YA New York

Young adult literature has taken off in the last few years, with skyrocketing sales and tons of new authors writing fascinating novels.

Indeed, it seems the recession that has hit most of the publishing industry is bypassing the YA market, because teens who read will keep reading no matter what else happens. Young adult readers are many, many things, the most important of which is loyal. They love books with a passion few adults retain, and if you’re looking for True Believers, the YA market is where you’ll find them.

So why do we as a society have some crazy idea that YA fiction is not “real”? Why do people ask authors questions like, “When will you write a real book again?” Why do my friends refer to reading YA as “regressing”?

Well, for starters, YA wasn’t always as good as it is. There are certain books I read and adored in the ’80s which were … well, let’s just say that I wouldn’t bother reviewing them here.

No, we’ve got to get into it a bit more. There was a time when YA wasn’t real. It was a fantasyland in which teenagers didn’t drink or do drugs or have sex. They certainly never used naughty words.

Several years ago, Gossip Girl and some other choice books completely reversed that trend. Instead of writing books that didn’t reach kids because they did not exist in any kind of real world, Cecily von Ziegesar and others invented a land in which all kids did was drink, do drugs, have sex … and shop.

That was a fun little place, for a time. Even as we outgrew Gossip Girl, people had to admit that some sort of wall had been broken.

And writers now reach deep down into their souls, and they don’t condescend to write teen lit — they do it because there is something that they feel, something they want to express, that can’t be done with characters who are all in their twenties or thirties.

My favorite YA books are ones that get at the heart of something. Ned Vizzini’s books are raw explorations of depression and isolation, of neuroticism and confusion. Libba Bray uses fantasy to empower women and also to remind us that there are a million ways in which society has tried to disempower us. E. Lockhart does the same thing in a modern setting, with books that, like The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, are nothing short of subversive.

There’s also a lot of exploration in the style of the text itself. Meg Cabot is great at this, perhaps better than any other author. She incorporates everything from blog posts to e-mails to receipts — artifacts, essentially — into her books. She understands that form can sometimes indicate more about a moment than anything else. What’s in a text message, or an IM conversation? Ask Meg.

Teenagers are open to this kind of stuff because they’ve grown up in a world full of texture. And they’re smarter than they got credit for in the ’80s — they can handle frank discussions of sex, drugs and rock and roll. They do handle those discussions, every day, and it’s not always an after-school special. In fact, it almost never is.

And that brings us to where we are today. If you’re a grownup who doesn’t read YA, think again. Think long and hard about what choices you’re making and why you’re making them. Remember that the face of YA has changed, and consider checking out one of the books featured on this blog.

I promise, you won’t be regressing.