Never Grow Up: The Versatility of Young Adult Fiction

Your fingers flutter across hundreds of book spines, rows upon rows of fantastic fiction, no two books the same. Hot off the press must-haves and cult classics fill the shelves at your local bookshop. You wait for your fingers to land on a new world to call home for a few hours a day. Strangely enough, you find yourself back in the young adult section of Waterstones, despite trying to navigate your early twenties. 

You barely recognise the shelves – with around 30,000 YA books published every year, there’s no wonder you only recognise a few titles by name alone. You wonder what brought you back here rather than any other section of the store.   

Adults are responsible for 55% of sales of YA fiction. This might not come as an initial shock – people buy gifts for younger family members all the time, right? Turns out 78% of adults who have purchased a YA book admitted to buying it with the intention of reading the book themselves. So what is it about young adult fiction that appeals to an older audience?  

For many of us, it all goes back to the Harry Potter franchise, with its popularity not being defined by age rating despite it being considered a children’s series. The Harry Potter series was one of the first universal series on the market and continues to gain traction despite ending in 2007. This jump started reading for fun for many children who didn’t enjoy the required reading and for adults who had fallen out of love with reading. Numerous new readers wanted to recreate the joy and fascination they found in Harry Potter in other novels, picking up other magic books and discovering what other books are popular. “A voracious appetite arose for books aimed at children that adults could enjoy too, and the appetite quickly shorthanded itself into ‘books for teens,” cites Monica Hay in her MA dissertation. Another series that was known to not be tied to its age rating was the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. This was rated for around 9 to 10 year olds yet was popular among teenagers and adults and remains popular after the release of the sequel series Heroes of Olympus.  

Countless adults today never saw certain aspects of themselves represented in literature available to them as teenagers. In the UK, 90% of YA titles between 2006 and 2016 were reported to feature white, able-bodied, cis-gendered, and heterosexual main characters.  Representation is so important, both in literature and film: seeing yourself in characters can grip you for hours until you’ve witnessed both the sunset and sunrise of a new day. Yet if you were a teenager in the early 2000s or before, you might not have seen aspects of yourself in the characters written during this time. Whereas in 2019, 19.6% of YA authors published in the UK were people of colour, compared with 7.1% in 2017. This year alone has seen stunning YA releases such as Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna and This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron, to name a few. The first book to feature a transgender protagonist – Being Emily by Rachel Gold – was published in 2012, which had to share its release date with the final Twilight movie that had the majority of readers gripped that year. This year, Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender was released in May and still can be found on tables and display boards in Waterstones. Now knowing that you might be able to find that missing puzzle piece in words published in recent times might be all it takes to tempt you into exploring young adult fiction again. Especially since what you read back then might have been decided by compulsory reading for assignments or what books were popular at the time.  

Young adult fiction also has come a long way in recent years. The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar has LGBTQ+ Muslim representation, with the protagonist Nishat, who is determined to win her school’s business competition and outperform the girl she has a crush on. Loveless by Alice Oseman features asexual representation and follows a girl’s journey to realising that love doesn’t have to involve sex or romance. When I think back to what books were easily available to me, the only one with queer representation was The Mortal Instruments series with the characters of Magnus and Alec. We had Twilight, multiple copies of The Fault in Our Stars, The Mortal Instruments and Harry Potter. I struggle to remember a book where a POC was the main character from what my school library stocked between the years of 2009 and 2014. With only 8% of all published young adult authors being people of colour between 2006 and 2016, I don’t think the issue was just with my school’s library.  

Despite there being more representation to relate to in literature than ever, traditional publishing has a long way to go. This is probably the reason why self-published authors are on the rise. Not only is it easier to see your work in print, it is also easier to see the story you want to tell – not what the publishing company thinks will give them the most profit.  

YA books published in recent years contain content warnings, and are advised not to be read by under 16s, due to heavy topics such as mental illness and racism. But many of the discussions that might be hard for some readers are essential conversations to have for others. In Heartstopper’s latest volume by Alice Oseman, one of the protagonists – Nick Nelson – is seen having a conversation with his mother about how “love can’t cure mental illness.” Instead Nick and his mother research how to best help Nick’s boyfriend Charlie Spring. It is refreshing to know that these scenes exist in modern YA, knowing many teenagers 10 years ago who would have benefited from this. While some do not agree on the addition of content warnings, for some it can be the deciding factor on whether they read the book or not.  

However, some people do not agree with these trigger warnings, whether to warn younger audiences or for their use in adult fiction – that an age rating should be enough.  

This user however makes a good point that people won’t read them if they don’t feel they need to but for those who need them, it can make all the difference.  

While fiction is targeted at specific age groups, that doesn’t mean that older readers won’t enjoy them, especially if they can find themselves in teen fiction released today. There’s an age cap depending how young you are, but that doesn’t mean once you reach 18 you can’t continue to read fiction targeted at younger audiences. When speaking about Harry Potter and Twilight, critics have said that “these works speak to the greater human condition, and not just to the specific teen experience.”  

Coming of age stories dominate the YA section and many adults feel like they didn’t reach maturity at 18. Typically, young adult fiction’s main themes are friendship, first loves and identity and while many adults relate to these themes, they might not enjoy reading about the school drama that comes with it. So a new sub-genre has come to the table in an attempt to bridge a gap between young adult and adult fiction.  

New adult is a new subgenre of adult literature with protagonists between the ages of 18 and 25 – no older than 30 – who experience first loves, struggles with identity and more. It focuses on issues that are tackled in young adults but brings them to the age where university and getting a job are in the frame of mind, rather than studying for your GCSES. High school crushes turn into office job romances. New Adult goes to show that who you thought you were in school might not actually be your true self – even if this emerging sub-genre doesn’t have its own section in stores yet.  

St Martin’s Press – publishers of New York Times Bestseller Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey Mcquinston –  coined the term for this sub-genre of literature with their contest back in 2009 when they were looking for “cutting-edge fiction with protagonists who are slightly older than YA… fiction similar to YA that can be published and marketed as adult—a sort of an older YA or new adult.” Booksellers told Publishing Weekly that they wouldn’t “try and market something I’m reasonably sure will be perceived as lame.” Yet many books that fall into this genre have gone on to become bestsellers, especially after the popularity of BookTok and authors self-publishing their work after being rejected by traditional publishing houses whose books turned out to be hits.  

Good characters and compelling storylines are universal. At the end of the day a good story is a good story, regardless of which section you find it in at your local bookshop.   

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