When I got The Hunger Games from my teacher’s classroom bookshelf in fourth grade, my mom was surprised my teacher considered them appropriate for ten year olds, but she deferred to my teacher’s expertise and didn’t worry. As someone who was sensitive to scary/violent content in movies as a child, I’m also surprised that The Hunger Games books weren’t too much for me. But I was enthralled by them at the time, reading them multiple times over. Nine years after this little anecdote, I’ve discovered that my eight-year-old cousin is reading The Hunger Games. This doesn’t surprise me given my own experience with the series, but it does seem odd that books intended for kids between the ages of twelve and eighteen can also be enjoyed by an eight-year-old. These examples seem to defy the YA category: fiction which is fast paced, centered around coming-of-age themes, and marketed as “for teens, about teens.”
Yet exceptions to the YA category are likely to be noticed only by adults because kids don’t seem to need to categorize their books much. As a kid, I would simply pick up a book and start reading it without analyzing the likelihood that I would like it. If I didn’t like it, I just wouldn’t return to the book, without dissecting its shortcomings and attempting to find patterns in other books. I did not care that The Hunger Games was a YA book, only that it was interesting. Adults, however, have more prejudice for books based on the categories they belong to. One Redditor loved a book series and was surprised to find out it was YA fiction. They said they would not classify them as YA and admitted to having a mental block about books that are intended for twelve to eighteen year olds. A different commenter on an Instagram post stated that there should be “two categories for YA books. Those for teens and those for adults.” They said they wanted a more complex plot than some YA novels offer. This picking apart of differences between books within the same category and demanding even more categorization shows how adults are much less casual readers than children. Clearly, we like to know what we’re getting into and where we can find more of the same, which leads us to argue over confusing genres like YA fiction.
In a class last year, one of my classmates was praising a thriller/drama book she had just read, noting that she was surprised it was YA due to its disturbing themes. She said that if she had a teenager, she wouldn’t give them that book. Her views on that YA book depict another friction point within YA fiction: what should kids be exposed to? Since YA fiction is “for teens, about teens,” it sometimes contains violent or sexual content because that is what many teens are curious about. Some parents find this inappropriate. One Instagram commenter described a time she saw a fourteen-year-old in line at a bookstore with a YA book she knew contained sexual content. The commenter told the teenager’s mom, who decided not to get the book for her daughter. Some parents wouldn’t block their teenagers from all sexual content, knowing that development is a process. Other parents prefer to protect their kids until they’re older. These differing parenting strategies fuel disagreements over YA fiction.
All this disagreement over how YA books should be and what is appropriate reading material for teenagers points to the differences among people and books within the same category. YA books vary considerably, with some being enjoyed by all ages of people while others are really only good for kids aged twelve to fourteen. Avid readers of the same category of books can’t agree on what belongs in that category and whether YA should be divided further. These differences among individual books and individual people suggest that adult readers may benefit from relaxing their obsession with strict categories. Adults can be more like the youngest readers, picking books up and putting them down at will.
Gwen Shetlar, Pine Reads Review Writer and Editor