posted
Both of these books were originally not marketed as Young Adult titles, although both tend to be very popular with young readers today. Many people would call them something like YA or juveniles because of the young protagonists and the appeal they hold for young readers. However, there are compelling reasons why neither quite fits within the category. The protagonist is too young, for one thing--particularly in Ender's Game, although Davey from Jumper always read as much younger than his official age to me. YA books supposedly have protagonists two to three years older than their target audience. Ender begins EG at around seven, right? Davey is older, but, again, he never felt that way to me. For another, both books are way too long to be YA titles. YA titles run what, 90k to 100k words? A couple hundred novel pages or so? According to Goodreads, Ender's Game has 352 pages in the mass market paperback, and, coincidentally, the 2002 paperback for Jumper has the exact same number of pages. And of course, neither was initially marketed that way. So in the eyes of their original publishers, what did they have in their hands?
So what would you call these? Would you cram them into YA anyway? Just plain old fantasy or science fiction, and not bother with anything else?
And, of slightly more interest to me, what other books can you think of that inhabit this middle ground between speculative fiction and YA speculative fiction? Just throwing out a few things that pop into my head . . . Seventh Son, of course . . . well, heck, most of OSC's oeuvre. Maybe Feist's Magician--it's been too long since I read it. Equal Rites maybe?
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posted
I would not consider EG to be young adult. Not only for it's length but for mature content and concepts. Ender was a victim of serious crimes, and I would constitute what was done to him as abuse. While many young adults may enjoy the books, and get a lot out of them, I'd say it is not appropriate for the majority of young adults. When I hear the term "young adult" I think Artemis Fowl. Harry Potter is an unsure for me. The content gets more mature with each book. Books where children are abused do not get YA adult rating from me.
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I first read Ender's game in sixth grade. Or was it seventh? That would mean I was 12 or 13 years old. It's open to interpretation, but I could easily see it in the YA category, as well as Sci-Fi.
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Lyrhawn, are you telling me where it is in your local bookstore, or where you would shelve it?
-o-
Well, one thing that has recently come to my attention is that I have been misapplying the term YA for years, apparently. I don't think Artemis Fowl is YA. I think it may be Middle Readers, or something like that. YA, according to my recent reading, is stuff like The Chocolate War and A Separate Peace. Books for high school aged kids. Some pretty intense stuff actually does happen in those books. There was a discussion on SFSignal recently about what was and was not appropriate in YA SF, occasioned by a blog post by Nancy Kress about Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie by Holly Black. I haven't read this YA title, but, according to Kress, in chapter one, the protagonist walks in on her boyfriend having sex with her mother.
I'm not actually looking to re-raise the discussion here, but just thinking about what seems to me to be a nebulously-defined zone between Middle, YA, and, erm, adult (*wince*). If you were to pitch Ender's Game . . . in a future in which Earth fears a coming war with a vastly more powerful and implacable foe, Earth's government has set up a school in space to train the leaders for the coming conflict. In order to create the best possible leader, they begin schooling their prospects while they are still children. Ender Wiggin is the best of all of these kids, and the one who will have to command Earth's forces in the final war while he is still a child . . . doesn't that sound like a kids' book? I mean, without reading it? I agree that it's not, but I think that's a natural assumption.
EDIT I seriously got my wires crossed on one of those titles. I'd've been pretty embarrassed if anybody'd caught it!
posted
Here's a related question: Is the novel Jumper science fiction? I do believe that's how it's labeled. Wouldn't fantasy or paranormal be a better fit?
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posted
When I go to Barnes and Noble and I walk by the YA section, I do not see high schoolers browsing those books. It's only the 11-14 kids. The teenagers are reading the books in the rest of the store, the same ones I read. I know you are looking to split this hair, it's just an observation.
From your description of the book, I would assume Ender's Game was a kid's book. As a matter of fact, it is descriptions like that and on the back of my copy of Eg, that turn off potential adult readers. The plot is so much more complicated.
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I'd think of the difference between Middle Readers and YA being the intensity and complexity of the emotions, and how much the story emphasizes those emotions. A Middle Reader book can have complex adult emotions that'd be vaguely recognized but not really understood by a younger reader. (Thinking here of Charlotte's Web, which works for younger readers as a neat story about farm animals, while also working for older readers as a meditation upon life and death.) A YA novel requires understanding and appreciating the complexity of the emotions involved; I doubt a 4th grader would have any interest in reading The Chocolate War.
Ender's Game could be read by some Middle Readers, since it's got the whole young-boy-in-the-army plot to keep things going, but they'd have to have a lot of patience to get through the non-Battleroom stuff.
(Ender and kids may be younger, but they don't think and act like it; even allowing for OSC's wonderfully pithy dialogue, they're all at least 5-10 years older than regular kids.)
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Icarus, this is odd. I was thinking of this exact question(only about Ender's Game though) earlier tonight in my car.
I didn't come up with an answer. Though part of me thinks that labeling a book like Ender's Game YA does a disservice to the complexity of the story(no offense to YA books).
-edit: it does a disservice to it by saying, "this books is for this particular age group", when it should be for everyone.
posted
J.K. Rowling's British publisher deals with the situation by doing two editions: the one with a colorful cover for kids, and the one with a more plain cover for adults.
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I'm not well enough read in YA to know. And I wasn't really aware of the distinction between Middle Reader and YA until a couple weeks or so ago.
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quote:Lyrhawn, are you telling me where it is in your local bookstore, or where you would shelve it?
Heh, sorry, that wasn't nearly as clear as it was in my head. I meant that's where I would shelve it in my own personal theoretical bookstore. I honestly have no idea where it's shelved at the actual local bookstore.
What I have to imagine is the largest bookseller in the nation, Amazon.com, has it listed in a few different places (as far as measuring sales goes). It's #1 for Sci-Fi/Fantasy - Orson Scott Card books, #14 in Sci-Fi/Fantasy - Sci-Fi books and #51 in the Teen books section. That suggests to me that the non-teen (YA) audience buys it more often than the teen audience. Looking at the list of books in the Teen section though, I can how they might have cross-generational appeal, as in, yeah they are Sci-Fi in general, but they're ALSO the kinds of books teens would like. In that sense I can see why Amazon might list them in BOTH places, but you can't really do that at a physical bookstore, and given the choice, I think it should go in the regular Sci-fi section.
Hm, browsing through the top sellers in Teen and Sci-Fi revealed a few books I didn't realize were coming out so soon. Paolini's third Inheritance book, Brisngr (didn't even know it was named, or that there would now be a fourth book to the series as well) comes out in September, Once Upon a Time in the North, Pullman's His Dark Materials prequel comes out, well later today actually, and the last of the recent spate of Star Wars books is out in May. I certainly am behind in my frivolous Sci-Fi literature knowledge.
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posted
The Hobbit only has adults in it, but they're pretty immature ones.
...
Neil Gaiman commented somewhere on his blog that the idea of children's literature is very 20th century -- the concept wasn't around in the 19th century, back then the books that kids happened to like weren't necessarily written for them.
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posted
I read a fair bit of young adult books-- one I happened across recently is about a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl who knows that she's in the last stages of cancer and will probably not live another year and her making a list of the things she wants to do before she dies (have sex, try drugs, fall in love, etc), and how that works out for her. Ender's Game is actually somewhat fluffier than that book.
The bookstore I used to work at had a version of Ender's Game in the children's section and another in the science fiction section. None in the teen section, though.
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posted
In my bookstore, and library, there is a Teen section, and Artemis Fowl is not in it. It's over in children's.
My daughter DOES browse the teen section, as do I, incidentally. Some really good fantasy is being written for the teen market. The writers in the teen section are people like Stephenie Meyer, Scott Westerfield, Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, etc.
It's a very strange publishing category, Icarus. I'm writing YA, a novel that would be considered Teen and in the same category as Meyer and Westerfield would be - but I've also got one on the back burner kicking around that is probably more middle-grade, on the order of Artemis Fowl. It's tough to figure out.
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posted
I find it exceedingly strange when our Barnes and Noble shelves books in the same series, by the same author, dealing with the same subject matter, in different parts of the store-- one will be in kids and one will be in "Young Readers." Bizzare, and it seems rather to depend on what person did the shelving, they move around. And also, some of the books in the kids' section have more mature content than some of the Young Readers books. Go figure.
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posted
Belle, that's exactly it. I'm currently writing a book with a young protagonist, and I'm trying to figure out how to pitch it. Early on in the process, people kept telling me it was YA because the protagonist is 13. But I never saw it as YA, and I'd rather not be held to YA standards--most notably when it comes to length. So when I start pitching it, which I'm actually somewhat close to, I want to be able to give a clear sense of just what it is. And the two most obvious examples in my mind of things with young protagonists that appeal to young readers and yet are not or were not originally marketed as YA are Jumper and OSC in general. I'd like to find more examples, to help me define my book by comparison to others rather than with a pat label. I'd also like to find the perfect phrase to describe such books.
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quote:Originally posted by dean: I read a fair bit of young adult books-- one I happened across recently is about a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl who knows that she's in the last stages of cancer and will probably not live another year and her making a list of the things she wants to do before she dies (have sex, try drugs, fall in love, etc), and how that works out for her. Ender's Game is actually somewhat fluffier than that book.
*curious* what's the book? Would you recommend it?
I read a lot of kids books/YA books. They tend to be more life-affirming than "adult" books; even when YA books have serious themes, they're usually more optimistic and enjoyable than adult books. (Which have more of a tendency to wallow in themes of adultery, illness, angst, and the meaningless of it all, while nothing happens.)
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One my mother wants bookshops to do is separate the "teen romance" from the "young adult". There is a category of books which is about young teen sexual exploration and although that kind of thing shows up outside of the genre, my mother didn't like my twelve year old sister moving from the children section in search for harder and more mature reading material and being presented with porn lite, suitable perhaps for sixteen or seventeen year olds.
I'm mostly with her. I certainly read books with stuff that made me go ! (and skip pages ) when I was that age, but it was because I was delving into the adult sci fi section. Also, you have multiple separations. You have ages 12-15 books, like Paolini, Tamora Pierce (although I read her as a child) then you're getting books which are more like 13-16 like the Outsiders. And then you're getting books which are pushing the upper end of 'teen' which in bookshops is 16-17. I agree it might be beneficial in this complicated age to separate the quite heavy mature-but-teen romances, the ones that you don't really want your 12 year old being presented with, and put them with the romance books under 'teen romance.'
Also, they crowd the other books on the shelves because there are hundreds of them and they're not intellectually more mature, they're just heading off into Romance, and sometimes surprisingly so.
I say that YA should be a more investigated genre than it is, and perhaps it should be more stratified into subgenres.
To answer your question:
I think Ender's Game belongs in the Adult Sci Fi section, unless you stratify YA. Young adult in many places seems to be represented by 12-15 year olds (I'm thinking of Chapter's "Book Recommendation" kids). I think Ender's Game falls into the second, non-existent age category.
The Hobbit belongs in the YA (and adult), as do other adult books with more youthful elements, such as Terry Pratchett. LOTR belongs in the adult section.
Books are not rated, like films. Kids and teens can move freely between sections and this should certainly be the case, but libraries and bookshops should shelve their books as a suggestion: "This is what you might like to read" or "this is what your thirteen year old might like to read" or "this is what your seventeen year old might like". The top age category by extension could thus include adult books typically read early on due to ease of reading, accessibility or age of subject, such as Pride and Prejudice or Ender's Game.
I think this thread brings up a very valid problem in the YA category both in content and in difficulty of material.
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posted
Hi Everyone. Long time, no post. (so long, in fact, that I've forgotten my password and my old email addy is no longer active, so here I am with a new login. No more Scythrop...)
As Imogen mentioned, I did my PhD dissertation on this subject, looking specifically at recent (in the last eight or nine years) trends in the Australian marketplace to award major prizes for 'Young Adult Fiction' to books in which the protagonists are either:
-out of their teenage years, often in their early to mid 20's, living and experiencing lifestyles which would be beyond the experience of most teenage readers (A good example of this is Markus Zusak's Book 'I am the Messenger') or,
-Written about children, but where the writer is deliberately using thier protagonist's limited worldview as a device to insert gaps and silences into the text, which often require of the reader a degree of adult life experience to fully access and interpret. (Mark Haddon's novel 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time' is a good example here.
In terms of defining 'Young Adult Fiction' it's an area of writing which is somewhat ambiguous. In some circles it's taken to mean simply teenage readers, (though this in itself covers a vast spectrum of reading, cognitive and physical development on the part of the implied readership) in others it refers to readers in the lower years of secondary schooling, while in others readers well into their 20's, often economically independent but still living a semi-adolescent lifestyle. Under the umbrella of 'Young Adult Fiction' it's possible to find award winning books for all three of these readerships.
The waters are muddied still further by the fact that, as reading skills develop, teenage readers tend to appropriate as their own books originally intended for an 'adult' readership. This is particularly prevalent with speculative fiction - I'd put EG into this category. This has, over time, led to the remarketing of a lot of 'adult' fantasy for the 'Young adult' marketplace. (David Edding's Belgariad books have recently been re-published here in australia in covers clearly targetted at the 12-15 year old readership.)
At the same time, the reverse is also true - the success of books like Harry Potter and Phillip Pullman's 'Northern Lights' trilogy in the adult marketplace has led to the multiple marketing of books originally intended as Y.A. Fiction. Zusak's 'The Book Thief' is an interesting example: in the US it was marketed as a YA title, and in fact reached #1 on the NY times bestseller list in this category. In Australia, (where Zusak was already reknowned as an accomplished YA writer, and thus this market was assured) it was released as an Adult literary title, to great critical acclaim.
There's a lot more I could comment on; the role of name recognition, the links between YA and 'new realist' writing of the 60's and 70's and so on, but I suspect I've already blathered on too much. From my own point of view, I no longer worry too much when approaching a story about exactly where it will 'fit'; I just write it as best I can and let other forces worry about the rest. I think the salient point is that adolescence is a time of tremdous change on many levels, and that adolescent fiction must necessarily encompass works that appeal to a very broad spectrum. It is also - again, like its readers, I suspect - a field of writing that is constantly under review and revision, and this constant change makes definitive categories of 'young adult writing' very difficult to pin down.
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quote:Originally posted by dean: ...about a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl in the last stages of cancer making a list of the things she wants to do before she dies (have sex, try drugs, fall in love, etc), and how that works out for her.
*curious* what's the book? Would you recommend it?
I read a lot of kids books/YA books. They tend to be more life-affirming than "adult" books; even when YA books have serious themes, they're usually more optimistic and enjoyable than adult books. (Which have more of a tendency to wallow in themes of adultery, illness, angst, and the meaningless of it all, while nothing happens.)
Before I Die by Jenny Downham. It's not my typical choice of reading material, but it was enjoyable. It left me feeling rather sad but also kind of uplifted. At the same time, it felt like a book in the girl-dies-of-cancer-genre rather than a book that goes someplace new.
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posted
I think it would be a big mistake to classify Ender's Game as YA even if you were to define YA as 17-21 because any YA classification automatically implies that the book is unlikely to be of interest to mature readers. Kids and teens who have the maturity to appreciate Ender's Game, will be reading other adult fiction but its very unusual for mature adults to read books targeted to YA unless their trying to find out what their children and grandchildren are reading.
I was in my 30s when I first read Ender's Game. I picked it up in a Sci-Fi section of a book store. It OSC books had been relegated to the YA section, I never would have started reading them.
I only started reading the Harry Potter books because so many of my student's were into it. I like to keep at least a bit abreast of what my students are into so I can relate with them better.
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quote: but its very unusual for mature adults to read books targeted to YA unless their trying to find out what their children and grandchildren are reading.
I also have to disagree, though it's a very common misconception about this field of writing. Current research indicates that a lot of adult readers are looking towards 'young adult' texts as part of their reading. As a result, a lot of publishers are now looking to cross market their 'young adult' writers into the adult literary marketplace.
quote: I think it would be a big mistake to classify Ender's Game as YA even if you were to define YA as 17-21 because any YA classification automatically implies that the book is unlikely to be of interest to mature readers.
I think there are a couple of issues to consider here - Firstly, the whole notion that YA can be classified in any definitive terms (ie: fiction for readers between the ages of 9-12) is problematic. When you think about it, there isn't another area of writing that people even attempt to classify in this way - you don't get press releases from publishers saying 'this new book is ideal for readers between the ages of 50-65', or 'we're proud to release that latest in our list of titles for septegenarians' because it's generally accepted that adult readers have a broad range of reading interests and abilites. There is no reason that the same shouldn't be true for 'young adult' readers. (In fact, given the state of flux that is adolescence, it is possible to make an argument that 'YA fiction' is even less definable than other areas.) The mistake that many people seem to make is thinking of 'Young Adult Fiction' as a 'genre' of writing, rather than as a 'readership'. The reality is that 'YAF' is a blanket term that covers a vast range of styles, genres, and reading abilities.
Two Australian academics, Foster and Nimon, who've done a lot of work in this area, make a pretty good summary of this point in their book 'The Adolescent Novel':
"The concept of teenage books as 'a bridge between children's and adult literature'...militates against marked distinctions between books for each audience. Rather the goal has to be the production of a range of titles of varying complexity and sophistication which at the older end of the market blend indistinguishably into adult material."
Secondly, the notion that the term YA means that the book will automatically not appeal to "more mature" readers is also loaded with problems of definition - what or who is a 'more mature' reader, and what are the means of classification? If, for example, we take a concept such as 'open mindedness' as an indicator of 'reading maturity' (as opposed to reading ability) then I know of plenty of highly advanced, critically literate readers, well into adulthood, who read nothing but fantasy/sci-fi. It would, I think, be possible to argue that, at least under this criteria, this is a sign of 'reading immaturity'. On the other hand I also know several people who refuse point blank to read anything remotely speculative - I'd also classify this as a case of 'immature reading habits'. In either case, the age of the reader is irrelevent to their 'reading maturity' - at least under this measure.
I hope it doesn't sound like I'm having a go at you here, Rabbit, because I'm really not meaning to - I've probably just spent far too long thinking about this topic, and it's a complete minefield, especially in terms of definition. There are arguments that a YA text is one defined not by publishers or marketers, but by the readers who appropriate and identify with it, in which case its possible to make the argument that EG is indeed a 'YA' novel, and a very successful one at that. On the other hand, it's also read and loved, as you point out, by adults, and on that basis also has an identity independent of YA fiction. Personally, I see no reason why it can't sit, like so many other brilliant books of the last fifty or sixty years , in both camps.
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Anthony, you're most definitely not blathering, and I appreciate hearing from you! What a great dissertation topic.
I know bunches of people who frequent the YA section for reading material, particularly in the speculative fiction genre. As I said before, I think some of the freshest, most original, and most exciting work SF may be in the YA area.
I don't claim to be well read in the genre either, except perhaps in the SF area, because that's my preferred genre and what I'm writing so I try to keep tabs on what is happening there.
But in the last few months, I've seen Twilight by Meyer in the hands of people ranging from 7th grade up to a 60-something grandmother. The only common denominator being that they were all female. Which makes sense, given it's a "romance" targeted at girls.
Garth Nix's Abhorsen series has also been widely read by both young people and adults. Look at all the grown-up hatrackers that recommended it on the recent thread. I think it's definitely a misconception to belive the only adults who read YA are parents checking out what their kids are reading.
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quote:I very much like YA books, thought I can't claim to be well-read in the field.
Like rivka and Icarus I am a so-called adult who loves YA fiction. It's also an area I frequently write in. Instead of reading cheap mysteries or romances etc., when I'm looking for an easy, fun read, I'll often turn to the type of YA fiction I read a lot of when I was younger (mostly sci fi/fantasy). It's also an area I frequently write in although not always deliberately.
I don't often see the cut off between "young adult" and "adult" fiction in many cases. For example, Anne McCaffrey's writing appeals to a YA audience but is mostly entirely 'intended' for adults. Some YA fiction, like Tamora Pierce's Alanna Series, starts with a young, immature character and ends up with an older teen. I didn't enjoy the second two books in the series until I was much older than I had been when I read the first two (which, ahem, I read when I was approximately seven, so that kind of explains why).
I'm not an immature reader- I'm an English major who's nearly finished her degree (!!). I just like a good adventure.
The point is that there is no reason that adults should feel compelled to only read books about or intended for adults, the same way children should not only feel compelled to read books about or intended for children (provided there's nothing inappropriate). Stories can be literary, approachable, appropriate, simple and complex at the same time and appropriate for many ages. It is artificial to set aside whole sections of reading or types of writing because they are marketed towards a different group and do not contain sex, drugs and despair.
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quote:Originally posted by Icarus: So what would you call these? Would you cram them into YA anyway? Just plain old fantasy or science fiction, and not bother with anything else?
"Book(s) Saxon made me read."
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) when I was that age, but it was because I was delving into the adult sci fi section. Also, you have multiple separations. You have ages 12-15 books, like Paolini, Tamora Pierce (although I read her as a child) then you're getting books which are more like 13-16 like the Outsiders. And then you're getting books which are pushing the upper end of 'teen' which in bookshops is 16-17. I agree it might be beneficial in this complicated age to separate the quite heavy mature-but-teen romances, the ones that you don't really want your 12 year old being presented with, and put them with the romance books under 'teen romance.'![[Wave]](graemlins/wave.gif)
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