Admit it: You were glad when the Harry Potter series ended. You were grateful, as I was, for the epilogue that showed your beloved characters in a safe and happily coupled adulthood, but you did not actually want to follow them to that end page by page.
Because there was something about the magic of their tween and teen years—Voldemort and Dumbledore aside—that never could have sustained itself through college, internships in the Ministry, or even longed-for weddings and births announced by owl.
Think about the other high school characters and series you loved that petered out, sometimes painfully, after graduation: Buffy, Glee, Friday Night Lights, the original 90210….. Even Bella and Edward lost some of their angsty splendor in Breaking Dawn, once the hats had been thrown in the air.
YA’s enthrallment with short series like trilogies might speak to the underlying notion that even much loved teen characters can only be interesting for so long. It’s not because characters older than 18 aren’t interesting—they are, just look at the burgeoning New Adult genre. It’s more that the characters we love as teenagers change rather dramatically when they go to college/work/get married too young. And the woes they experience as teenagers are so different from the ones they experience as “new adults” that, in some essential ways, they become different people (just as we all did when we went to college and realized how little we’d really known back when we thought we knew everything). They become different characters with different concerns.
Also the fishbowl that is high school provides an ideal, familiar setting in which a writer can narrow focus and spotlight certain woes in YA. Characters can be as outlandishly weird as they want, and that setting keeps them contained—easy to view, complete with essential archetypal set piece characters like teachers, jocks, and dweebs.
Even dystopian and fantasy YA novels that don’t technically take place in a high school manage to recreate the fishbowl in other ways: training grounds (a la Hunger Games and Divergent), underground rebel camps (a la Delirium), and secret societies (a la The Archived). Even the characters in summertime YA novels, liberated from the tyranny of homework and extracurriculars, are still defined by their roles at school. Their road trips, beach combing, and experimenting are all methods of railing against who they are when school is in session—in the hope of making the kind of permanent change that will likely only occur when they finally graduate and are able to reinvent themselves outside the fishbowl.
This is why, when older characters graduate and leave their younger friends behind, we understand the moment to be incredibly poignant and painful. It’s awful that we know Charlie will be left totally alone when Sam and Patrick graduate (in The Perks of Being a Wallflower). It’ll never be the same for them after those two leave for college, and in some ways the novel is about the three of them sucking up every possible moment of high school togetherness before the inevitable future.
I didn’t realize it when I started writing this blog, which was ostensibly just about the difficulty of following high school characters to college, but through writing, I realize that I’m grappling with the YA vs. New Adult debate. Without even realizing it, I was asking myself “Is New Adult really a different genre, or is it just a cute marketing term aimed at artificially divvying up the market?”
It seems to me that, given the differences between characters in high school and characters after high school, New Adult is a valid and different category of literature, distinct from YA. I certainly don’t think that gritty, difficult, and often violent or sexy novels about teens in high school qualify as New Adult simply by virtue of their more “adult” content. No, those are still YA.
What’s in an age? A lot, it turns out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kerri Majors is the author of “This is Not a Writing Manual: Notes for the Young Writer in the Real World” (Writer’s Digest Books, July 2013). She is also the Editor and Founder of YARN, the Young Adult Review Network (www.yareview.net), an online literary journal of YA short stories, essays, and poetry, which won an Innovations in Reading Prize from the National Book Foundation. Kerri’s short stories and essays have appeared in journals such as Guernica and Poets and Writers. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and their daughter. You can find out more about her at www.kerrimajors.com.