Welcome to a rather belated newsletter…I was caught up in my teaching job search. I miss writing little missives, but I really wanted to focus on a proper essay this time.
I’ve been reading more YA in part because I am writing a YA book, and you’ll notice several titles here are from my reading inspiration/research list (or have been added since). Plus I got back on Netgalley and requested a some YA, as you do. And I’ve noticed that a lot of books that are about the older teen years, often called “crossover” because these books appeal also to adults. And I noticed some patterns.
Please note that I am specifically talking about books that are categorized by the publisher as YA, not books that are categorized and sold as adult that still appeal to teen readers (regardless of if they have teen characters or not). (A book I read recently that’s the opposite of this is Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson, in which the narrator spends most of the novel telling about one summer when she was 16.)
There has been a lot of talk about how YA books are aging up and attracting adult readers (one could say this started with SFF books), how YA romcom covers look like their adult counterparts, how there’s never a good selection available to 12-15-year-olds (I would argue middle grade has been filling this gap more and more)…all valid discussions. But the marketing and audience angles are not what I’m looking to explore here. Instead, I want to look at the content and hallmarks of this mini-genre.
The books
These are not an exhaustive list—just books I’ve read recently (from late 2022 until now) that are also fairly recent releases. Also, they all feature queer main characters, which isn’t necessarily a feature of the genre…just a pattern in my own reading for the obvious reason that I am also queer. But I am focusing specifically on contemporary realistic (and one historical) books.
Note: these links are my family’s affiliate on Bookshop.com so if you do buy something, it gives us a small commission!
How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow (2022)
We Are Okay by Nina LaCour (2017)
A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo (2022)
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo (2021)
Ander and Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa (2023)
Margo Zimmerman Gets the Girl by Sara Waxelbaum and Brianna R. Shrum (2023)
The Quiet and the Loud by Helena Fox (2023)
Honorable mention: Self-Made Boys by Anna-Marie McLemore (a favorite author), which is The Great Gatsby entry in Macmillan’s Remixed Classics series. Because this of the source material, the characters are off living on their own, but because it’s YA, they’re just 17-18 (the major change being that Tom and Daisy aren’t married yet). At least, that was how I understood it. I sort of wished the characters were in their 20s. It really wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
Disclaimer: I received digital ARCs of Ander and Santi and Margo Zimmerman, and this post is part of my review of them.
Life after high school
A major hallmark of YA is the high school setting, and so what sets most of these books apart is the lack of it.
How to Excavate a Heart and We are Okay (the oldest book on this list by a considerable margin) features protagonists who are on the winter break of their freshman year of college. A Scatter of Light takes place the summer before the main character goes to college.
Ander and Santi and The Quiet and the Loud are gap year books. We generally don’t see many of these in an American-dominated YA industry because it’s rarer in America than other countries (The Quiet and the Loud is Australian; Ander’s parents are constantly on them for having delayed the start of college).
The two books set in high school—Telegraph Club and Margo Zimmerman—are somewhat preoccupied with the world beyond it. In Telegraph Club, the characters are seniors and sneak into a lesbian bar. In Margo, they too are seniors, and a major plot point involves retaining a college admission. There is also a “teen night” at a local lesbian bar that allows for a space very few teens actually are able to experience. The ending of that book, like Ander and Santi, also involves major decisions for the future.
The “mature” content
Okay, YA books have had sex in them for ages. We have Judy Blume’s Forever, after all. But I want to talk about the true crossover aspect of some of these books, which is that they appeal to adult romance/romcom readers.
“Booktok” is a darling of the press and publishers. I’m not even going to try to link to the numerous articles and editorializing. I have my own mixed feelings. But from my experience, a large part of the books that are becoming popular are romance. Particularly adult romance/romcoms, which have been on an upward swing and reaching more audiences since adopting trade paperback sizes and illustrated covers around 2018.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club became marketed as a “Booktok” book by its own publisher (though I haven’t seen it on any of those B&N tables!), and Lo herself credited TikTok for contributing to the book’s sales (it also won a ton of awards and had like the most possible starred reviews, but that only goes so far for the average reader). Jake Maia Arlow single-handedly did a lot of marketing for How to Excavate a Heart (they never actually were contacted by a publicist), and a big part of that was promoting the book on their TikTok (to the detriment of their mental health, according to more recent social media posts).
How to Excavate a Heart and Margo Zimmerman Gets the Girl are perhaps the most “romcom”-like of my selection. Even then, Heart has some twists that challenge the usual romance narrative. The character development is squarely coming-of-age, where self-understanding is absolutely crucial for the main character before a romance can fully blossom.
Margo, meanwhile, has plenty of banter, flirting, and a teacher/student role-play that wouldn’t be out of place in an adult romance novel, a genre that loves its quips and tropes. My partner (aka the author
) thought that the characters were more emotionally mature than high schoolers—perhaps more aligned with college, and could model that to younger readers. I sort of understand, but the characters are also seniors so there isn’t that much of a difference to me. This is also a book that is very much about identity, but it’s about the nuances of it and inter-community biases and stereotypes. Adult books tend to not have as much room for these explorations and teaching moments.All of the books on my list except The Quiet and the Loud have sex on them, to varying degrees: it’s simply mentioned in Ander and Santi as a part of their relationship, sexual assault and trauma is a major plot/character point in How to Excavate a Heart, it’s described in varying shades of explicit in We Are Okay, Telegraph Club, A Scatter of Light, and Margo Zimmerman.
Malinda Lo actually wrote A Scatter of Light before Telegraph Club, but could not get a publisher to buy it because of the explicit lesbian sex scenes. A Scatter of Light is also the least romantic in terms of genre, definitely. Like, I don’t think I can emphasize enough that this book is not a romance. In fact, because of the messiness of it all, the book comes off as perhaps the most mature of the bunch, even though the main character is, well, not.
Looking ahead…
Despite the issue of younger YA readers being abandoned by the current market, I think we are in an exciting time where YA can expand to include those who are leaving high school or in early college, who are still teenagers anyway! The key is to do it meaningfully…there have definitely been some fantasy books (one author in particular…) that were originally intended for adults but aged down for market reasons, and that is not beneficial to teen readers. The focus audience still should be teenagers.
I will say, something I want to see more in queer YA (and, like, in general) are queer characters that do not have a romance (and not necessarily because they are aromantic). Romance is really commercial so I get this is unlikely to happen on a larger scale, but I just really want it! (I am writing something that falls into this category, by the way…)
Further reading
10 YA Books Set in College from Book Riot
YA Goes Adulting: 14 Crossover Titles with Older Teen Characters from School Library Journal
Who is a ‘Crossover’ book for? by
in Publisher’s Weekly (which I cannot link because I am using the browser on my phone because there is a glitch where I can’t use my desktop to edit sometimes, and it will not let me use the link function…)