BTW, congratulations on the (well-deserved) glowing reviews! You must be so relieved - I mean, every author is obviously relieved when their work is greeted with a degree of appreciation, but you had the added pressure of carrying the flag for the home team.
Exactly! You want to read books about adult stuff. Obviously not actually adult stuff (mortgages, back pain, sense of unfulfillment) but an imagined version of adult stuff
I read all of Forsythe and Le Carré, James Clavell, Jilly Cooper, John Grisham (whether they were remotely age-appropriate for a thirteen year old is left as an exercise for the reader; still, I turned out fine, eh?).
Which reminds me of another not-actual adult task: evading both the FBI and the mafia, often through the purchase of multiple airplane tickets in your name and one ticket in an assumed name, for which you've secured a fake ID.
Yes, not skills I put to use with any frequency, but it was fun to read.
When I was 12 or 13 ,I was literally reading Dune and Smiley's People. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. But it was not stuff for teens. I had no interest in that at all.
when i worked at a used bookstore, i would have parents asking me “but where are the BOY books? all of these young adult books are for girls” and i wanted to be like well your son looks a little young for Hemingway
Same. Personally, I wanted interesting ideas first, and everything else was secondary (including plot, which mystified the local adults). And at the time, one easy way to trigger 'interesting' was to be about a time, place, or set of people as far away from me and my actual life as possible.
I was thinking this at the weekend in a bookshop with a great kids section and 1/3 of it for young adults and thought that after 13 I just read my dad’s Grisham books
When I was a teen I started on the parent's SF&F bookshelf. All books written for adults, with lots of strange concepts in. I've given my own teen children pretty much full access to all the books in the house now.
The headline alone tho is obnoxious—literally it’s a struggle for publishers to *not* center boys in every age group? Just because YA is getting more diverse doesn’t mean boys are being left out
I can’t unpick all the bits - too exhausted right now! But some v interesting replies in thread & I think a broader (maybe foggily-framed in the original piece) intersectional discussion around reading, school attainment & non-toxic models in the UK context merited. Completely take your point, tho.
Oh yes the replies are interesting here. honestly having taken care of children for quite a while, teens really do like a lot of the same things when it comes to books, regardless of gender.
Especially when books can take them away from the discomfort of puberty, school, home.
For about twenty years no one had to worry about what to give a lad from say 14 to 30 for Christmas. The new Mac Lean (or if you knew someone else did that, the new Innes or Bagley (1st, 12th and 23rd in the bestseller list for 1980 for example)
When I was 13, I read The Hunt for Red October. I was also reading Dragonlance at the same time. Nary a teenager in either of those (but not overly challenging, either).
I read crime fiction avidly (still do), classics like Austen and the Brontes from the age of fourteen, and then by 16+ was getting addicted to E M Forster.
I'm so thankful my parents gave me free rein over my reading (which, yeah, was their own bookshelves full of horror, SFF, thriller, spy, smut, etc). I was done with teen characters by the time I was 12. 😂
I think the most teen boy content I read as a teen was in Stephen King books. Teen stuff mattered only in how it showed 1) how not to be a creep and 2) seeing bullies get eaten by monsters.
This applies to me now as a middle-aged person with kids and a job and a mortgage. I emphatically do not want to read books about being a middle-aged person with kids and a job and a mortgage
Easiest way to make me lose interest in a book when I was a kid or a teen was to say "and this is aimed at kids and teens" - who wants to think of themselves as a minor?
As a pre teen I read a lot of true war stories - well it was the late 1960's/early 1970's. In my teens I graduated onto Alistair MacLean, Clive Cussler, and a certain John LeCarre.
As a teen I started on the books that were around the house like Dennis Wheatley, Alistair Maclean, Jack Higgins, and James Herbert, then transition to Clive Barker. I did read SE Hinton, and Chocky by Wyndham but not really teenager books.
I went through a bit of an obsessive phase and bought all of his books in paperback when I was about 12/13. I had a chance to get a crime dossier from a secondhand bookshop and didn't buy it. Still kicking myself about that.
Absolutely. I recall CS Forester - Hornblower of course but also Payment Deferred & Brown on Resolution.
And Dennis Wheatley, Alistair Maclean & Nevil Shute.
I really did not need to read about how teen boys felt misunderstood and alone, or how adults seemed to regard them as irrational aliens. In particular I did not want to read long, tragic self-examinations by teen boy characters.
The Curse of YA, and our current cultural Zeitgeist.
Hey Kidz!! Why read aspirational stuff that stretches and extends you beyond the life and world you know, when you can just sit back and see your own little self reflected back at you from every narrative surface you see????
I did quite want to read about characters with super powers of whatever sort who didn’t have to worry about teachers or other teen boys being vile to them because they were too busy riding dragons and triumphing over evil.
I skipped right to sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, and never had any interest in supposedly age-appropriate books when I was around ten or eleven. My mother let me read whatever I wanted as long as we'd discuss it after.
I did read a coming-of-age tale once as a teen. It was about this kid who was sent on an adventure by his step dad and he did ride an eagle, I think. Became all mature over the course of 3 long volumes and ended up throwing a ring in a volcano.
Honestly my recollection as a teen girl is that there were a lot of books about the real life teen experience, and I wasn't really interested in this--I skipped that section of the library shelves.
The books I actually remember reading as a teen boy (there were a lot of others) seem to be mostly by Aldiss, Ballard et al… Heady stuff in the 1960s :)
They made us read Catcher in the Rye in secondary school, and I remember thinking it was 'all right', but it didn't send me back to the library looking for 'more stuff like this'.
Also the guy felt much older somehow.
Also, inevitably, at some point you thought: 'wow this guy's really weird...'
YES. All of this. This was 90% of my local library's YA section (which was also not sorted by genre), and as a teen who preferred fantasy...yeah I was very frustrated lol
"Give me the fun stuff! Not what adults think is relatable and important!" - teen me, pretty much
FWIW, my teen son mostly wants to read current adult nonfiction science books and classic 19th century horror. He has ZERO interest in contemporary stories about boys his own age doing stuff.
Not *quite* the same, but when I was around 5yo, Gerry Anderson came out with JOE 90. I liked that Joe was very blond (as was I), I liked the theme music, I liked his briefcase with the hidden compartments. I hated everything else, especially that he was a kid. I wanted my derring-do done by adults.
From which it follows that one way to sell to teen boys would be to de-emphasise their teen boy-ness and offer them books which entirely coincidentally contain things they like which are ostensibly just books that happen to exist but which they might perhaps like to know about.
My primary school had a weekly session where we'd bring in whatever we were reading at home, and I still have the headmaster's note ticking me off for bringing in Thunderball. I was 10.
To this day, I have a limited appetite for suffering in fiction. Characters don't have to be superheroes, but I do need to anticipate that they'll prevail
I think it’s to do with needing to criticize the lack of a corresponding boy category for the over marketed, genre-bound girl categories. Avoiding that the girl categories are also flawed and reductive.
I would agree with this. As a boy, I recall jumping from the Hardy Boys to techno-thrillers like Crichton, Clancy and Cussler. The most YA book I recall was Cynthia Voigt, but to your point, it was written in a way that de-emphasized the age of two male leads.
I've always taken the approach with reading that I want to travel to somewhere else in my head, not the same place but with additional characters and a different plot line.
100% agreed. The books marketed to teen girls never interested me as a teen girl; I read a few, then decided to wade into the big pool of fantasy novels for adults as soon as possible. I wanted adventure and swordfights and magic
It's really about figuring out what teens like, and handing them THAT
There is absolutely value in seeing people like yourself as the protagonist in stories - my preferred genres are frequently sparse on female characters of real substance, which irks me - but that can't be the *only* hook.
Give the teens some swords, or a mystery to solve, or an adventure to go on.
I remember reading a picture book about a dragon and a boy got excited. Got the book and had me sign it. Mind you, the boy was only 4-5 years old. But I agree with your theory.
When I was a bookseller I was surprised how few fictional books there were for teen boys (or girls for that matter) set in the world of football. There was only 1 series we knew of & stocked aimed at teens, but many would ask if we had any others as they'd read them all. Always struck me as a gap.
I had this conversation in my bookshop just the other day. Grandfather and 11 yo grandson were looking for stuff for the young one to read, so I recommended the Sherlock Holmes short stories, having been roughly that age when I first read them myself.
As I still dimly remember being a teen boy I think I was very well served with the sci-fi, horror and fantasy shelves of my local library, and would have also ventured into the thriller aisle too. If a book has words in it then a teen boy can read it. This article screams 'marketing department'.
I would have been reading Moorcock's Elric books, Zelazny's Amber series, anything by James Herbert, multiple attempts at the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (usually the library had one missing) all of Dune + serial wet camping holidays in Cornwall with Clive Barker's latest brick for company.
I wonder how much of this can be explained by the way girls are brought up to read books (and identify) with male protagonists, but boys aren’t necessarily raised to read books with female protagonists. So as the overall diversity of books increases, there appears to be ‘less’ for teen boys.
Also, literally the biggest tween/teen series of all time is boy-led. Harry Potter is 11 in the first book and ages a year each book, and from the stats I can quickly find, readership is skewed slightly male.
Starting from middle school, I mostly only read sci-fi and thrillers, so pretty much every book I read as a girl was ‘boy-led’. Back then we just called them ‘books’.
I mean, this is undeniable, and I think part of the discussion is that publishing feels it’s done a lot of work there and is responding to the more general cloud of discussion around “what’s going wrong with the boys?”
There is an issue with the boys which I think is under-examined. The demographic that's now least likely to go to uni is working class boys. But it's a larger societal issue that's quite complicated, taking in class, an underfunded educational system, the lost of Sure Start, cultural factors & more.
I certainly agree that some of the cultural factors are the ones you've mentioned around toxic role models and damaging identities. But I can also see a hint of a backlash there against seeing more diverse characters in books, as we're seeing against, say, women in general.
Yes! Exactly. Which is not something publishing can fix, but it is something they could be part of resolving. An actual good rather than just a marketing issue.
To which one answer is: they’re currently in a conceptual battleground between toxic role models and a rather complex landscape of identities, and a lot of the books people are referencing in-thread are pretty problematic now.
I was devouring every fantasy epic series I could find, starting with the Belgariad. read the entire DUNE series around the same time, which definitely shaped my concept of what sci-fi should be.
Comments
Yes, not skills I put to use with any frequency, but it was fun to read.
(Goosebumps was always a good answer)
As the poet said, "tell all the truth but tell it slant"—preferably with the slant involving magic, swords, space, and/or aliens
Also, it’s just occurred to me that I’d grown out of reading Hardy Boys books - about a pair of teenagers - by the time I was, er, 12…
Especially when books can take them away from the discomfort of puberty, school, home.
When I was 13, I read The Hunt for Red October. I was also reading Dragonlance at the same time. Nary a teenager in either of those (but not overly challenging, either).
I then found science fiction...
And Dennis Wheatley, Alistair Maclean & Nevil Shute.
Hey Kidz!! Why read aspirational stuff that stretches and extends you beyond the life and world you know, when you can just sit back and see your own little self reflected back at you from every narrative surface you see????
Also the guy felt much older somehow.
Also, inevitably, at some point you thought: 'wow this guy's really weird...'
"Give me the fun stuff! Not what adults think is relatable and important!" - teen me, pretty much
It's really about figuring out what teens like, and handing them THAT
That!
Give the teens some swords, or a mystery to solve, or an adventure to go on.
Also, literally the biggest tween/teen series of all time is boy-led. Harry Potter is 11 in the first book and ages a year each book, and from the stats I can quickly find, readership is skewed slightly male.