Let me tell you about my dad.
My dad will be 61 years old in less than a month. He retired early last year from being a school teacher, and his main obsessions in life are college football, cycling, and reading. What does he read? Well, he’s a lifelong sci fi reader, growing up with authors like Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. Today, he reads mostly young adult fiction.
Yes, you read that correctly. My 61 year-old father loves YA.
Within the last decade, I’ve introduced him to all my favorites, including Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and the Legend series. He’s also read some of the series that I’ve liked but haven’t been crazy about, including Twilight, the Divergent trilogy and, most recently, the Vampire Academy series. In fact, he’s currently reading Richelle Mead’s first Bloodlines book.
He devoured Divergent, reading all three books over the span of about 10 days, and he devoured Vampire Academy almost as quickly. The VA series is what makes me chuckle the most. If any of those books I just listed have been written specifically with teens in mind, it’s got to be VA, which to me is the quintessential girly vampire fantasy series. And yet my dad, a football watching, beer drinking DUDE loves them. Can’t get enough of them, either.
My mom, meanwhile, read Vampire Academy before my dad. She just turned 60 (although she’d kill me if she knew I told you that, so don’t say anything) and she’s gotten into buying books off iBooks and reading them on her iPad. She read the all VA books while she was on the elliptical machine at the gym. While she was there, my mom’s gym friends, who are all professional women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, asked what she was reading. My mom told them about Vampire Academy, and the next thing you know, there was a whole row of ladies on elliptical machines, treadmills, and stationary bikes reading about Rose Hathaway tramping around through Russia while she searched for her ex-boyfriend, an evil vampire.
Hmm.
All of this begs the question: Who is actually reading YA these days? Is it actually “young adults” (ie, teens)? Or is it a kind of reader we wouldn’t expect — readers like my mom, dad, and their friends?
YA Readers Aren’t Always Who You Expect
You may think that my mom and dad are anomalies (I know I have thought that many times in my life — sorry, guys). The data, however, shows that grown-ups who read YA aren’t alone:
- 55% of YA buyers are over the age of 18
- The largest segment of YA buyers are in the 30 to 44 range (28% of all buyers)
- And in case you think these buyers are all parents buying books for their kids, 78% of buyers say they’re getting these YA books for themselves, not others
Source: Publisher’s Weekly.
In other words, we might have an image of a YA reader as being someone who looks like this:
But a more accurate image might be someone more like this:
Why Are Adults Reading YA?
Adult fans of YA, you can come out of the closet. You are not alone. But have you ever asked yourself, “Why am I reading this book about teens?”
Malinda Lo posted that question to her Twitter followers a while back and then wrote a blog post with her results. Here were a few of the answers:
- Narratives are less cynical
- The writing is less pretentious
- Novels don’t tend to be too long
- The pacing is fast
- Many of the themes are surprisingly thought-provoking and deep (think Hunger Games, Deathly Hallows, The Subtle Knife)
- It’s fun reading about the intensity of first-time experiences, like first loves
It’s those last two answers that pique my own interest in reading and writing YA fiction. First, I think that teenage and young adult characters are intrinsically dynamic. I don’t how well you remember your teenage years, but I remember mine as being filled with questions about what really mattered in life, who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. Everything was in flux. Stories about people who are in flux anyway naturally lend themselves to interesting plots.
Furthermore, I think that we tend to forget, once we pass our mid- to late-twenties, that we were actually working our way through a lot of deep stuff when we were teens. As adults, we look at teens and we tend to downgrade who they really are and what they’re really thinking about, making strange assumptions about how they interact with themselves, their peers, their world. But for every teen who belongs on Saved by the Bell, there are two or three more who are very Katniss Everdeen, Hazel Grace, or Ender Wiggin.
One Last Thought
You want to hear something funny? YA as a named genre didn’t exist when I was a teenager, but if it had, I wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a YA book. I read books with young characters, like the aforementioned Ender’s Game, but those books weren’t called YA back then. No, when I was a teenager, I had a chip on my shoulder the size of Montana and there was no way I was going to be accused of reading “shallow,” “trivial” YA books. I was reading TS Eliot and Albert Camus, Ayn Rand and Zora Neale Hurston back then. Read popular fiction designed for teens? No. Way.
It took me until I was in my early twenties to realize, “You know what? Sometimes I don’t want to have to work so hard when I read. Sometimes I just want to read a good story.” So, after much resistance to the JK Rowling zeitgeist of the late 1990s, I went to see the first Harry Potter movie with a friend. I grudgingly admitted that I enjoyed it, then read the first four books, which were all that was out at the time, in six days. Yes, my friends, that is what I am like: I read Harry Potter 1 – 4 in less than a week. And I was working full-time.
Harry Potter turned out to be my gateway drug. I’ll be forever grateful for that. So, apparently, will my parents.
photo credit, top: Vivi Calderón via photopin cc
photo credit, girl on bench: Ed Yourdon via photopin cc
photo credit, woman with flower in her hair: Drongowski via photopin cc