YA Authors Cafe has another Open Discussion going. This one is on Who is reading Young Adult books?
As I may have mentioned here before, when I first started publishing in the mid-nineties, I was told by someone at my publishing house that teenagers didn't read YA. I don't think anyone would say that now. I'm wondering, myself, if a lot of adults are reading it. Certainly within the on-line kidlit community many adults are reading it.
And if adults are reading it, will adult views and interests, adult sensibilities, we might say, start to invade the genre (or classification or whatever it is)?
You might also like to check out Jonathan Hunt's article Redefining the Young Adult Novel in the most recent issue of The Horn Book. In it he discusses crossover novels, "those books that appeal to both teenagers and adults, which could have been published for either market."
We have a bunch of Middle Schoolers reading YA at our school (NYC independent variety). Westerfeld is one of the authors that dragged their parents in. Moms picked up Uglies and couldn't put it down!
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