Adulterated

This person is harmfully wrong.

YA is the only literature that’s taken any real risks over the past 10-15 years. I hate to say that, as I love sf, but (other than YA sf) even most sf is not taking any interesting risks or promulgating many new ideas. Yes, it is diversifying and that is great, but not expanding its scope in really any other senses.

However, YA is actually grappling with contemporary issues in novel ways and expanding not only the allowed palette of characters’ skins but also the ideas allowed to be discussed.

Even Rick Yancey’s The Fifth Wave though only a middling book in my opinion is better and more aware and responsive to its own times than many “adult” literary darlings that have won awards recently.

Books like Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Love is the Drug, and The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson are great books, better than any of the award-winning (and very, very boring) adult novels of the past few years that I’ve read.

Really, the only difference between most YA and fallaciously-labeled adult novels (for adults who seem to have no self-awareness, no historical knowledge, and little imagination) is that YA features younger protagonists.

If you’re not reading YA, you are missing out. And if you’re reading yet another novel of someone doing something blah blah blah Brooklyn midlife crisis blah blah divorce blah, you’re wasting your damn time.