The Guardians Gazette No. 6
"Children's literature," or the adultification of YA
It’s weird being a Geriatric Millennial sometimes.
I’m part of a cusp generation that was old enough to have had a formative childhood without the internet, but also young enough to be considered a digital native.1 I’ll put it this way, I’m old enough to have had to memorize phone numbers when I wanted to call my friends, but young enough to have taught myself HTML and CSS in elementary school. Old enough to have to take computer classes to learn MS-DOS, but young enough to have never needed it. Slightly too old for Pokémon, too old for Avatar: The Last Airbender, too old for Percy Jackson, but young enough have to been Harry’s age when I first started reading the Series That Will No Longer Be Named.
In fact, I’m so old that I remember a time before YA.
I’ve been a fairly avid reader since I was young; in my fact, I would say my most formative reading years were probably between the ages of 7 and 11. As with most gifted-to-be-diagnosed-later-in-life-as-neurodivergent kids, I was an early reader, put in all the advanced reading groups from preschool onward. But it wasn’t until the summer between first and second grade that I truly fell in love with reading. With worlds. With adventures. With characters. With stories.
Before then, I had always been a compulsive reader, and by compulsive, I really mean I was compelled, almost against my will. The thing about my ADHD is that I can’t stand tedium; I will do almost anything to escape boredom. Before I fell in love with reading, that meant I read to pass time. Anything except be in the present, because the present is boring. I read anything and everything — the nutrition labels of cereal boxes at the breakfast table, the signs on billboards while driving in the car, IKEA instruction manuals when my parents brought me shopping with them, and even the Bible when I was dragged to church.
There are a lot of books from that summer I still recall fondly — The Day Chubby Became Charles by Achim Bröger, several Goosebumps books by R. L. Stine,2 all the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary,3 Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery — but more than a single book, it’s the experience of that entire summer that stays with me. The feeling of passing afternoons in a golden haze, lost in a book. The weekly trips to the library, as sacred as Sunday school, to me at least.
Back then, the stratification of children’s fiction did not exist. YA as a category didn’t become its own thing until Twilight became a phenomenon, although teen books have always existed. I measure the expansion and growth of kid lit by the second floor of Vromans Bookstore, which was my local indie as a child. The summer I first fell in love with reading, YA consisted of a single bookcase labeled Teen, filled with Tamora Pierce, Garth Nix, and Sweet Valley High. Now YA is almost the entirety of the second floor. All other kid lit was shelved together, regardless of the age of the protagonist or reading level. As a result, my memory of children’s fiction is that it was much more fluid back then. Indeed, “peak” children’s fiction for me were all the books I read at age 10: every single Redwall book by Brian Jacques I could get my hands on, The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, A Wrinkle in Time (and my favorite, A Wind in the Door) books by Madeleine L’Engle, the Tripods trilogy by John Christopher, The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, the Sally Lockhart books by Philip Pullman, Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli, The Giver by Lois Lowry, I could go on and on and on.
It’s interesting, in hindsight, to look back and see how very different "children’s fiction” is to both middle grade and young adult now. Now both age categories have strict conventions and tropes associated with them, and the voices are very different. A book like A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle features an adult and pregnant Meg as a protagonist, yet is still considered children’s fiction. Or even the third Sally Lockhart book, in which Sally has a young child out of wedlock. What was considered kid lit back then was less a matter of substance than one of style. Did it...feel young? Then into kid lit it went. In fact, there was very little difference between the reading levels of the later Prydain novels and Orson Scott Card; the only difference was on which floor they were shelved. Also word count.
I oversimplify, of course, but it really did feel that back then, the boundary between children’s and adult — well, adult SFF — was porous. I found Zel by Donna Jo Napoli in the children’s section, but it’s a retelling of Rapunzel told from the wicked witch’s point of view. It’s also rather explicit about sex and lust and pleasure and jealousy, but also about the pain of infertility. Tamora Pierce has also been candid about how the Song of the Lioness quartet was initially meant to be one book for adults, but was divided into four books and published for teens.
All that changed around 2005.
Now, because I’m ancient, I got most of my book discourse through Livejournal, and mostly through the fandom of the Series That Will Not Be Named before shortly moving onto reading blogs of the YA Old School: John Green, Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Holly Black, Maggie Stiefvater, etc. But around 2005, discourse started shifting toward a little teen vampire book that could — Twilight.
To be completely honest, YA as we know it today is entirely due to Stephenie Meyer. If the Terfmaster of Magic School proved that children’s fiction can break out of its intended readership to include adults, then Stephenie Meyer opened a vein of gold in the mine known as publishing. Teen fiction became lucrative. And once a market gets tapped, imitators and prospectors rush in. Tropes become standardized, and the category develops distinct characteristics. For about ten years (or two 5-year cycles, as publishing tends to move in 5-year cycles), YA became embedded in the cultural consciousness.
And then came 2015.
Now, I love Leigh. I’ve known Leigh since our days writing for (Pub)lishing Crawl, and I think she is a phenomenal writer. I still remember reading an ARC of Siege & Storm for the first time and being floored by how good it was, back when I was just starting out as an editorial assistant in publishing. The character work, the world building, the Sturmhond? *chef’s kiss* Give it to me.
Six of Crows was a game changer.
I remember reading Six of Crows for the first time and again, being floored by how good it was and also...not believing for a moment Kaz was an actual teenager. But that’s the way of fiction sometimes. A certain suspension of disbelief needs to be had to enjoy certain works, and I was willing to give Leigh this. Kaz Brekker might have been “seventeen,” but he was 17 the way CW (which was WB when I was a kid) actors were 35 years old and playing 17. Kaz — and the rest of the Dregs (except Wylan) were grown-ass adults cosplaying as teenagers, and I was fine with that.
Only...Six of Crows began the adultification of YA.
The creep was slow at first. The publication of Six of Crows followed the push by my old publishing boss for a category called New Adult, and while that never quite took off the way he envisioned, YA slowly became more and more adult over time. Sarah J. Maas published A Court of Thorns and Roses in 2016, which was initially bought by Bloomsbury as a New Adult title, even though it was published as children’s. Then came the trend toward older, darker, “sexier” YA, and where there had once been crossover between children’s fiction and adult SFF, now there was significant crossover between YA and romance. My debut novel doesn’t escape this trend either — Wintersong, like ACOTAR, was bought by my publisher as an adult title, before being edited for the YA market.
Even as early as 2018 — the year I sold Guardians of Dawn to my editor — there was rumbling amongst the reading and writing community about a “hole” in the market for younger YA. Where would you publish something like Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones these days? Or the Gallagher Girls books by Ally Carter? What about the kids who were too advanced for middle grade, but not yet emotionally ready for YA? A lot of middle grade post-Twilight also become increasingly rigid in its voice and target audience, reaching for the 8-10 crowd with Whimsy and Magick.™ For the 12-14 year old reader, there aren’t a lot of options anymore. You go straight from Percy Jackson to Serpent & Dove. From adventure to romance.
At the same time, I remember a lot of discourse from this era asking But what about the boys???? Most neoliberals in publishing wrote off this question, saying that we should teach boys to be more in tune with their emotions like girls, and get them to read romance instead of action/adventure. Besides, they came move on to adult SFF, can’t they? Only...this pigeonholes girls into “romance-only,” while boys graduating from Diary of a Wimpy Kid might not necessarily be ready for George R. R. Martin. To say nothing of people like me, who likes having romantic storylines in books, but would rather the romance be secondary to the adventure.
This was the landscape in which I wrote the first Guardians of Dawn book.
There is, as I’ve said, a troll impulse in me that I just can’t quite wrangle. Where my peers was going older, darker, sexier — they didn’t leave YA for adult altogether — I was consciously heading in the opposite direction. Younger, lighter, more chaste. To be honest, the books I had in mine most while writing Zhara was Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and The Arkadians by Lloyd Alexander. While shelved middle grade today, these were just...”children’s fiction” when I was 12, and some of my favorite books of all time.
I’ve seen some criticism of Zhara saying that it is “childish” and “juvenile” and that the 16-year-olds of the story act like middle schoolers instead of teens. And sure, that’s valid. The humor of Zhara is young, cheesy, and not at all subtle. But the part about the characters not seeming like realistic teenagers does stick out to me because I wrote them as the 16-year-old I was. I was not Kaz Brekker. (I’m still not, as much as I’d like to be.) I had little experience of the world at sixteen, and I acted accordingly. I like to think my characters do too.
We are still in the adultification era of YA, but at some point, the pendulum will swing back. There is already significant burnout with the current trend of older YA, and we are currently in the category’s bust cycle. And that’s fine. As with everything else, there are peaks and troughs. The algorithm might have thrown a wrench into things, but the basic principles still apply.
I can’t wait.
Yes, the term digital native was first applied to millennials, not Gen Z.
That I had to sneak home from the library because horror was “the devil’s fiction,” according to my Christian mother and grandmother. My mother also forbade me from reading Babysitters Club because she thought mass-produced books weren’t “quality,” but I didn’t care about Babysitters Club; I wanted to be scared.
Including Ramona and Her Mother, the only book to have made me cry until I read The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak at age 23.