Week 7

I read New Adult:  Needless Marketing Speak or Valued Subgenre and Look Homeward, Reader:  A Not-So-Young Audience for Young Adult Books.  Full confession here:  YA may be my least favorite age literary age group.  I love children's books; just never got bit by the YA bug.  That said, I'm not surprised that it's widely read by adults my age (slightly older than 'new adult') and older.  I have some suspicions about the impact of the book-to-bigscreen market, which seems to disproportionately affect YA, but I'm sure that's not all there is to it.  Meg Wolitzer quotes one critic, who says "YA endings are uniformly satisfying."  I fail to see why the critic is complaining about that, since the point of reading would seem to me to leave the book satisfied in one way or another.  Otherwise you might as well just be doing a school assignment--read, report, move on to the next item.  YA is not to my tastes, but it's enough for me to know that it is to the tastes of many readers.  The trick is knowing when to suggest a YA book to an older reader (a skill I haven't yet mastered).

Regarding the term 'new adult', I agree it has some value as a marketing tool, although I wouldn't try to treat it as a separate genre from 'old' adult fiction.  As far as libraries are concerned, I think we should just be aware of the term and what's being marketed under it to point patrons in the right direction.  

I followed Shannon Hale's blog and Someday My Printz Will Come.  Can I talk about how much I LOVE Shannon Hale's awareness of issues of gender and reading?  How 'girl' books are simply not offered to boys, and how female authors are only considered relevant to girls?  So far I've only read Hale's "Princess in Black."  I'm definitely going to fix that.  We, librarians, are in the perfect position to help fix that problem--and yet we rarely do.  I can seldom pull off convincing a boy to read a book with a girl on the cover, even if it's a survival story (Julie of the Wolves) or an action/sci-fi (The Search for WondLa).  When they see a picture of a girl on the cover they just shut down.  And there's always that fumble when the book doesn't have an obvious cover--the "The main character is a girl but."  But what?  Parents aren't helpful here either--I had one mother today turn down Stella by Starlight for her son because it's about a girl (even though it's not about a girl, any more than Bud, Not Buddy is about a boy).  I can't predict how her opinions on these matters will influence other readers, but I know I went from 'vaguely aware' to 'highly interested' after reading her thoughts on this eternally relevant issue.

Someday My Printz Will Come is the blog of YALSA's Printz Award, given to excellent teen books. Definitely a handy resource, even retrospectively (award season is not yet upon us).  It's a great general guide to the what's what of recent young adult fiction (and nonfiction), with due consideration to diversity in YA publishing (something that can seem lacking when only looking at the list of winners).

Checked out Harlequin Teen (is it just me or does that seem...wrong, somehow?) and Harper Teen. Trends seem to still be fantasy oriented, as well as dystopian.  Lots of romance, and a number of series that seem to be continuing (like Julie Kagawa's Iron Fey series).