What the Hell is YA Anyway?

Melissa: (I started this off with a post I found through Bookshelves of Doom.) I think the real problem is that no one (read: people who don't read much YA) really knows how to define "YA". It's an okay list. What think you?

Nicole: Half of the list are MG and kidlit, haha. Not that I don't like their choices, but there are definitely some who fit more 'YA' than others. That said, I don't like their paragraph on Hermione.

Heidi: Agreed, a lot of this list isn't what I would constitute as YA at all. Also I feel as if the author just wanted to highlight the negatives of classic characters much more than point out what is positive about them which gave the whole list a 'best of a bad thing' feel.

Sya: This just highlights the lack of understanding that the media has at large regarding the term young adult. I'd say that this list, bar a couple, is classic children's heroines. It's lazy writing.

Angie: What Sya said.

Angie : And that's a sucky, sucky paragraph on Hermione.
October 25 at 10:36am · Unlike · 3

Donna: I haven't read most of these books, mainly because my youth was otherwise occupied by Anne Rice, Stephen King, Clive Barker, RL Stine, Christopher Pike, Diane Hoh and Alvin Schwartz so, as you can tell, I didn't have much room for else. But authors like the one that wrote this article make me hate feminism with the passion of a thousand fiery suns because they will only be happy with a heroine if she has a severed, bloody cock in one hand, a sword scraped with fleshy pieces in the other and standing atop a pile of junkless man-corpses. Hermoine's was an awful paragraph. But so was Wendy's. In fact I got more irrationally angry about the Wendy paragraph. It's such a pedantic, arrogant tone I want to slap the author.

Nicole: Before the age of 15 I was reading nonfiction books on animals and adult high fantasy. I... did not have a normal childhood.

Melissa: My childhood was Agatha Christie, Ray Bradbury, and Edgar Allen Poe. I tried to read Tolstoy's War and Peace at age 12. It's a wonder I turned out normal. (Wait....)

Melissa: I like your point about feminism, Donna. It IS ridiculous that the only way we expect women to be empowered is to be Kick Ass BAMFs. There are other ways to show an independent woman. That said, I didn't like the way Barrie portrayed Wendy much. She was actually quite simpering. Then again, I didn't much like Peter Pan, the book.

Nicole: Complain about ALL OF THE THINGS!

Donna: I actually haven't read Peter Pan so I can't rightly comment on Wendy but just the way the author looked down on motherhood really rankled me. And I have next to no motherly bones in my body. Maybe my pinkie toe but that's it. I knew the basics of mummification, the number of deaths on the Titanic and that Charlie Chaplin was an alcoholic by the time I was 8. Weird kids FTW! We should YAck this. Do it.

So: what do you think about this? How do you define YA?