Young adult fiction has never been more popular among grownup-adults—more than half of YA books are sold to people over the age of 18. There isn’t anything wrong with the occasional guilty pleasure, or even in indulging in topics that are, by definition, childish, says Ruth Graham, writing at Slate, but should we be concerned that we’re all losing some perspective?
But the very ways that YA is pleasurable are at odds with the way that adult fiction is pleasurable. There’s of course no shame in writing about teenagers; think Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters or Megan Abbott. But crucially, YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults.
