The Importance Of Reading Young Adult Literature

People enjoying different types of literature is a common occurrence. People always have and always will enjoy different plot arcs, different types of main characters and different target audiences. While the author of Against YA by Ruth Graham makes very valid points, I feel her judgement of adults reading young adult literature is overly harsh. As you get older what you should read will change greatly. Nobody still reads the books they read as a child and thinks that it was yet another great piece of literature. In the same way this will happen with other books as you get older. A book that you loved as a teenager won’t give you the same rush as it did when you were in the target demographic. Looking back, whatever it may be that you read

The moment she is very quick to bring up is her reaction after finishing The Fault in our Stars. She states her thought process stating “Hmm that’s a nicely written book for 13-year-olds”. While I personally have not read the book, I also feel that if the idea that you can finish a book and the first thought passing through your mind is that it was written for a different audience, then the book itself probably wasn’t something you would want to read in the first place, not as a matter of the audience, but as you picked a book written about a topic that clearly didn’t interest you. The next big point made was the fact that young adult literature “is pleasurable are at odds with the way that adult fiction is pleasurable”. This idea I think has some truth to it, with the fact that as the author starts to deal with more mature topics, a different type of happiness begins to arise than that found in young adult works. That combined with the fact that young adult works are “uniformly satisfying” causes them to be more predictable to some people, and unsatisfying because of how simply they wrap everything