Why Adults Are Reading Young Adult Fiction

My son, Andrew, is seven, but he is a very good little reader.  I may have mentioned before that in my despair at the amount of effort he was investing in reading about Pokemon, I put him on to Narnia.  Since that time, I asked on this site and others for books I should encourage him to read.  A number of people mentioned the books about Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  Andrew read The Lightning Thief and then The Sea of Monsters.  

Naturally, Andrew began talking about the books and so I decided to read them just to make sure they were okay and to be able to carry on a conversation with him about this new world of imagination.  The Lightning Thief held my attention so well I found myself looking forward to lunchtime at work just so I could sit down with the book.  I am now working on The Sea of Monsters.

I have been thinking about how much I have enjoyed these books.  Consider the number of adults who read things like Percy Jackson or Harry Potter or Twilight.  Why do so many adults like to read young adult fiction?  I think I have the answer.  I think we like to read it because it has limits.  Young adult fiction has be judicious in the amount of sex and violence it contains.  The descriptions can't be quite as graphic or gratuitous.  That means in order for a story to be successful, it really has to be good.  A story has to have merit instead of relying on titillation of one kind or the other to succeed.  

Comments

[Joe H]

When I was young, I read the whole Redwall series (although Jacques is supposedly still knocking them out). I'm trying to get my nieces and nephews into them. The books are about woodland creatures who go on quests to fight evil in the forrest. The majority of them live in a huge abbey called Redwall. Redwall has a long history of being the haven for peaceful creatures. The good creatures are mice, moles, voles, hares, badgers, otters, etc. The bad creatures are snakes, lizards, rats, foxes, martins, weasels, etc. Clearly drawn good/evil lines- no cursing, no graphic violence except sword fights. Very good stuff!!!!!

[James Drake]

Some of my first books when I was seven or so were the Mushroom Planet books of Eleanor Elford Cameron. I wish I had read them to our son.

Marva Collins has a very good list of recommendations in her book. One of them is the wordless novel The Silver Pony.

[firinnteine]

Ha! Someone else has read the Mushroom Planet books!

To the point of the original post -- an older adult friend just told me in an e-mail this afternoon that she likes juvenile fiction for that very reason.

All I know is, I like juvenile fiction 'cause it's good. :-)

[Tim]

Mr. Baker,
I'm glad to see you and your son are enjoying the Percy Jackson books. My now nine year old discovered them last November and ripped thru all five books in two months. He's now rereading them and were reading all sorts of books on the Greek Gods (favorite for him and me is D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths). He even came up to me the other day with the Greek and Roman Alphabets written out (he'd found them in the big old book thing .... a dictionary!). RE adults reading kid fiction: I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed being brought back into this world by the responsibility to read to him; I enjoy these high quality kids books because they are so simple. So much of our adult works these days swim in seas of relativity; kid's works, at least the stuff from the classic era of kid's works - 1880-1940/50 - swim in seas that are mysterious yet reliable, real as pertains real kid perceptional abilities yet they feed the need and want for the fantastic. I suppose that is what I enjoy so much about them; they are unabashedly about and embrace the fantastic.

[Semicolon]

Unfortunately, the books you are reading Lightning Thief, etc. are considered children's fiction, not YA. And the YA books are becoming increasingly sex-saturated and violent despite the success of Twilight.

[Karen]

My eleven-year-old loves the Percy Jackson books -- we have them all in hardback.

I have also enjoyed reading Harry Potter with him, and re-reading Narnia and the hobbit books. I think the appeal of these books is that they are adventures instead of dull catalogs of life's miseries. So much contemporary adult literary fiction is about depressed people doing depressing things depressingly. Fighting monsters is a nice change from that.

[Christopher Hathaway]

I was talking with a friend and he holds the same opinion of movies. He prefers children's movies, Pixar, Disney and the like because they are free of material he would be embarrassed watching. I just watched the Incredibles with another friend, for the ninth or tenth time and am still moved by it.

I remember Tom Clancy saying that his publisher made him put sex in his later books. It was clear Clancy didn't enjoy writing that but justr went threw the motions. I don't know what the publisher was thinking. I don't know anyone who ever read a thriller for the sex. Red October had zilch and was an excelent read.

[Michael]

Adults read YA fiction because YA fiction is the only genre (although I'd challenge that it's not so much a genre as a marketing group, as you can have fantasy--Harry Potter, "slice of life"--pretty much anything by John Green, or romance--Twilight, and still be YA) left that still deals with themes worth talking about. Identity, morality, friendship, love--these are cornerstones to a teenager in development, learning relationships and how to be an adult. Adult fiction is tawdry, overwrought, violent and depressing. I am so frequently disappointed by it that I scarcely notice it anymore.

Semicolon-- the Percy Jackson books are "middle grade", not children's literature. Still a cut, market-wise, below YA, but not quite the same as, say, the old Boxcar Children books.

Generally the market for not-adults-yet literature is broken down as follows:

Children's Literature (3-7)
Middle Grade (7-12)
Young Adult (13-18)

And then you have a giant pool of adult. As a college student looking to teach high school, I'll probably be looking at YA novels 'til I die. As a writer, I really wish there was a realistic market slice labeled "no longer a kid, not quite an adult" in the 17-23 age group.

[Micah Watson]

Great observation Hunter. I think the same dynamic works in humor. It's relatively easy, and lazy, to go for the laugh that comes just from the shock of crossing some line unexpectedly. It's much more difficult to tease out the irony and messiness of life in a subtle and funny way (i.e., Bill Cosby), without resorting to tawdriness.

[Karen]

This reminds me of a discussion my husband and I have about movies made under the old Hays Office rules. Because writers couldn't simply use swear words, they had to actually use craft to get their meanings across. In "Casablanca" Rick tells Ilsa: "I heard a lot of stories. They go to the sound of a tinny piano downstairs and all begin 'Mister, I met a man once..'" It doesn't take much thought to get the reference, (although I've seen that movie a hundred times, the first one when I was sixteen, and it only dawned on me what he was talking about when I was forty.) but it's so much more artful that just calling her a whore.

Same with YA books. The writers can't simply go for shock, they have to use skill.

[Kristine]

I read YA novels because nihilism is so in vogue for grown-up, especially literary, fiction. YA novels still adhere to that old, old (and deeply human) formula: the main character faces some horrible choice, wherein if he does the right thing, he risks losing everything, and if he does the wrong thing, he gets what he wants, but someone else suffers. Sometimes they end tragically, sometimes happily. But you almost always get the feeling from them that being human is about making hard moral choices. As opposed to grown-up literature, where the feeling you get afterwards is usually, wow, life is empty.

[fat albert]

The same thing is true of so call "Hard" science fiction by classic authors like Heinlein, Niven, Asimov, Pournelle and so on. Despite being disdained by the literary elite much of it was very well written with well crafted stories and literate wordsmithing. The Heinlein books for the YA market are still (and will continue to be) classics.

[Rob G]

There's a fair amount of modern literary fiction that's not tawdry or nihilistic -- you just have to do a little searching. I can recommend Peter Taylor, William Maxwell, Wendell Berry, Kazuo Ishiguro, and P.D. James, to start. And whatever you do, don't miss Mark Helprin. He's phenomenally good.

And of course there are always the classics.

I haven't read a juvenile or YA fiction book in years, but I've never been at a loss to find a decent work of fiction to read.

[Angela]

The sex doesn't get as graphic in YA as it can in adult fiction, but they are definitely filled with sensuality and violence. And why not? Teens have always had to deal with questions of sex and violence and drugs whether their parents wanted to think about it or not.

I read YA lit because they are publishing some of the most daring and original literature right now. YA authors take risks in format and style and genre that adult publishers aren't willing to take because adults are seen as being set in their reading interests, while teenagers will give anything a try at least once.

[Robert Espe]

Harry Potter, Narnia, Tolkien, Twilight. I think what these have in common isn't their target demographic, but that they are fantasy. Fantasy is a powerful medium, it just so happens not much is written for an exclusively adult audience unless you count the original Grimm's fairy tales (not the sanitized Disney versions). Or perhaps even when such a work is produced, many adults assume such things must be for children and miss out.

[Rob G]

Another thing about the appeal of YA fiction might be the fact that it is, generally speaking, more plot-driven than literary fiction for adults, which sometimes spends more time on description, character development, etc. For those readers who read primarily for plot and not so much for these other qualities, YA fiction is probably more appealing.

A couple other recent adult fiction works well worth reading are Marilynne Robinson's 'Gilead' and 'Home.' Both have a very prominent Christian aspect -- 'Gilead' won the Pulitzer, btw.

[Scott]

Consider Russell Kirk's books, too.

[firinnteine]

If we're listing good adult fiction, check out Leif Enger as well.

On the juvenile/YA front, I just reread Tom Sawyer. :-) The Penderwicks is a good recent addition to the realms of children's fiction; shades of Nesbit.

[Daniel Crandall]

When discussing Young Adult, Middle Grade or Children's books one thing that might be obvious, but should be kept is mind is that kids tend to read up in their age. So children less then 10 years will likely want to read stuff on the high end of Middle Grade and Middle Grade kids will tend toward Young Adult. It might have to do with wanting to feel older and smarter than they are. It might have to do with wanting challenging themselves.

I don't really care for the Young Adult classification. I believe that it drives away adult readers who think that its just going to be juvenile drivel. During the Harry Potter craze there was some mention in the beginning that it was published by Scholastic as "Young Adult," but as the popularity grew that aspect, I think, was diminished. I avoided Harry Potter for quite some time precisely because I thought it was a "kid's book." Then I listened to the audio book (Jim Dale is a great reader, btw) and caught the fever like everyone else.

I've been listening to Jim Dale read Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. It's something of a re-imagining J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. I recommend it.

[Katie]

I know why adults read YA fiction. Its fun, and since Harry Potter you can sit in public with one and no one will bat an eye. I just read a really compelling YA title, Her Mother’s Diary that was very sophisticated. A great read.

[Watch Grown Ups Movie]

I have read the whole Harry Potter series and liked it so much.I have also seen the movies and liked them also. I was talking with a friend and he holds the same opinion of movies. He prefers children's movies, Pixar, Disney and the like because they are free of material he would be embarrassed watching. I just watched the Incredibles with another friend, for the ninth or tenth time and am still moved by it.