YA is good and valuable and important, and part of that is NOT diluting it by shoehorning everything that isn’t about a angsty professor’s affair with a student into the genre.
After seeing it shelved in that section, I had to tell the librarian that the Shades of Magic series was definitely not YA even though the author *does* have other series that are.
Oh! Is that a thing?
Now those weird reviews I got saying 'reads like YA' make sense. (I write closed door/ no sex romance novels about people in their late 20s or early 30s, so the 'like YA' thing really confused me).
Just write about your life and change the names. Then make everyone an absolute asshole whose character development is that they become less of an asshole (at best).
Yes!! As someone who is ace, I’d like to enjoy stories for stories, not as a thinly veiled fantasy filter for smut. So I end up just leaning into YA because I -know- it won’t be smut-centric.
For the record, I’m fine with relationships and even sex, but prefer it to be plot-driven.
I can highly recommend JA Andrews Keeper Origins as a completely smut free adult fantasy series.
I'm asexual myself, also don't like 99% of sex scenes. But luckily I find more then enough books without it still. It's just hard to dig though all the currently romantasy craze...
I’ve read things marketed as YA that were definitely not, lol. Just because a thing has a younger character doesn’t automatically make it YA! It’s okay to just let things be what they were written to be.
I mean, I read A Spell for Chameleon when I was single-digit ages, plus Darkover books, plus the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy in one beat-up secondhand paperback volume, plus Year of the Unicorn (no unicorns; cheated!!)… Pern, Number of the Beast (Heinlein) around 12-13…
I’d say the hobbit is a book for reading to children? It’s not YA in the modern sense, and the tone and setup is supposed to be fairy tale-ish. Lord of the Rings sort of retroactively makes it more adult I suppose… but I read it at age 9, so maybe I’m an oddity? Idk.
I'm honestly not sure I ever read anything Is call YA books (that I don't mentally classify as Newberry bait instead) there's not much of a jump from genre fiction to adult books
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Now those weird reviews I got saying 'reads like YA' make sense. (I write closed door/ no sex romance novels about people in their late 20s or early 30s, so the 'like YA' thing really confused me).
Go figure.
It's what I wanted to read growing up.
But apparently the things I wanna write don't count as YA cause it's not about angst. (Bruh, I see adults angsting more than teenagers. 😂)
Voila! Literary fiction.
For the record, I’m fine with relationships and even sex, but prefer it to be plot-driven.
I'm asexual myself, also don't like 99% of sex scenes. But luckily I find more then enough books without it still. It's just hard to dig though all the currently romantasy craze...
Highly recommend!
(*mistakes were made)
As a kid I had no concept of books not being for me. It's weird almost because I had no issue understanding that some movies weren't for kids
but books were mine
Thankfully I didn't traumatize myself too badly
(Though honestly I think The Hobbit IS YA, even if the rest of LotR is not)