don’t sell books. Word of mouth does.
There is quite a lot of disconnect in the meaning of the term YA. It used to be a term to describe the age of the audience but that’s shifted to be the “expectation” of the audience.
Young characters don’t make a book YA. Being PG-13 equivalent of tame doesn’t make it a YA. When you reach for a YA book, you expect a certain type of content. An easy read would be my simplest explanation.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. There’s a reason why it’s so popular. Easily digestible books are like potato chips.
As to why adults reach for it? It’s a guilty pleasure. You want to escape the stress of adult life, relive the times when you were a teen and the simplest problem seemed like the end of the world. You’re able to look at that and heave a sigh of relief. Maybe your life feels a bit calmer by comparison.
Yes. I’ve had readers see one of my characters very differently than I saw them. That doesn’t make them wrong. And even if I want them to like someone and they don’t at first, I think that’s fine. Characters don’t have to be likable. They have to be relatable. We all have flaws. So should characters.
Ah, this quote is the best,
I hate the concept of likeability—it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love.
— Jonathan Franzen
The article brought up the issue of gender but they completely missed the point - they were talking about tropes: the good girl and the bad boy. It’s a popular trope. Lots of readers like it. Not all, but if the market sways in the favor of one trope for a while, it can make you think that it’s a gender issue. Oh, if the female character is not “good,” the book won’t be as successful. That’s not it at all. You can’t take the “good” out of context. You have to look at the full trope.
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That’s more what I viewed romance altogether, growing up. Read a ton of Regencies.
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This idea intrigues me, since if having evident depth makes a book unsuitable for YA readers and the genre, wouldn’t that imply one can’t truly have a deep YA novel? Sure, one might have a deep novel that looks like YA on the surface, that conforms to all those other criteria you mention, but it would be lacking in the content essential for the genre.
Whether a novel can simultaneously be deep and act as a guilty pleasure or a brief bit of escapism is a different question entirely, and I think the answer to that is a fairly obvious yes.
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Shoot, you found my no-man’s-land. I want to write simpler–sometines succeed–but come up with too many thoughts that could cause questions and thinking. Like I noticed that I really like stripping characters of their sense of self, forcing them to come to grips with whatever isn’t the same. Just one of things I find myself wandering back to, all the dang time.
It’s just not YA friendly writing, lol.
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Just going to preface this with the fact that I’m reaaaally sick but I’ve been wanting to weigh in on this for a little while. Hope I make some sort of sense here.
Not really, no. Though I kind of dislike utilizing terms which sort of generalize people by age, as it sort of sets an expectation that people by that age either can’t do something, or are expected to know certain things. Anyone can learn anything from a YA novel.
I think the reason why some readers of YA are older is because some people just never really had a chance to be a child. There’s been this trend recently about “healing your inner child” which I think reading YA helps with. That’s the biggest reason for me to still be a reader of YA.
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I agree, keeping in mind that everyone defines depth differently. What other people consider a challenging read, I often don’t, and vice versa. Although I don’t think The Night Circus was aimed at a teen audience, it was written as simple fantasy escapism, and yet I found depth in it. Whether others would, I don’t know. A lot of people read My Year of Rest and Relaxation as a straightforward tale of a woman actually trying to stay asleep for a year, but I thought it was an allegory for America prior to 9/11. Maybe I was just reading into the story and put depth there where there really wasn’t any…? ¯\_(ﭢ)_/¯
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I think the definition of “deep” is crucial here.
To me, deep means that it makes you think. You pause while reading and/or after to reflect on the themes within.
A book within any genre can have that quality and a reader of any age can enjoy a deep read but am I wrong in assuming that the adult audience would be more drawn to it?
That’s not to say there are no teens that would reach for a deep book, but I think they wouldn’t look for a read like that in the YA stacks.
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It’s more that deep may not be the focus for a teen.
But at the same time, unless you have a very introspective teen, you’re dealing with someone who hasn’t spent years thinking about things, so the threshold might be lower.
I mean, whatever crises I faced, 10, 20, 30 years ago has already done shaped me, so throwing a thought up that I’ve had a long time ago isn’t going to be novel for me.
That by no means leaves nothing to be gleaned from books meant to challenge people with less experience than me. But it’s just that: gleaning, little bits of expansion, not a whole paradigm shift.
In fact, at 40, I’m going find things harder and harder to shift me into novel realms of thought. It’s a part of why it’s hard to change the mind of older folks.
That is part of why it could be detrimental to stick to light reads as a more experienced person. No growth is atrophy.
Anything is possible, but this is more an issue of probable and proveable–both of which have tighter limitations.
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This assumes that growth can only be gained from reading.
Reading can be a way to relax. I don’t think anyone should be shamed for the desire to use books as entertainment and not personal growth.
I don’t want to read any of those “leadership” nonfiction books. Does it mean I’ll never learn skills they talk about? No. I can find other sources. I reserve reading for fiction (or an occasional autobiography).
If someone looks down at me for that…
That says more about them than me.
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