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The Narrowing Gulf between YA and Adult
March 17, 2008

Having gone to some lengths to get my greedy hands on an advance copy of Cory Doctorow's forthcoming novel Little Brother, I found myself pondering the mystery of what is and is not a YA book. Elizabeth Devereaux, our lovely Children's reviews editor, occasionally comes by my desk with new YA books that she thinks I'll like, because books written for older teens are often perfectly suitable for adults and vice versa. She and I also occasionally argue discuss which section a borderline book should be reviewed in. When in doubt, we tend to go by imprint, which is why Anne McCaffrey's most recent Petaybee twins book (Del Rey) was reviewed under SF/F/H while Little Brother (Tor Teen), which arguably has an older target audience, wound up covered in the Children's section.

It doesn't help with definitions when authors who got their start writing for adult markets start producing books for younger readers. (Please note that when I refer to "adult fiction" or "adult markets," I mean fiction written for and marketed to mainstream audiences. Nothing in this post has anything to do with pornography!) Consider Little Brother, or China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, or Terry Pratchett's metafictional Where's My Cow?. Longtime YA author Janni Lee Simner just wrote a short but eloquent rant on the topic, calling out authors who turn to YA because they seem to feel it's expected of them or because they see it as a route to easy sales, with the market growing by leaps and bounds. "If you're not here for the love," she says, "get out and let someone who is write that book instead.... In some ways, [adult readers] and that 15-year-old looking for a good book aren't all that different. Give them a little credit, please." In the comments on that entry, Michelle Sagara suggests that agents who handle adult science fiction and fantasy may be getting requests for YA and passing them on to their authors; I don't know how prevalent that is, and would love to hear from any agents who would be willing to comment.

Some YA-ish books by authors of adult fiction are marketed to adults because that's where the author's fans will look for them in the bookstore. John Scalzi's forthcoming Zoe's Tale is coming out from Tor rather than Tor Teen, even though Zoe is a teenager and her story covers many of the events already seen in The Last Colony. Scalzi writes that "Tor and I have a marketing goal for Zoe’s Tale, which is that we wanted to make it accessible for teen readers. Note that 'accessible for teen readers' is not precisely the same thing as 'writing a Young Adult novel'; the audience I wrote ZT for is the one that is (or is like) the audience who have read other books in the series.... So part of my mission with this book was to write a story that would give the longtime fans everything they come to the OMW universe for, and at the same time leave open the door to younger readers." At this point I'm not sure the line between YA and adult fiction is blurry so much as erased entirely.

Other writers start out with YA but bring in more mature concepts as their characters and readers age. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are practically a treatise on the subject, and many of Rowling's young fans have declared their love for the idea of books that grew up with them. Sherwood Smith's Inda and The Fox, marketed to and enjoyed by adult readers, may be even more fun for those who were kids when they read Crown Duel and other YA stories set in the same universe. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain stories always had a dark edge to them, but it's still a considerable leap from Spiral Castle's dank (but easily escaped) dungeon in The Book of Three to men being burned alive by the Horned King in The Black Cauldron, and in some ways an even greater leap to Taran's struggle to achieve self-determination in Taran Wanderer. Unlike Simner's spirited defense of the YA field against amateur incursions, I've never seen a suggestion that these authors should not have ventured into writing adult fiction or fiction with serious, complex themes. On the other hand, once authors are labeled a certain way, that label seems to be hard to shake no matter what they write. Rowling could write a hundred bestselling fantasy novels and she'd probably still be seen as a YA author.

This is one of the many areas in which I wish for "bookstore 2.0," a system that would allow multiple tagging of books just as one might file this blog post under "Publishers Weekly" and "blogging" and "books" and "adult fiction" and "YA fiction" when bookmarking it on del.icio.us. Then Zoe's Tale and Little Brother could be tagged "adult fiction" and "YA fiction" and "teen-friendly books by authors of adult fiction," and Scalzi and Doctorow could be tagged "science fiction author" and "YA author" and "prominent blogger" and whatever else makes sense. While I bemoan the slow, tragic disappearance of the independent bookstore as loudly as anyone, this is one area in which virtual bookshelves are better: the same book can be in three or thirteen or thirty digital places at once, and authors can be found by all of their fans, not just the ones who know which shelves to look on.

Perhaps in the near future we'll see more big houses issuing multiple editions of such books under multiple imprints or with multiple covers to capitalize on the crossover potential here. Until then, I'll make sure to stay on good terms with Elizabeth. Some weeks, it seems like all the really dark, edgy, daring, morally and philosophically complex science fiction and fantasy ends up on her desk, and I wouldn't want to miss out.

Posted by Rose Fox on March 17, 2008 | Comments (1)