We started our centennial year of mini-themed issues with picture books in the January/February issue, and now end, fittingly, with YA in November/December. It seemed like a natural progression — from “the early years,” as we were calling it, to young adult, with stops at poetry and folklore; nonfiction and Horn Book history; awards; and middle grade. Ironically, from a ­historical ­perspective, YA is the youngest of the age categories we’ve touched on, with that classification being the most recently developed into something resembling what it is today.

Books that are today considered YA — To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye — were famously first published on adult lists. “Junior novels,” books for teenagers, existed as early as the 1930s but took off in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the 1960s and 1970s, when teens were being taken seriously as a viable consumer market, the YA publishing category was born. S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders is commonly seen as the harbinger of YA and was positively reviewed in the August 1967 Horn Book ­Magazine: “This remarkable novel by a ­seventeen-year-old girl gives a moving, credible view of the outsiders from the insiders — their loyalty to each other, their sensitivity under tough crusts, their understanding of self and society. Most frightening and most hopeful is the author’s picture of teen-agers at the crossroads, at the point of becoming full-fledged ‘hoods’ or something special.”

That crossroads metaphor has become one of the hallmarks of YA. For a time, so-called young adult “problem novels,” often heavily proscriptive (think Go Ask Alice, with its murky provenance), made the right path for teens to take in life seem clear and only one-way.

“Tough topics” have always been part of YA, and as it developed and deepened, creators at the forefront were exploring and offering welcoming complexity to teens’ journeys: Walter Dean Myers, Judy Blume, Robert Cormier, and Sandra Cisneros in realism, for example; Ursula K. Le Guin and Susan Cooper in sci-fi/fantasy; Russell Freedman in nonfiction; among many others who paved the way. Horn Book Editor Emeritus Roger Sutton has written extensively about this topic; see for example, his Second Look column about Annie on My Mind (September/October 2007) and his Happy Anniversary column for I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. (January/February 2019), to name just two, along with many “rants and raves” grappling with definitions, perceptions, and adult overreactions on the Read Roger blog. See also the Magazine’s YA-focused Borderlands column.

Sutton was on the inaugural committee of the Michael L. Printz Award, first given in 2000 by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) division of the American Library Association, presented to “the best book written for teens, based entirely on its literary merit.” That year’s winner was Monster by Myers. Recent years have seen inclusion of YA categories within other awards (the Pura Belpré Awards added a young adult category beginning with Furia by Yamile Saied Méndez in 2021; and the Sydney Taylor Book Award did in 2007 with The Book Thief by Markus Zusak).

As in other age categories, there has been an increase in diverse representation in YA, helped along by the advent of We Need Diverse Books. Sometimes, that means books covering serious contemporary issues (Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, for example, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner in 2017 along with other accolades). Other times, it simply means more characters of color, more queer characters, more religious diversity, and more Indigenous characters; fewer “magical headaches” (May/June 2023) and “magically (dis)abled” (November/December 2014) people are seen as the default in fantasies, thrillers, graphic novels, and rom-coms. See the work of Angeline Boulley, Jenny Han, Leah Johnson, Sacha Lamb, Crystal Maldonado, Amber McBride, Jason Reynolds, Sabaa Tahir, Gene Luen Yang, Nicola and David Yoon, and many other contemporary favorites.

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Young though YA is, in recent years it has exploded into a huge part of the industry, with juggernaut titles, series, and trends taking over. Think 2005’s Twilight and the vampire trend, and 2008’s The Hunger Games and other dystopian novels. The phenomenon of YA bestsellers wasn’t completely new — the first YA novel to hit the New York Times bestseller list was a 1985 Sweet Valley High super edition. (See series creator Francine Pascal’s obituary on page 125.) But in the past couple of decades, we’ve seen adults wandering into the YA section to check out Bella and Edward’s romance or Katniss Everdeen’s odds.

It’s a truism that many kids tend to “read up,” but conversely, adults who read YA make up a not-insignificant part of the readership. Adult interest is part of why the category has grown so huge — which is well and good, as long as teens don’t get lost as its primary audience. So many protagonists in current YA are at the upper edges of the teen years, or even technically adults. (See “What’s New About New Adult?” by Sophie Brookover, Liz Burns, and Kelly Jensen in January/February 2014.) More books about teens starting high school and navigating life at fourteen or fifteen would be welcome.

It’s hard to scratch the surface of all that YA can be. But in this issue, see Maurene Goo’s Writer’s Page on page 46 for the not-always-light story of how one (mostly) light YA fantasy came to be, and see Paula Yoo’s Writer’s Page on page 39 for a story behind a work of YA nonfiction about a complex topic. Nikki Giovanni’s poem on page 44 may bring to mind the role of YA in addressing difficult topics. And after you read Meg Medina’s Zena Sutherland Lecture on page 21, check out her YA novels Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass and Burn Baby Burn.

“Too many adults wish to ‘protect’ teenagers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived,” said Margaret A. Edwards, herself the namesake of an award for a body of work in YA. Here’s hoping for more and more books for teens that show — and imagine beyond — life as it is lived.

From the November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more Horn Book centennial coverage, click here.

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