As you may have noticed, my blog has been in a bit of a lull. This has mainly because school and extracurriculars have made me super busy, but also because I've been undergoing a lot of shifts in my reading preferences.
Before I go into this, obviously these are my own, personal reasons. There are tons of reasons to enjoy YA, but I'm going to be sharing why I've been moving away from it as a genre. Lastly, a little background on me. Without revealing my exact age, I am squarely in the center of the young adult demographic. I began reading young adult in about 2015 or 2016, slightly before I was demographic age and also slightly before the genre began blossoming as a whole. Last year, I read 161 books, and the year before that, 139. Of the 161, 20 were not YA, 10 in November and December. In 2018, 10 of the 139 were not YA. So it's safe to say I've had a lot of exposure to the genre.
In my reading, I have settled on 3 concrete reasons why I've "left" YA. They are as follows.
1. The Lack of Stakes
As with all of these, this does not hold true for everything in the genre. Just this morning, I was rereading Libba Bray's The Diviners and tingling with anticipation for the plot twists that I've already read. However, the genre as a whole does not have a ton of stakes. I understand the need for a transitory genre between the "The world is a safe place" of children's books and the "everything sucks" of adult, but I think middle grade does a great job of introducing these concepts. In my opinion, (as everything is) young adult needs to exacerbate them more. The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas is an excellent example of this. Starr, the main character, risks jail time and grapples with grief close to her.
Typically in YA, I find that the characters are often removed from the issues that they are grappling with. You know that characters will make it out mostly physically unscathed, and for me, that ruins some of the mystery and anticipation.
(This is, of course, a matter of taste. I see how young adult books can provide comfort, but if we are to assume they are written for actual teens, a larger dose of reality would be more age-appropriate.)
2. The Message Books
This one is definitely going to make me sound a bit churlish, but I have come to realize my hatred for message books. That is also.....sort of the point of a lot of young adult. Don't get me wrong, I think it can be done well. Coming back to The Hate You Give, that was a great YA book because it had a clear message, but also an interesting plot beyond the message and compelling characters. More recently, I have been reading a lot of fictional feminist literature. For this example, I'll use two YA books and two adult books. Both of the YA books were incredibly obvious about their messages, and they followed the same basic plot structure. White, upper middle class, educated girl who is already sort of a feminist experiences a catalyst event and decides to become even more open about it. This goes poorly, and she is either chastened or emboldened to rage against society. She meets a person of color and gets a throwaway paragraph about her privilege, which is then never acknowledged again. One of these books, The Rules of Being a Girl (I won't be naming the other one because the author is not as well known) was slightly better because the message was at least coherent. However, I found them both surface level and pandering. It was basically a buzzfeed article about feminism with the first cliche plot that the author thought of thrown in. They were a fine introduction to feminism, but if you were even remotely educated, they were not enjoyable.
The two adult books that I read were Salt Slow by Julia Armfield and The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter. Without going into too much detail, they both had an excellent narrative that allowed the reader to connect their own experiences with those of the character, while letting you come to your own conclusions.
There's nothing wrong with being a message book, I just read two bad ones in a row. However, I think as a genre, YA lacks room for reader thought and analysis. Readers can grasp large concepts, and I don't think it would hurt for this to be acknowledged.
3. How Formulaic it is
After being saturated in the genre for so long, I'm just going to come out and say it. A lot of YA books are the same. There is little diversity of writing style. In reading more adult, I have discovered stream of consciousness, writing that plays with time, and a multitude of other stylistic complexities that simply do not exist within young adult. This somewhat comes back to the lack of stakes, but I find most books so predictable that reading them takes little effort and is not fun. Again, this does not apply to everything. Ziggy, Stardust, and Me by James Brandon is an awesome example of a book with a simple writing style that manages to be really engaging.
In conclusion
These are simply my reasons for feeling like YA is no longer the genre for me. It is not inferior to adult, but I think it can be agreed upon that it often takes less brainpower to read. This can be a great thing, I'm just looking for more. These are my reasons as a teenager, and I'm sharing in hopes that someone else might identify with this and to open up a conversation on the differences in genre. (My 0 followers and I are coming for you, book industry.) I don't quite consider the things I've listed to even be negative; just my feelings.
Happy reading, everyone!
- Sarah
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