The YA Phenomenon: What is it about YA?

Why write YA (young adult) novels?  The simplest answer I can give is because I read YA novels.  So the next question is inevitably, why read YA novels as a grown woman?  The answer is a complicated one filled with societal woes and a generational gap that is more and more evident than ever.

My generation experienced a hardship that many of the baby boomers can’t really comprehend.  We graduated and became adults in an economic hardship that has made it nearly impossible for us to bounce back… and yes, I could write a huge blog post on this submit but I won’t.  I only mention this because it is what drove us to the exciting happens of the YA atmosphere.

We clung to the dystopian stories, fantastical worlds, contemporary stories of teens overcoming adversaries that were both seen physically and unseen to explain our own feelings of inadequacy (that was constantly shoved in our faces calling us lazy, spoiled, entitled, etc), our feelings of ‘being a caged bird,’ and our feelings on an ever changing society that we were trying to change.  These characters are passionate and have a voice point that I have found lacking in many adult novels.

So maybe it is best to talk about what I don’t like about adult novels to explain what I do like about YA novels.  I don’t like that adult novels feel preachy.  They don’t feel like stories (many historical fiction novels I will exclude on the principle of the subject they are writing on), they feel like lectures.  I think it is wonderful for a story to have a moral lesson, or shine a light on an issue but if that is all your story is doing, then why not lecture on it instead?  Why hide it, poorly I might add, in a fictional story?  I don’t want to be preached at; I want to be entertained.  Now, I will say that not all adult genre writers do this.  I have an equal share of ‘adult’ novels sitting next to my YA, but the tone is so vastly different that it is hard to ignore.

YA novels are writing for an audience that wants to be first and foremost, entertained and connected to.  These characters and these worlds are crafted so that the reader than see themselves or someone they know and feel compelled to keep reading, not to finish the story but because the reader is now invested on an emotional level.

 In short, YA is emotional and our generation is filled to the brim with emotion.  We react with it and are consumed with it and that’s beautiful.  No longer do we hide behind restraint, but we embrace the rollercoaster and so many YA novels are, at their very core, about embracing ‘it.’  That’s their appeal.  That’s their connection to an audience that so many adult novels are lacking in their attempt to up their reading level, tackle ‘adult’ subjects, reveal some great truth.  Great truths are being revealed in YA in a much more accessible way by simply telling the story of a person or group of people with no pretense to show and teach the world something.  By simply telling or ‘showing’ the story, the truth is revealed.

We come back to the question: Why YA?  Because the connection to the audience is like nothing else in this world at this time.  Change and adventure is happening and it’s happening in YA.