It’s time for another Creator’s Roulette and today we are talking about YA novels for adults. Whether you are an avid reader of YA books or not, this article is bond to be interesting to you! Cassondra Windwalker is the author of novels Love Like A Cephalopod, Hold My Place, Idle Hands, Preacher Sam, and Bury The Lead, as well as the poetry collections tide tables and tea with god, The Bench, and The Almost-Children. She writes full-time from the southern Alaskan coast, where she enjoys interacting with readers, artists, and generally decent human beings of all interests. Let’s read what she has to say!
On All Grown-Up YA Novels
Guest post by Cassondra Windwalker
Anyone who’s been in a bookstore or scanned through literary accounts on social media in the past ten years knows the power of the Young Adult market. Young Adult books and the movies they’ve spawned have been wildly successful, dominating the attention of agents and publishers. A half-hearted attempt has been made to push New Adult books as a means of holding onto the same readership as they age, but that seems to be the result of a misapprehension of the success of YA. YA isn’t successful because of the ages of its readers or its characters, but because of the appeal of its tropes and storylines. It’s worth noting that a significant portion of YA readers – the majority, according to a number of studies – are in fact adults (source).
YA fantasy in particular has captured the imagination of readers of all ages. It’s delightful to drop into a high-drama, high-stakes magical world without having to wade through pages and chapters of exposition and world-building that’s more intense in adult fantasy novels. And the tropes – much maligned as they may be by loud-mouthed critics – play no small part in the books’ popularity. Although YA novels span innumerable worlds and systems, there is an element of predictability in the cycle of types, questions, and existential challenges that YA necessarily envelopes. [https://www.city-journal.org/why-is-young-adult-fiction-so-popular] But what about readers who are finding it increasingly hard to lose themselves in the psyche of a 16-year-old?
Grown-Up YA
When I first began researching Love Like A Cephalopod, all my time was spent reading papers on octopuses and watching live aquarium cams. Eventually, though, my protagonist Grenda emerged, and I realized she was a 56-year-old (human) YA heroine. She possessed a unique gift that made her rare in her society, she’d been deceived about her own origins, she suffered through a complete paradigm shift that upended her view on the world and herself that necessitated sacrificially heroic action, and she was the only one who could pull it off. These are all the classic YA tropes. Not to mention her only friend and companion is a cat-sized dragon who loves hot sauce. You can’t get more YA than that.
The Chosen One
But grown-up YA requires a more nuanced approach to the old standards. While it’s true that Grenda possesses the unique abilities that have forced her into the role of state executioner, she’s not the only one. Being chosen is no gift – as it happens, there is an entire class of people with Grenda’s abilities, and while she’s always thought them elevated, in reality she’s been a participant in the genocide of her own people all along. Her gift was the fulcrum of her complete isolation from everyone and everything in her world, but the real quality on which she will have to draw to save anyone will be her common humanity.
The Love Triangle
Love triangles are painfully common in young adult literature. Adults, though, have been choosing from more varied menus for a long time. A simple pick-one dilemma from two choices doesn’t hold much appeal. Grown-up YA quandaries require complicated and sophisticated approaches to love of all sorts. Befitting this, Grenda is no typical character. She’s a 56-year-old, deeply empathetic, asexual grouch with zero interest in other human beings at all. She’s contradictory and self-aware and completely comfortable with her own inconsistencies. The only meaningful relationship in her life is that with her dragon, Bjartur, for whom she would sacrifice anything, and who is completely devoted to her in return. But when a fugitive refugee child whose very existence could spell their own demise shows up on Grenda and Bjartur’s doorstep, they both find their loyalties and their affections challenged in ways that could cost them everything. It’s a love triangle, all right, but not like any you’ll read about The Hunger Games or the Twilight series.
Superpowers!
Grenda does have a unique power, but she can’t use it to save the world. She can’t even use it to save herself. And being grown-up YA, she’s got no patience for the other tropes that generally accompany this one: she’s clumsy and stiff-jointed, so no acrobatic hijinks or amazing athletic prowess or one-of-a-kind swordplay to come to the rescue. She’s intelligent and well-read, but she doesn’t have any latent skills with woodworking or trap-setting or forest craft to allow her to disappear into the woods and live off the land like a ghost. She doesn’t concoct a brilliant, impossibly complicated plan. But she does muddle through. Readers of all grown-up YA want a little more grit and a little less glitter in their glory.
An Apocalyptically Doomed Society
More magical realism than high fantasy, Grenda’s world looks an awfully lot like our own. The state machine responsible for the atrocities Grenda helps commit could easily rise to power in a few years in almost any country. Parts of it already have. In grown-up YA, the dystopia is our own, and we are the monsters. We’re too old and grumpy to pretend otherwise.
The Dysfunctional Family
Both the dysfunctional family and the found family are beloved tropes among readers of all ages. In grown-up YA, the found family that emerges from the ashes of the dysfunctional family is badly scarred and limps a bit. There’s no escaping Hemingway’s assertion that all endings are sad endings. But that doesn’t mean love can’t still triumph at the end. It does mean that the price, however high, will be paid right there on the page where the reader can’t hide from it.
So Go Ahead – Indulge Yourself
The best book is the one the reader loves. Genres, tropes, suggested age groups, have nothing to do with the value or quality of any book. Adult readers of young adult books should continue to delight in those worlds to their hearts’ content. But if any reader should start to crave a chosen one who’s a little more crotchety or who takes a slightly more mundane approach to surviving the apocalypse, all grown-up YA books are out there. And Love Like A Cephalopod is one of them.
Of course, there are others you might not have even realized fit the label. While The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien is the pinnacle of high adult fantasy, The Hobbit is a perfect example of all-grown-up YA. Moving outside of the fantasy genre, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber and Rosemary Thurber would be another example of an unremarkable hero moving through the tropes of the hero’s journey to become quite remarkable indeed.
You might take issue with those, but whether or not a book can fit into a neatly marketable label means very little to the reader who finds it in their hands. I’m an avid reader of all genres, including non-fiction, and I love to be surprised – go ahead and make a murderer of my favorite grandma, or (God forbid) write literary fiction with a happy ending. As long as I get lost in someone else’s head – even if that someone is an octopus – I’ll be captivated.
If you have any questions for Cassondra or want to share your favorite YA books, pop them in the comments below. We love hearing from you!
Thank you for hanging out with us today. Connect with Cassondra on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Stay tuned for a sneak peek of Love Like A Cephalopod in the coming days.
Cover image: Photo on Unsplash
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