Kimberly Emerson

One more thing to be insecure about: do I write the genre anyone wants? Everyone looking for an agent – for writing, for acting, for music, and probably tons of other things – fights an uphill battle. This remains true whatever your genre, but as Erika pointed out to me recently, the path might be a tad less vertical if you write Young Adult literature. There’s no disputing the fact: YA as a market has exploded in recent years.

Back in the 1990s when she shopped the first Harry Potter book, J.K. Rowling was told not to get her hopes up, because even if she got published, children’s books didn’t make much. Fast forward twenty years, and we find children’s books keeping the publishing industry afloat. Between 2013 and 2014, YA/Children’s book sales increased by 22.9%, while Adult Fiction sank by 3.3%. What happened? Did kids and teens suddenly start reading more, and adults less? Not exactly. Digging deeper into the numbers, I found a 2012 article on Bowker.com stating 55% of all YA books were purchased by people over 18. By 2014, the number had risen to 77%, according to a PBS story.  At first glance, I couldn’t see anything revolutionary about this. Of course adults did the buying, they had the money. Maybe they bought the books for teens. According to the Bowker article, however, a survey of adults said when they bought YA books, 78% of the time it was for their own reading pleasure.

Research the topic, and you will find some people up in arms. For some people, “adults reading YA” ranks right up there with “dogs and cats living together” on the list of things slathering lard all over that slippery slope to destruction. We’re dumbing down the population. Adults are indulging in simplistic happy endings. These books are uncritical and don’t challenge you intellectually. As Ruth Graham writes, “You should feel embarrassed if what you’re reading was written for children.”

Of course, this same woman grudgingly admits that reading Rainbow Rowell’s critically acclaimed Eleanor & Park might at least rank above watching Nashville or reading detective novels.

From what I hear, the only thing that classifies a book as YA is a teenage protagonist. You can find endings happy and sad, main characters likable and not, stories understated and overwhelming. Given that both Romeo & Juliet and Twilight fit the category, I find it hard to render an opinion one way or another. Much like adult fiction, some of it appeals to me and some of it doesn’t. I don’t feel any need to read about sparkly vampires, but to be fair, the vampire genre, YA or otherwise, would go bankrupt if it had to depend on my patronage. On the other hand, I adore Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and Anne of Green Gables. I’m also a huge fan of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. I can equally enjoy Big Girl books like the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, The People of the Book and Pride & Prejudice, but I’m still pretty sure Ms. Graham will never name me Reader of the Year.

Why do so many people love reading YA? Lack of sex, violence and foul language? Not likely.  Since the only necessity is a center-stage teen, YA runs the gamut of political and moral beliefs. Ariel Richardson put together a great list of reasons why reading YA is good for adults for the Chronicle Blog. One of the more surprising reasons? YA books frequently retail for less than their adult counterparts, in some cases as much as 50% less. Little known fact–adults like saving money as much as teenagers do. Maybe more.

Personally, I sometimes read YA because the topics interest me. A boarding school that teaches kids to be witches and wizards. A modern-day twist on ancient Greek myths. An orphan who teaches a town tolerance of redheads. (We need love, too.) These things intrigue me, so I read about them. The protagonists are under eighteen? Hey, I was that age once, too. Let’s see if their experience was anything like mine.

Naysayers accuse YA readers of wanting to escape to easier time and indulge in happy endings. I can only imagine these people have very different memories of their teen years than I do. Most everyone I know disliked high school at least a little. We desperately wanted to grow up, and often times, there was a good reason for that. When you’re trapped in a community of perhaps a thousand people, some of whom resent your existence for reasons you don’t know and probably couldn’t understand even if you did, you usually want to leave. The cloying atmosphere of secondary school taught me that I could survive more than I thought, and that if endings frequently weren’t happy, well, at least they weren’t the end of me. This is not a place I want to escape to. This is a world I feel brave for re-examining, because looking back at my teenage self once in a while helps me understand my present self better. It also helps me understand the teenagers in my life today.

If someone doesn’t want to read stories written for someone under eighteen, I for one will not make them. I can’t think of anything less rewarding than trying to tell someone that they’re reading the wrong thing for pleasure. Plus, I write adult books, and I’d like to think someone will buy them someday. But please, don’t waste your time trying to make me feel bad if my personal library includes YA, middle grade or even children’s books. I don’t enjoy them because I’m trying to relive my youth. I like them because they are different stories, depending on how old I am. Books I read at ten for a great story and re-read at fourteen for a sympathetic character I now enjoy going back to because they tell me how different ages view the same situation and give me a start at bridging that generation gap.

At the end of the day, I think there’s a reason why so many books written for children stick with us. Little Women, Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Rings and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Where the Sidewalk Ends all came into the world to entertain young people. We keep reading them because they still have something to say, no matter what age we are. Madeline L’Engle summed it up nicely: “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

Maybe some adults want to read the difficult stuff, too.

Kimberly hopes one day she’ll be sophisticated enough to write for kids.