It's World Book Day next week, and I was attempting to help my younger sister choose a character to dress as. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I couldn't think of any young adult books from recent years. The Fault in our Stars, Insurgent and Eleanor & Park were all published six years ago in 2012. Most young adult novels were published even earlier; with this lack of recent enthusiasm, is it safe to say the genre is dying? Or are we just growing away from it?
It's not as if there were no young adult books published in 2017. Rather, Goodreads.com lists over 1000 of them published that year. Even John Green wrote a new book, 'Turtles all the way Down', though I have not heard it mentioned at all, and I doubt I would have known about it before today. John Green's 'The Fault in our Stars' was described by Kate Pavao, a critic, as "a tearjerker dealing with dying - - and surviving the death of a loved one." Is it concerning that such a well known author's new book is going seemingly unmentioned? Or is that just the cycle of societal interest?
Indeed, young adult literature can be, to some, seen as a trend. For a time, the only books teenagers were reading tended to fall under the young adult bracket, and also had heavy links to dystopia. Now, though, the trend seems to have moved. At one point, books based on youtube stars were popular. Stories of wallflower teenage romances soon gaveway back to more dystopain style stories set in a falling society. Is the fall of the young adult genre simply a trend yet to pick back up, or is a more permanent shift to perhaps more mature reading?
It's difficult to say. Whilst perhaps the newer books aren't sticking with the teenagers as well as the old ones, it's still not uncommon to see young people reading the Hunger Games, or one of the Harry Potter books. It is therefore perhaps more likely that the genre just isn't sticking with teenagers at the moment, but, when the right book is published, the genre will pick up speed as it did a few years ago.
