by Michael Cart
“Trend in Books: Tales Aimed at All Ages,” by Phil Kloer, Cox News Service, October 6, 2002
“Crossing Over: A Materials Selector Looks at Adult Books for Teen Readers,” by Angelina Benedetti, School Library Journal, January 2003
“YA Lit—Not Just for Kids Anymore,” by Steve Sherman, Bookselling This Week, March 25, 2003
“What Exactly Is a Children’s Book?” by Nicolette Jones, London Times, April 30, 2004
“YA for Everybody,” by Steve MacDonald, Quill & Quire, February 2005
“Growing Up,” by Judith Rosen, Publishers Weekly, February 21, 2005
“Why YA and Why Not,” by Sue Corbett, Publishers Weekly, September 5, 2005
“Crossover Books for Teens and Twentysomethings,” by Gillian Engberg, Booklist, November 15, 2005
“The Quest for Crossover Books,” by Scott Jaschik, insidehighered.com, May 22 20061
“Crossover Books—Time Out,” by Amanda Craig, amandacraig .com, 2006
“Redefining the Young Adult Novel,” by Jonathan Hunt, Horn Book, March 2007
“Teen Fiction Not Just for Teens Anymore,” by Tina Kapinos, Chicago Tribune, June 27, 2007
“Identity Crisis? Not Really,” by Meg Rosoff, Publishers Weekly, October 22, 2007
“The Grand Tradition of Crossover Novels,” by Meg Rosoff, Manchester Guardian, 2008
“An Author Looks beyond Age Limits,” by Motoko Rich, New York Times, February 20, 2008
“Patterson Aplenty,” by Matthew Thornton, Publishers Weekly, May 5, 2008
“‘Madapple’: What Is a Crossover Book?” by Christina Meldrum, freshfiction.com, April 7, 2008
“Young Adult Literature: Not Just for Teens Anymore,” by Stephanie A. Squicciarni and Susan Person, VOYA, June 2008
“I’m Y.A. and I’m O.K.,” by Margo Rabb, New York Times Book Review, July 20 2008
“Guilty Pleasures,” by Misty Harris, Ottawa Citizen, October 26, 2008
“Crossovers,” by Michael Cart, Booklist, February 15, 2009
The Invasion of Adult Authors
Further confusing the distinction between adult and young adult is the increasing presence of established adult authors among the ranks of those now writing and being published for young adults. Attracted by the increasing profitability of writing for young adults and encouraged by publishers who seek to capitalize on these authors’ already established readerships, the list of these grows longer every day. Some of them—writers like Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Clive Barker, Isabel Allende, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, John Feinstein, Carl Hiaasen, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Robert B. Parker, Michael Winerip, and James Patterson—are writing commercial or genre fiction. Others, however, attracted by the newly expansive artistic possibilities of the field, are writing literary fiction for young adults. In this category are the likes of Sherman Alexie, Julia Alvarez, Michael Chabon, Francine Prose, Joyce Carol Oates, Joyce Maynard, Cynthia Kadohata, Nick Hornby, Peter Cameron, Alice Hoffman, Ariel Dorfman, Terry Pratchett, and more.
Viking has recently published, for young adults, a selection of T. C. Boyle’s previously published adult stories. How does the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer feel about this? “I hope that my publisher will want to do a follow-up collection,” he told Publishers Weekly, adding, “I’d like to see some of the wilder, more whimsical stories in it” (Rosen 2005, 80). Similarly, Blake Nelson’s 1994 adult novel Girl was reissued in 2007 as a YA trade paperback by Simon Pulse after Nelson had become a popular author for teens.
How significant—and sometimes confusing—crossover publishing, marketing, and selling have become is epitomized by the case of mega-best-selling author James Patterson (thirty-nine of his adult thrillers have made the New York Times Best-Seller List, and in 2007 one of every fifteen hardcover novels sold in America was by Patterson). His entry into the YA field in 2005 with a new series, Maximum Ride (coauthored by an uncredited Gabrielle Charbonnet), was, accordingly, big news and an even bigger success. By early 2008 there were reportedly 4.8 million copies of the first three series titles in print. Nevertheless, when the sales failed to match those of the adult titles, Patterson and his publisher, Little, Brown, decided to reposition the fourth volume, The Final Warning, marketing it as an adult title, redesigning the cover art, and raising the price from $16.99 to $20.00. So as not to lose the still-lucrative YA market, the new book was branded “A James Patterson Pageturner” and billed as suitable “for readers from ten to a hundred and ten.” (The phrase was, reportedly, coined by Patterson himself, who—before he became an author—was chair of the legendary J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency.) Even more dramatic was Patterson’s insistence that all of the Maximum Ride books—and another new YA series, the Dangerous Days of Daniel X—be displayed at the front of bookstores instead of in the children’s or YA section and remain there for as long as any of his adult titles would. Subsequently, the hardcovers would be shelved with adult fiction. As a concession to younger fans, the new titles will be reissued, six months after the hardcovers, as YA trade paperbacks (Rich 2008).
Civilization will probably survive this, but the Patterson brouhaha is the clearest evidence yet that it is not necessarily readers but revenue that is driving the crossover phenomenon, and that explains why it is not necessarily the editorial staff that determines whether a new book will be published as adult or as YA; instead, it is often the sales and marketing staff. Which brings us back to Sittenfeld’s Prep and Rabb’s Cures for Heartbreak, both of which—though written as adult titles—could have been published as YA, though only Rabb’s was.
What Do You Mean “Young Adult”?
All of this conversation raises another question: what on earth do we mean by the term young adult? Surely the term no longer embraces only twelve- to eighteen-year-olds—it must now also include nineteen- to twenty-five-year- olds (or even older, as the twelve-to-thirty-four MTV demographic has become an increasingly desirable market in publishing). Indeed, over the course of the past five or so years, coming of age itself has become a significantly more attenuated process, and as a result a new category of human development has begun to appear that is being called, variously, kiddult, adultescents, twixters, and boomerangers.
This category started to show up when, because of economic hard times, more and more twenty-something Americans began returning home to live with their parents, delaying commitments—to professions and partners alike—until their early thirties. And why not, as many of them—given increasing life expectancies and continuing economic hard times—are looking at living into their nineties and working until they’re in their seventies. Who can blame them for not rushing to accept adult responsibilities? How to market to them and—if you’re a librarian—how to serve them, however, remains a continuing conundrum.
Further confusing the issue is new research that confounds our long-held belief that the human brain is fully wired by the age of twelve. Scientists have demonstrated that the brain continues to grow until the early or mid-twenties and that the last part to mature is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for such adult behavior as impulse control, regulation of emotions, and moral reasoning (Raeburn 2004, 26).
“The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing,” the psychologist Robert Epstein told Psychology Today in 2007—“30 is the new 20,” he continued, “and most Americans now believe a person isn’t an adult until age 26” (Marano 2007).
“Most Americans” now includes the medical community, too. Between 1994 and 2005 nearly one thousand doctors were certified in a new subspecialty: adolescent medicine. As Kantrowitz and Springen (2005, 65) write, “The old view of adolescence was that it ended at 18 or 19. Now, with many young adults in their early 20s still struggling to find their foothold in the world, doctors call the years from 18 to 28 the second decade of adolescence.”
These are all complicated issues, but one way to begin addressing them is, as I mentioned earlier, to consider redefining young adult. As it now stands, the term—at least as applied to l
iterature—includes books for readers as young as ten (the category includes middle school literature for ten- to fourteen-year- olds) and as old as twenty-five. My suggestion would be to leave the middle school age range as is but to be scrupulously careful to call it middle school and not YA.
Literature for twelve- to eighteen-year-olds (or thirteen- to nineteen-year- olds) could officially be described as “teen” (a descriptor that more public libraries are using anyway for what had formerly been called young adult services); and books for eighteen- (or even sixteen-) to twenty-five-year-olds could be categorized as “young adult.” Granted, there’s a good deal of overlapping among these categories, but the folks they contemplate don’t fall into rigidly defined demographics—they are all individuals who grow and mature at different rates and, accordingly, have different individual needs, interests, and appetites. And they should be encouraged to range freely among the three groupings, reading up or down as their needs and interests dictate.
I don’t offer this suggestion whimsically, fully recognizing that—as I wrote in my January 2005 “Carte Blanche” column—“the biggest impediment to making this change a practical reality is that it contemplates creating a new area [or areas] in libraries and bookstores; it might also mean reorganizing publishing or, at the very least, encouraging the children’s and adult sides of publishing houses to communicate and publish cooperatively” (always the starry-eyed dreamer, I) (838).
According to Publishers Weekly, a few independent bookstores have already started cautiously experimenting with adding new sections for titles with appeal to older adolescents (or younger “adultescents”!) (Rosen 2008). And the YALSA board, at its 2009 annual meeting, approved the Serving New Adults Interest Group and charged it with “discuss[ing] issues relating to serving young adults in their late teens and early twenties. We seek to develop and exchange ideas,” the conveners continued, “on how libraries can continue to best serve these ‘new adults’ as they navigate life after the high school years.”
Meanwhile, so many books are appearing, willy-nilly, with reader appeal that crosses over from sixteen to twenty-five (and up) that, since 2004, I’ve been reviewing them for Booklist as a separate category of adult books (Cart 2009). Significantly, Prep was one of the first I reviewed.
These books typically have several features in common: many are first novels by writers who, themselves, are often in their twenties, and their novels typically feature protagonists in their late teens or early twenties, characters who are—like Holden Caulfield before them—coming of age with various degrees of grace and success. Perhaps most significant, though published as adult books, almost all of the titles could easily have been published as YA had someone not determined they would be more advantageously (read “profitably”) published as adult.
The Alex Awards
Speaking of adult books for young adults brings us to YALSA’s Alex Awards, a list of the ten best adult books for young adults that has been assembled annually since 1998. In light of our lengthy discussion of the ongoing blurring of the boundary between adult and young adult books, this category-driven list might seem, at first blush, a bit regressive. But as Betty Carter notes, “Alex winners put more books on the table for librarians to read and use for readers advisory. And that’s what Margaret Edwards [the legendary YA librarian for whom the awards are named] was about: wide reading and solid recommending in order to create lifetime readers of thousands of young adults” (Carter 2008, 22).
Spearheaded by Deborah D. Taylor, the former YALSA president, and funded by the Margaret Alexander Edwards Trust, the Alex Awards began in 1997 as a five-year YALSA project designed to investigate the use of adult books with young adult readers. It was the ad hoc committee appointed to administer this project that recommended the creation of both an annual list of best books and the presentation of a program at each annual ALA conference that would focus on some aspect of adult books for young adults. Thus, it was that the first program, held in 1998, featured a lecture titled “Back to the Future with Adult Books for the Teenage Reader.” Presented by Richard F. Abrahamson, professor of literature for children and young adults at the University of Houston, it offered a retrospective view of the historic importance to young adults and their reading of adult books; it also examined the continuing importance of nonfiction in stimulating teens’ interest in reading adult books (Abrahamson is the coauthor with Betty Carter of the important book Nonaction for Young Adults from Delight to Wisdom [Oryx Press, 1990] now sadly out of print) and called for more future research on the relationship of adult books and teen readers while stressing the importance of providing teens with enhanced opportunities for free reading—of both YA and adult books.
The Alex Awards ultimately became a permanent YALSA fixture in 2002 when the five-year project concluded and the board voted to perpetuate the list under the cosponsorship of Booklist magazine, which for a number of years has been adding four categories of repeat notes to adult titles to identify those with special interest to general readers, mature teens, teens with special interest in specific subjects, and those books with particular curriculum value.
As a result, 120 adult books have been named Alex winners. Viewed retrospectively, they are remarkable for the diversity of reading interests they represent, ranging from commercial and genre fiction to serious investigations of race, ethnicity, and civil rights, and from sports to memoirs to science. But they also have some important elements in common: one is the large number of nonfiction titles, particularly in the categories of biography, science, and narrative accounts of adventure; a second is the large number of first novels; and a third is the increasingly large number of what we would now call crossover books (e.g., Over and Under, The Year of Ice, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Black Swan Green, The Thirteenth Tale, Upstate, Anansi Boys, As Simple as Snow, Swimming to Antarctica, My Sister’s Keeper, Project X, The Kite Runner, The Fall of Rome, 10th Grade, Imani All Mine, What Girls Learn, and more).
And so it would seem that the Alex Awards themselves, while continuing to acknowledge the historical propensity of teens for reading adult books, have inevitably reflected the changing nature of those adult books. One imagines that the redoubtable Margaret A. Edwards, who always had one eye firmly fixed on the future of teens and of reading, would be pleased.
And in the larger context of the many changes that continue to visit young adult literature, one thing that Abrahamson said in his Edwards lecture remains singularly apposite: “If we truly cared about creating lifetime readers,” he noted, “we wouldn’t be talking about either young adult books or adult books, we’d be discussing the need to use both” (Abrahamson 1998, 383).
Notes
1. This interesting article demonstrates the ubiquity of the crossover phenomenon, which has invaded academic publishing where the term describes the attempt to find books with crossover appeal to the mainstream market.
back in the real world
Immigration, Mixed Race, and Other
New Realities of Teen Life
Not only was the face of young adult literature changing in the 1990s; so was the face of the American population. For as the 2000 census would reveal, the previous decade had seen the largest influx of immigrants to this country since the end of the nineteenth century.
Because of this surge in immigration, 80 percent of the 1990s population growth consisted of racial and ethnic minorities, growing America’s minority populations to a record 87 million, 43 percent more than in 1990 and 90 percent more than in 1980.
“The nation is much more diverse in 2000 than it was in 1990,” John Long of the Census Bureau’s Population Division told the Sacramento Bee, “and that diversity is more complex than before” (Westphal 2001, 1).
Contributing to that complexity was the fact that the 2000 census was the first to allow respondents to self-identify as of more than one race. This new opportunity was bracketed by the publication of two significant young adult novels featuring mixed
-race protagonists: William Bell’s Zach in 1999 and Chris Crutcher’s Whale Talk in 2001. Further raising adolescent awareness of the changing face of race in America were two nonfiction titles that also appeared in 1999: Pearl Fuyo Gaskins’s collection of interviews with mixed-race teens What Are You? (Holt) and Gary B. Nash’s Forbidden Love: The Secret History of Mixed-Race America (Holt).
The census offered its new mixed-race option in the form of six categories from which respondents could choose (white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and some other race), an option that—statisticians pointed out—could yield a total of sixty-three mixed-race combinations. Two minimum categories for ethnicity—Hispanic or Latino and not Hispanic or Latino—were also included, though persons who chose either of these categories were then asked to select one of the racial categories as well. (Because Hispanics can be of any race, the Census Bureau regards them as an ethnicity.) Forty-eight percent identified themselves as white, and 2 percent as black. However, another 42 percent of the Latino respondents chose, instead, the box labeled “some other race.” As Mireya Navarro (2003, 21) explained in the New York Times, “While there are clearly white Hispanics and black Hispanics, many more come from racially mixed stock, with white, black, and American Indian or other indigenous strains” (some respondents, for example, wrote in such identities as Mayan, Tejano, and mestizo).
Ultimately, a total of 6.8 million respondents—42 percent of them under the age of eighteen—identified themselves as of more than one race. In addition, 3.1 million reported being partners in a mixed-race marriage (up from 500,000 in 1970), and 13–15 percent of unmarried households were also of mixed race (Navarro 2003).
This trend to diversity has continued in the years since the census. Between 2000 and 2006, the mixed-race population grew by about 25 percent, whereas the overall population grew only 7 percent. By 2008 the number of multiracials had grown to 7.3 million, or 3 percent of the population (Hendricks 2008). The cultural implications of this are predictable: as early as 2004, the New York Times was reporting that “[ethnic] ambiguity is chic” and “using faces that are ethnically ambiguous is the latest youth marketing trend” (LaFeria 2004, E1).