There’s no category in the book world hotter than Teen / Young Adult. Publishers are constantly rushing out titles and bookstores are still expanding the shelf space allotted to them. Part of the allure is that this is a new offering and the audience is expanding. A closer look tells us that this isn’t really all that new for many reasons.

First of all, not all of the readers of this genre are young. It’s been estimated that a quarter of all readers of this genre are actual adults. They value these books for many reasons, one of the most compelling are that they are relatively “clean” and have relevant messages. I happened across an excellent paper on this topic that I think is worth reading by anyone who really cares about the state of publishing in general:

http://www.unc.edu/~overk/PDFs/kelly overton masters paper.pdf

What intrigues me the most is that the basic concept is far from new. When I was a teenager, boys had Science Fiction and girls had somewhat sanitized romances by Judy Blume and other authors. The gender line was rarely crossed, at least by boys, but there was a category of literature out there which we could handle. Most Sci-Fi was written at about a sixth grade reading level, which is to say that if you could read a newspaper you could get into authors like Asimov and Bradbury. Much of this material was left over from the Baby Boomers, but it was still accessible to us.

Why did Sci-Fi largely die off? If you look at today’s Teen books, it becomes fairly obvious. Sci-Fi was very male in its approach to things, and relied on a certain faith in technology. Today’s books are much more in the Fantasy vein, which is both more feminine and reflective of a neutral or even hostile view of technology in general. What changed is that we have a new generation of kids who have different approaches to society, and thus different interests.

Another trend that I find interesting is that a lot of teen works are collaborative in nature. For example, Erin Hunter of the “Warriors” and “Seekers” series is actually a pseudonym shared by four writers in the UK. This is made necessary by the hunger for larger series of works, rather than single books, meaning that the stories have to be cranked out faster than one person can do it. Certainly, the use of a pseudonym to disguise a corporate approach to writing is not new, as per Carolyn Keene of “Nancy Drew”. But in that case, as with many of the “ghosted” novels, the writers were still compelled to produce one work on their own and not collaborate on the finished product.

Lastly, the Teen genre often includes a fair amount of rather casual violence. This is not unusual at all in historical terms, as something is needed to keep the plot interesting and moving along. There is likely no more in today’s works than there was in the pulp fiction kids read in the 1950s. But one of the things that I think makes the Teen genre necessary is that the violence often has consequences, meaning that there is some kind of moral lesson implied; that is what separates this violence from adult books.

There are many interesting types of works that are thrown into this category, ranging from the historical fiction of Diane Lee Wilson to the Anglican fight between good and evil in Harry Potter. What do they all have in common? What’s important is that they all carry with them a very literary sense of explaining the world around us all even as they tend towards being rather easy reads. In that sense, they are probably the future of literature in the same way that their target audience are the future of readership.

But don’t count out the adults that like what they read, either. You don’t have to be young to understand what good literature is these days.