Adult /Young Adult Lines Grow Increasingly Blurry

Young adult readers are a powerful market force in the book industry -- teens spend $94.7 billion per year, increasing by $1 billion each year (Jupiter Research). Most booksellers have sections devoted to young adult or teen readers, but increasingly the lines between age ranges and target audiences are blurred. Can labeling a book 'teen reading' turn off potential readers over 14? Do the very characteristics that publishers require for YA books limit the books' ability to generate interest for those seeking complexity rather than straightforward moral lessons? Can an established bestselling adult book be successfully remarketed as a YA book? Is 12 and up the new eight to 12? Some booksellers contacted consider young adult readers those from 16 to 18; others see children as young as 10 in the YA section. Booksellers must make crucial decisions about a books' audience when they decide where to shelve it.

Many booksellers post lists of adult books that are suitable, or recommended, for teens. But communities and the appropriate age ranges for books vary greatly. In small towns, booksellers often know all the children under 18 buying books, as well as their parents. They may inform the parents about the subject matter in books the kids want to read. Ellen Davis of Dragonwings, a children's bookstore in Waupaca, Wisconsin, hesitates before recommending the popular Lovely Bones to those under 18 unless she is sure that their parents are aware of the book's grisly premise. Donna Urey of White Birch Books in North Conway, New Hampshire, received a list of suggested reading from the local middle school faculty with entries such as Memoirs of a Geisha, The Things They Carried, and The Perfect Storm. "Different families have very different standards [of acceptability], and each child has different reading needs," Urey told BTW.

A 13-year-old could be handed Bee Season instead of Go Ask Alice or Cut, or Speak, although the former was written for adult readers and the others are recommended for his or her age group. Martha Parravano, executive editor of The Horn Book Magazine, made the point that much young adult literature is less appealing to young teenagers than adult literature. "It's possible," she told BTW, "that many 13-year-olds aren't ready for the angst and grimness that pervade much of current YA literature and would be happier skipping right to a gripping adventure fable like Yann Martell's Life of Pi."

Those familiar with current YA titles might agree. Anorexia, self-mutilation, abuse, disabilities, and untimely deaths, like amnesia and evil twins in daytime soap operas, seem to occur with remarkable frequency in books written for young adults. Perhaps, as Davis noted, real and imagined tales of terror, such as Into Thin Air or The Lovely Bones, would provide some relief. Realistic coming-of-age stories, such as Jim the Boy or Plainsong, although filled with life's trials, may offer more comfort than the typical YA fare. Davis also noted that the limited number of adult books in her store are all taken from the Book Sense lists, so they are already culled from the field for their quality.

Michael Cart, an author and anthologist of works for young readers, former president of YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association), and a member of the 2003-2004 ALEX Award Committee (annual awards presented by YALSA, Adult Books for Young Adults Task Force) told BTW, "We are also seeing more and more books being published as adult titles that could, just as easily, be published as young adult books. The best recent example: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, which was selected as an ALEX Award title this year." In fact, more and more of these books are appearing on this annual list of the 10 best "adult" books for young adults. Other titles in recent years include Joseph Weisberg's Tenth Grade, Martha Southgate's The Fall of Rome, and Ann Packer's The Dive From Clausen's Pier.

In an article titled "Tigers and Poodles and Birds, Oh My!," to be published in the May/June issue of The Horn Book Magazine, Tim Wynne-Jones, a noted adult and children's book author and a faculty member at Vermont College's MFA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, deconstructed the assumptions of the YA novel as they relate to three popular books written for adults: Life of Pi, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and What the Birds See by Sonya Hartnett, which was originally published in Australia with the title Of a Boy. He found that these titles follow none of the overt or tacit formulas for successful YA fiction and yet all three, in distinct ways, have been selling heavily to young people.

Wynne-Jones noted that these three books have successfully crossed over to the children's market despite conventional YA publishing wisdom that necessitates a single, teenage narrator; constant action propelling a strong, linear plot; no gratuitous profanity or extremely esoteric language or syntax; and a "ring of safety" -- or an ultimate assurance that nothing too bad will happen. Wynne-Jones wrote that for kids one of the strengths of the three books is, "precisely because they were not written for kids" and "none of the [three] titles has received that particular brand of editing that is visited upon books for children. Imagine a children's editor writing to the author of Pride and Prejudice," he wrote wryly, "'Jane, Jane, Jane! How many times must I tell you, show don't tell!'"

The language in the three books, he contended, may violate the YA standard by including difficult words such as frugiverous, durian, tiffins, and commensal (Life of Pi); foreign terminology such as tombola-sized, grass clags in wads (What the Birds See); and Britishisms plus some vulgarities uttered by adults (Curious Incident).

David Fickling, editor of the Random House U.K. children's edition of Curious Incident, is quoted by Wynne-Jones as having said, "The swearing [in Curious Incident] shows that the adults with whom Christopher interacts are not in control. And that gives the book much of its sense of truth and sense of humor too." Fickling noted that the text is identical in both the adult and children's versions published in the U.K. because, "it is high time that we allowed that young readers can tell the difference between actual swearing and reading about swearing. We seem to have no trouble understanding that they can read about killing, murder, and death."

Mark Haddon commented on the logic of maintaining colorful (and off-color) language and complex plots when he told Wynne-Jones that "most teenage fiction has an invisible ring of safety built into it. However sticky situations get, however dark the material, little signals here and there give off the message that this is 'only' a kids' book. Don't worry. Nothing too bad will happen. Things will come right in the end. I didn't want that ring of safety. And the swearing is one of the signals in Curious Incident that it isn't there."

When younger readers opt for adult books, Parravano posited that "perhaps it's that they would be happier skipping the careful scriptedness of YA fiction, in which the angst is always accompanied by some kind of safety net: there's always some kind of redemption in the end. In adult fiction grimness and angst is certainly part of the fabric -- you can't get much grimmer than what happens to Pi in the aftermath of the shipwreck -- but it's in context of a rich, complex story and a rich, complex world. The tight focus on the protagonist in YA fiction doesn't often let readers see beyond their teenage years, whereas adult fiction, again like Pi, puts the teenage years in the context of a whole life. That might be a welcome perspective."

"Younger readers have always read 'up' in terms of enjoying books with protagonists several years older than they are, Cart told BTW. "It does seem that young kids are reading titles aimed at older and older readers, simply because they're more sophisticated than in the past. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since reading is a mediated experience: the material is being filtered through the creative consciousness of an adult author. So even more difficult issues are less disturbing than kids' seeing them, as they routinely do, on TV or on the Web or in video games."

Wynne-Jones articulated the point that straying from the narrative, one of the prohibitions in children's literature, makes these books all the more diverting for all readers. "One of the great pleasures of Life of Pi," he wrote, "is the plethora of information about survival at sea, the fascinating habits of tigers, or the differences between various religions…. In Curious Incident, our protagonist spends whole chapters discussing intriguing mathematical problems, difficulties one might encounter in deep space, dilemmas about the nature of perception."

Although convention dictates that children's fiction be written in the first or third person from the point of view of a young person, Wynn-Jones noted that in What the Birds See, Harnett "leaps into the minds of several of her characters, notably Beattie, Adrian's grandmother, or Grandmonster, as he sometimes thinks of her … we learn a lot that we could not have possibly seen merely through Adrian's eyes. We learn objectivity. And we are going to need objectivity to try to come to grips with what happens in this story. Or in life, for that matter." --Nomi Schwartz

For booksellers' suggested adult titles for teen readers, click here.

For information about the ALEX awards, go to www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards.

For information about The Horn Book Magazine and the May/June issue featuring Tim Wynne-Jones' article "Tigers and Poodles and Birds, Oh My!," go to www.hbook.com/mag.shtml.