While I was at RT and at various parties or dinners in the evening, the topic of adult readers of YA came up frequently. Some authors and readers questioned whether adult books were being packaged and sold in the YA section in hopes of attracting the attention of adult YA readers who shopped there. I can tell you there were a TON of authors talking about their upcoming YA novels. The crowded high-school-hallway turnout of the Teen Alley at the book signing and the number of young readers I saw roaming the booksigning looking for books to read (I was clear on the other side of the room from Teen Alley, so any young readers who I saw had made the trek across the crowds to the other side of the ballroom) indicates to me that YA remains popular with young readers – but what about these adult readers of YA? Are you one of them?
I totally am. I love YA romance for a host of reasons, and while I’m pretty picky about what I read, I love contemporary YA that’s not paranormal or dystopian most especially, because I love the tension and struggle provided by having emotions that are foreign and new and sometimes overwhelming. I know in the previous comment thread following my review of The Luckiest Girl, some readers mentioned preferring YA romances that didn’t end in a HEA for the hero and heroine because it’s not believable for them to see two protagonists embarking on a coupled future at such a young age. I personally don’t have that problem with suspending my disbelief though I totally understand the perspective of those who do. I met my husband in high school and we were together from freshman year of college onward, though we didn’t get married until we were 25 and he’d gotten that supah sexxay graduate degree he was after (rwor). So I understand the “Hold all calls, we have a winner!” feeling at a young age, and appreciate when an author pulls it off and makes it seem that no matter how the characters grow, they’re going to grow more awesomer together.
But I want to ask you, via the poll below: are you an adult reader of YA?
What do you like about it? What do you dislike? What books rock your world? Why YA, or why not?
Definitely some of the appeal of YA is that it’s usually a quicker read. A lot of good sff novels are still shelved under YA and include themes I would not call childish, and they actually get to the point in less than 600 pages (unlike “hard” adult sff).
I actually didn’t care much for YA when I was a teenager, but now that I’m in my midtwenties I find it a bit relaxing. I’m still really picky about my protagonists (no cliquey high school dramas please), but there is definitely some good stuff out there.
Like another commentor, I really enjoyed “Anna and the French Kiss”. As much as I enjoy ‘adult’ romances, sometimes they get to the sexxoring too quick for my tastes. I enjoy a healthy relationship before it becomes a healthy sexual relationship, and sometimes YA does that better IMO.
I’m an adult but enjoy YA fantasy/sci-fi lit almost exclusively. When I was a kid I read everything in the school library, but that changed in high school – my preferences really narrowed when I discovered Diana Wynne Jones’s amazing books. For a while I did try a lot of adult fiction, mostly fantasy, but finally I gave up because I found the books so disgusting and disheartening. Plus, I’m an English major, so enduring six years of whiny, depressing classics didn’t help.
I like YA because, when it’s well-written, it’s interesting and happy, whereas adult fiction is boring, depressing, and full of annoying obligatory sex. Two exceptions are Orson Scott Card and Juliet Marillier – Card is a brilliant writer no matter what he turns his hand to, even though there are only a handful of his actual books that I like; and Marillier’s fiction could pass as YA if it was marketed differently.
I don’t read much YA unless it’s written by a paranormal author I really like…
Too often it reminds me of high school and navigating high school was tough enough without having to relive it again with characters in a book! LOL
At least if there’s a paranormal element it makes the YA experience different enough from real life that I can escape into the story.
Coming of age YA is all right, like Something WIcked Thie Way Comes, but romantic YA is often so angst-ridden I’d rather not! LOL
Lisa 🙂
Hey! Happy birthday @AgTigress!! Many happy returns on the day (and good books too!)
Back to your regularly scheduled YA discussion.
Wait- one more thing:
@Teresa N: “I enjoy a healthy relationship before it becomes a healthy sexual relationship, and sometimes YA does that better IMO.”
That really resonated with me. I am going to think about that for a while.
Glad I could add to the discussion. Thanks for bringing this topic up 🙂
I love YA and haven’t always been comfortable admitting that to other people, even though there’s no good reason for my reluctance.
I heart LM Montgomery with a love undiminished by time and am always asking my students what they’re reading or if they have any good recommendations, which is how I was turned on to Westerfeld, Dessen, Marr, and many other fabulous authors.
I really like the writing quality in the YA books of recent years.
I’m not sure I can answer this question properly. I mean, I’ve been reading adult fiction since I was about 13 and I still read YA and childrens books now that I’m 20. I think it’s more that if a story interests me I’ll read it regardless of genre or intented age bracket.
I didn’t read YA when I was younger but I love it now. And I don’t mind when the hero/heroine end up together – my husband and I have been together since high school, married out of college and now, almost 20 years later, we are still HEA. 🙂
I find that I like more of a variety of YA books than I do those geared toward adults, too, and I’m not sure why that is. But I’ve read YA sci-fi, paranormal, coming of age, etc. I can’t seem to get enough – just finished The Summer of Skinny Dipping, Timeless and The Clearing.
Thank you, SB Sarah. 🙂 I wonder whether there will ever be a fiction genre specially for Old Adults, focusing on burning issues like Clearing out a Lifetime’s Clutter, and the heartaches and stress of moving into sheltered accommodation…
😉
I don’t think it is a new genre. It is just wildly popular now. And more distinctly classified. I read all Rosamund duJardin. Wasn’t Anne of Green Gables, kinda?
First, definitely a reader of YA material and LOVE it. I don’t know if I would have if I wasn’t a librarian because I only became aware of it when I had to start ordering it and went, ‘Hmm, that sounds really good. I should read it when it comes in.’
I hear where some people posting are coming from on not being down with teens and not wanting to read about bad decisions, teen angst, etc. etc. I would agree, but would caveat with good writing will always win the day. I have put down YA books that were too teeny or the author was trying too hard to sound like a teen (P.C. and Kristen Cast, sorry..). But there are a ton of fabulous YA books out there where I have never rolled my eyes at the teen angst.
The best YA book I’ve read lately, and possibly this year so far, was ENTWINED by Heather Dixon. It’s based on the twelve dancing princesses fairytale and is drop-dead awesome. Go read it today.
I read quite a bit of YA, with my taste in YA skewing hard toward SF/F/H. The older I get, the shorter my attention span gets, and YA seems to be more likely to just get down to the story and not ramble on forever, especially with backstory, exposition, etc.
I’ve been reading a lot of YA recently and, like any genre, there’s some great stuff out there and some pretty bad stuff. I did read the Twilight series, and while I flew through it, once I thought about it, there were a lot of things I had issues with; however, it didn’t turn me off of the YA genre. For every Twilight out there, there’s a Hunger Games which I felt was amazingly excellent. When a friend of mine who I’d recommended Hunger Games to went to find the second book she couldn’t because she was looking for it in the regular literture section.
I enjoy non dystopian/sci-fi YA as well, but what I enjoy about that is watching a flawed character grow and realize their flaws and their strengths. I can buy that not every character is going to be a strong role model, but I want my female YA leads to grow, learn and realize that they can become these strong women. I recently read one YA novel where the protagonist basically had non-committed sex to escape her real life, and while it was somewhat addressed (the guy assured her she wasn’t a “whore” (the author’s words not mine)) I feel like it wasn’t dealt with on a level that I was comfortable with. It’s interesting, because I’ll fully accept this behavior in an adult novel but am absolutely not ok with it in a YA novel. I don’t have children, but when I’m reading these books, I”m always thinking “would I want my kids reading this?” And I feel like when I was young, books were pretty influential, and I don’t know that that is the influence I’d want.
Ok, one last point, then I swear I’m done. I’ve noticed that the couple of non paranormal/sci-fi YA books I’ve had HUGE issues with are YA books that are written by novelists recently out of high school. They’re not bad writers, I just feel like they are trying to write a coming of age story before they’ve actually come of age. I don’t think that I could ever write a YA book because my high school years were fairly uneventful. I was a band geek with a small group of four close friends. I’m willing to bet that some of the commenters above who had tough teen years could turn out some fairly compelling YA books based on those experiences.
I read YA. Not a ton, but I have enjoyed a lot of it (Harry Potter, The Bartimaeus books by Stroud, Holes by Sachar), but I don’t actively seek it out as much anymore as I do other genres (Urban Fantasy, Historical Romance, Paranormals, Fantasy, SciFi).
Hope this doesn’t post twice!
Like many others here, I read more SF/F YA than contemporary YA, but in recent years, that’s changed a bit. I stopped reading YA when I was still a child and moved on to adult books, but in my late 20s, I came back around to more contemporary YA. I just finished E. Lockhart’s “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks” and thought she was the most kick-ass contemporary heroine I’ve read in ages. It’s not really a romance because Frankie won’t settle for a boy who doesn’t regard her as an equal, but I think that just makes the story that much better (and as YA, it’s more realistic to me that a 16 y.o. isn’t planning on marrying her high school boyfriend).
Frankie is an amazing role-model in the contemporary camp, rivaling the strong female characters in SF/F YA like Katniss (Hunger Games), Sabriel and Lirael (Abhorsen trilogy), Alanna and Daine (Lioness and Immortals quartets) and Harry (The Blue Sword). I will also always reread L.M. Montgomery – for the nostalgia, for the gorgeous prose, and for the stories.
I hear what some people are saying about the angst of teenagers and not wanting to revisit high school in fiction, but for me it totally depends on the book. Most of the time I love Meg Cabot, but in her Mediator series, Suze is so well drawn as a teenager that I was annoyed with her more often than not. I was also annoyed with Harry Potter in the 5th book, which is actually a result of the authors doing a great job at the characterization of teenagers – sometimes the protagonists are just a little too sensitive, self-obsessed and angsty. But it certainly is true to life!
I also must recommend the Forever Young Adult blog for anyone interested in rekindling their relationship with YA. Their attitude seems to be that if a YA book or movie is too angsty or ridiculous, it’s your adult prerogative to make a drinking game out of it!
This quote by Cory Doctorow from a Locus magazine feature http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/07/cory-doctorow-natures-daredevils.html
sums up why I like reading and writing YA:
I really enjoy contemporary YA like John Green’s Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines; Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Twisted;
E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks; and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
And of course, Bitter Melon that I found through SB!
Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar is excellent, although hard to track down because it’s Australian.
Also the Dystopias are great including The Way I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, and the Tomorrow Series by John Marsden.
Love YA!
I love YA fantasy. Just finished Sherwood Smith’s A Stranger to Command, the prequel to Crown Duel. Stayed up ‘til 6am reading. It wasn’t the classic that Crown Duel is, but I still love the author’s work.
But, my love of YA comes with a major caveat: I do not want to read about teenagers in high school. I didn’t when I was a teenager, and I don’t now. The angst-heavy social posturing featured in a lot of YA novels was completely irrelevant to my life at that point and it’s even more annoying as an adult. I relied on books to take me away from the high school snake pit, not shove me further into misery. So, if dragons, swords, or quests are involved—bring it! Sparkly Vampires Need Not Apply.
I do read YA. It’s kind of a job requirement because I’m a YA librarian. However, before I went to library school, I read both YA and adult fiction. Aside from romance novels, all the fiction I tend to read have characters who have secrets and personality flaws and are awkward—all the traits of a teen.
Christy said: I don’t think that I could ever write a YA book because my high school years were fairly uneventful.
Quick summary of my high school years: boring. Not awful, but kind of dull. Not perfect either, but in general, tolerable. As for me personally, I didn’t break new ground, shift paradigms, or get into righteous fights with The Man. But sometimes when I tell people about certain everyday kinds of things my friends and I said or did back then, I think huhn, that was pretty cool. I then feel an urge to balance out my ‘interesting’ stories with the days upon days of being bored and squandering potential and blah blah blah.
I suppose my roundabout point is that sometimes Big Drama/Action isn’t everything. As a reader, would I be interested in a book by someone who may have had a similar high school experience? Maybe, tell me a little more about the story. Would I be interested in a book by someone who’s had a very different high school experience? Maybe, tell me a little more about the story. (Please.)
I feel like a lot of people have a similar attitude towards YA that other have toward romance. There is so much diversity now in YA that it seems odd when people complain that it’s all about acne or it’s babyish. It’s like saying that romance novels are all about bodice ripping. There’s nothing wrong with preferring one genre to another but I do wish readers would take a walk through the YA section and see how many crazy things are there. A” Tree Grows in Brooklyn” shows up in YA all the time and is also often counted as adult’s favorite books, and there many more examples that other people have already brought up. Hope this message isn’t too pissy – apparently I’m very protective of YA! Which I didn’t even know until this thread! While I’m at it, not all sci fi is about spaceships and not all “literature” is about middle aged angst. Now I am going to drink some nice soothing tea before I become all overset!
The thing is, I read very little YA when I was in the target age group. The reason for that was that I read for escapism, and so reading about other teens and their drama didn’t cut it as well as reading about adults with adult problems. Plus I hated my teen years for the most part.
These days I’ve been reading some YA here and there, mostly of the paranormal variety. I am now far enough removed from the highschool setting to find it interesting in fiction. And I find that I like teen romance. I met my now husband in my late teens, so I absolutely believe those relationships can have happy endings.
That’s a really fair point. I recently started a blog, which I characterized as fairly self-centered (the content, not blogging in general) and my friend told me that it depended on the story you have to tell. A story about finding jeans could be just that, a dull story about finding jeans, or it could end up being a funny, heartbreaking story about a mission to find jeans. I agreed with him, told him I’d probably never write a post about finding jeans, then two weeks later wrote a blog post about a pair of shoes I found. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never tried my hand at YA. High school was only 13 years ago, but even then I always felt like I didn’t “get” teenagers and felt like I “fit in” more with adults, though lord knows I acted like a teenager (at least if you ask my mom).
I love reading YA and I love writing it.
I love contemporary, paranormal, historical, you name it.
The emotions are so raw and new to the characters. It’s a wonderfully experimental time.
If its a good story, I’ll read it. I could care less about the age of the protagonist. ‘Nuff said.
Do I read YA? My answer is an absolute yes – not because it’s my job (I’m a middle school teacher-librarian, and head of a reading committee for a provincial book award for Grade 7 – 12 authors), but because I love it and I love the opportunities it gives to my readers.
I too hated high school – I was never so relieved in my life as I was the day after graduation. However, I LOVE reading about middle and high school – perhaps to cleanse the palate of my own experiences 🙂 To help me endure the process of high school, I dived into my love of all kinds of books growing up, and many of those old favourites are now classified as YA according to my local booksellers.
YA fiction is amazing – when written well, it encapsulates the best that fiction has to offer in a well-told story with engrossing characters and situations that are all-too-relatable. The stories told are those that contain some of the greatest themes in literature – love, loss, freedom, the quest for self-awareness or self-appreciation, or even just the Quest. The writing can be simplistic, but I would argue that simple writing is sometimes the best way to tell a complicated story, especially for those who might be reluctant to open themselves up to a book in the first place. Watching my students become enamoured of a series and breathlessly appear at my door to ask for the next is one of the best parts of my job. What’s important to remember is that there are many levels of YA, just as there are many readers, and the breadth and depth of stories out there allows every reader to find their own niche.
As for the authors … I have vivid and fond memories of Judy Blume, LM Montgomery, Gordon Korman, Terry Pratchett, John Wyndham and others, and eagerly pass on those recommendations to my own students. Now we have new and amazing authors to add to the list – Suzanne Collins, Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, Kelley Armstrong, Scott Westerfeld, Kenneth Oppel, Heather Brewster, Cory Doctorow, Sarah Dessen, Carrie Ryan, Lauren Oliver, Meg Cabot … the list is endless and ever-changing and wonderful.
Can you tell I’m a little passionate about my subject? 😉
I love quite a bit of YA. Harry Potter, Percy Jackson (and the new series he does with the Egyptian gods), the Mortal Instruments, and like everyone else in humanity, I love The Hunger Games (which incidentally, was the 5th most challenged book in the past year, since “sexually explicit” was listed as one of the reasons people challenged it, I can only assume that most of people challenging it had not read it). I like the struggles that seem to intrinsically come with being someone in that age group, plus (don’t hurt me), I sometimes find smexy stuff a little exhausting. I like it most of the time, but occasionally I could use a break. And at the end of day, there is some damn good YA. But sometimes publishers and critics seem a little condescending about it (which seems to be how they treat romance too, go fig).
It sounds like YA has improved in both quantity and quality from when I was the true target age. I’m another who went straight from Judy Blume to Jude Devereaux. My “YA” was no-sex, hands-above-the-waistline Silhouette Romances with early- twenty-something heroines.
I see these great reviews for YA books, but teen protagonists just don’t appeal at this time. And I like sex in my romances, but like others have said, not teen sex. But I’ve got girls who will be teenagers sooner than I want to think, and I may find myself picking up more YA as they do. First, when they are surly girls who won’t open up to Mom, maybe discussing their latest read will give us a conversation opener. Second, reading about the teen mindset might help a mom out who hasn’t been there in a long, long time.
I love YA…to a point. I read very little current YA books, but regularly re-read the ones I’ve held onto since childhood: Sunfire, Sweet Valley, Lurlene McDaniels, Fear Street, Zebra horror, L.M. Montgomery, Judy Bloom, Merivale Mall…the list goes on and on!
I haven’t ventured too much into the YA books being published today. I’m sure there are many good ones out there, but for some reason the interest isn’t there for me. Probably due to a preconceived (and likely incorrect) notion that all YA contains vampires and werewolves nowadays. 🙂
I didn’t read YA when I was a YA. I personally feel no need to re-live my youth nor pretend that I am. 30+ IS NOT the new 13.
Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. No YA EVER!
I have a house full of teens and I can escape them when reading. There’s no way I want to read about MORE of them! *shudder*
I LOVE YA. However, I think a lot of what is in the YA section now would have been in SCI/FI Fantasy a few years ago. It is in YA because that is where the sales are now, much easier to market a book as YA and have it sell than as sci-fi/fantasy and have it languish on the shelf.For example Wither, Ann Aguirre’s latest which I just read (and loved) today; Enclave, the Hunger Games, Across the Universe, etc…
Carrie S: I agree. Frankly, I’ve had the irksome-and-untrue stereotype in two of my favorite genres already—fantasy and romance—and having it in YA is not a big surprise, but does irk.
There’s nothing wrong with not enjoying a genre, but those who *do* enjoy it do so for all sorts of reasons, and dismissing them as social twonks intent on reliving wasted youth seems as uncool as dismissing all romance readers as frustrated housewives, or all fantasy/scifi fans as Cat Piss Man.
I read some YA. I feel like I skipped over YA when I was younger due to two things. 1) My local library was under the control of a Nazi librarian who did not believe in change and, thus, the YA section was three or four cylindrical, rotating bookshelves and the rest was stashed in the children’s section, and 2) I only read fantasy and historical fiction when I was in middle and high school, and the books I would pick out to buy were mainly from the Firebird imprint whose goal was to bring adult fantasy to YA audiences.
That said, I am trying to explore non-fantasy YA, but I have no desire to go back to high school, and I have difficulty finding books that are not set in school. This semester I am taking a lit class called Representing Adolescence and we have read some ok books. But this lack of teenaged characters was not a lack at all. As I almost wrote about in one of my papers for this class, Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books feature teen aged main characters, but are clearly marketed for adults. I never thought about this when I was reading the books, but on a recent re-read, with this class on my mind, I came to this conclusion and I think it explains why I felt so little need to read YA fiction.
On the negative side of YA fiction, I am not a fan of first person narration because it limits the view and I can only take so much of being in a high-schooler’s head with only his or her personality; I also can only read a select number of “adult” authors who write in first person for the same reason of wanting to see other points of view. The only author I always enjoy reading who writes in first person is Kathy Reichs, and she makes Tempe Brennan into a really interesting character and explains technical stuff in a concise way and uses lots a dialogue, which is a much for me. Internal thoughts can get really tiring after a while. Besides the lack of dialogue in first person narration, I believe my love for third person comes from my love of fantasy where there are multiple plot-lines going on at the same time (think Robert Jordan and his 75+page prologues). If the author wants to have POV characters, he or she can do what Suzanne Brockmann does with her deep POV where a part of the story is told using the POV character’s words. This allows for the intimate feeling of first person narration, but also allows for multiple views and plot-lines.
(What’s with things eating my comments today? :/)
Personally, I just read books. (In fact, I only learned the term “YA” with teh Internets.) The reason I’m on my twenties and still go to the “children/teens” section of the bookshop while looking for something to read is because “adult” books seem do damn boring. They all are either:
– Tom Clancy novels or the like. I haven’t read any, and books are too expensive for me to risk buying one that may be awful.
– Paulo Cohelo or classic Latin American authors. I read half of them for school, and while this may seem horribly unpatriotic since I’m a Latin American, I find them more boring than sucking on a nail :/
– Something about “independent woman trying to balance a career and love and lose weight in the process” or something (sort of like Sex and the City). Which, again, boring.
I don’t care about normal people with boring normal lives. I like stories with heroes, villains, quests to save the world, things like that. So while now I often take a look at the Sci-fi or Fantasy sections, I’ll stick with “teen’s” lit. It has as much substance, and it’s much more fun.
Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t read “adult” lit ever. The Dune books are not children’s books, nor are the Dragonrealm ones or the Night Watch saga I’m reading now. And I’ll read mostly anything that’s been recced enough. Still, most of my faves are YA.
Now that I mentioned Dune, there may be another reason I don’t care for age labels. I read those books when I was 13. They’re definitely adult books (and the sex scenes did make me go “ew” XD), but no one ever told me I should or couldn’t read something because it was for certain age. On the contrary, my parents wouldn’t let me watch “A Clockwork Orange”, but they were OK with me reading the book. And I love Dune as much as I do certain Mickey and Donald comics from my childhood. A good story is a good story, no matter how it’s told.
@Anonymousie
Because it is “adults like us”, and therefore boring? If I want to read college-age relationship drama, I’d talk with my friends.
@R.g.
.
This. Exactly.
@Lauren
I am sorry, pet peeve time: Book 5 Harry wasn’t being angsty. Book 5 Harry was suffering from POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. Due to, you know, being kidnaped and tortured and witnessing a murder and having to fight for his life. At 14. I looked up the symptoms on the DSM-IV – it’s a perfect match.
Reading the comments, maybe my “problem” is that I loved high-school. With all its bad things, I was happier than I’m now, so there are no sad angsty memories to drive me away.
And also, there’s the fact that (related to the HP comment) I don’t believe in the concept of “teenage angst”. In all my life, I’ve only met ONE teenager who was the walking cliche (moody, angsty, nonsensically rebellious). I think is an invention of “adults” to avoid trying to understand young people. If your boyfriend cheats on you, it’s a life-changing drama the whole plot of a novel could revolve around (see “Eat, pray. love”); if your daughter’s does, it’s just “teenage angst”.
And yes, I am 34, but if that’s the standard, I’m proud to NOT consider myself an “adult”.
And yes, I am 34,
I meant 24. *should not comment to things in the middle of the night ¬¬*
I don’t actively seek YA because dammit, I’m not that far away from my teen years that I want to look back at them through teenage characters. Plus, the latest YA releases just can’t compare to the books I loved as a pre-teen and teenager—especially Paula Danziger!
I like a lot of the YA books out there now. It seems like many mainstream adult romance writers (or their publishers, from what some of the authors have said) are stuck in a setting/plot rut that makes nearly every book feel like reading deja vu. YA books just seem “fresh” with new plot ideas, various settings, and conflicts that differ from the same-old song-and-dance.
Some favorites:
The whole Soul Screamers series by Rachel Vincent – she has written these in such a way that I would be happy if the heroine ended up with *either* of the males interested in her. I’m always in one camp or another, but not here! These are soooo different from the adult paranormals today, too.
The Ghost and the Goth by Stacey Kade – only the first one is out so far, but she’s planning a trilogy of them; I have no idea if these will even end up being romances, but they’re great fun. A stuck-up, perky cheerleader ends up dead, and the only one she can communicate with is the “loser” goth guy… neither of them are thrilled with the arrangement.
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher – definitely NOT a romance, but a very powerful read that will make you think about the impact your thoughts and actions could have on others
Forbidden by Tabitha Sazuma – yes, it’s incest, but you can literally feel the pain of the main characters. I’m not at all fond of the ending, but I’ll admit it “fits”.
Forget You and Going Too Far by Jennifer Echols – I loooove these books.
I will also freely admit to being a fan of iCarly, and a Sam and Freddie “shipper”… even though my teen years were already a distant memory a decade ago. 🙂
I am a adult reader of YA. My favorite young adult author and one of my favorite authors is Meg Cabot. I can always count on her books to put a smile on my face. I love reading about all those intense emotions that teens feel for the first time. I’ve always loved YA books and even as an adult, still enjoy reading them.
I also recommend the blog Forever Young Adult. Adults who love YA books come together, and the results are often funny and informative.
http://www.foreveryoungadult.com/
I love YA lit, but I’m picky too. I also married my high school sweetheart so, I don’t have an issue with HEA (cuz I got one!)
That being said, I’ve actually been having a hard time reading it lately b/c I have a YA son, and I can’t get out of the mother role as I read. It’s very distracting.