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How Adults Took Over YA

By: Alanna Schubach

By treating young adult fiction as a laboratory for professional-class moralizing, the publishing industry has effectively abandoned actual teens.

The Harry Potter books — which have sold hundreds of millions of copies since 1997, making author J. K. Rowling a billionaire — proved to publishers just how lucrative YA books could be. (Getty Images / Stringer)

As a kid, I read the way most young bookworms do: indiscriminately and with total absorption. Amid the blur of quickly consumed paperbacks, a few stand out. One, Babyface, by Norma Fox Mazer, a 1990s young adult (YA) literature powerhouse, was about a fourteen-year-old girl named Toni who believes her life to be close to […]

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As a kid, I read the way most young bookworms do: indiscriminately and with total absorption. Amid the blur of quickly consumed paperbacks, a few stand out. One, Babyface, by Norma Fox Mazer, a 1990s young adult (YA) literature powerhouse, was about a fourteen-year-old girl named Toni who believes her life to be close to […]

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As a kid, I read the way most young bookworms do: indiscriminately and with total absorption. Amid the blur of quickly consumed paperbacks, a few stand out. One, Babyface, by Norma Fox Mazer, a 1990s young adult (YA) literature powerhouse, was about a fourteen-year-old girl named Toni who believes her life to be close to […]

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As a kid, I read the way most young bookworms do: indiscriminately and with total absorption. Amid the blur of quickly consumed paperbacks, a few stand out. One, Babyface, by Norma Fox Mazer, a 1990s young adult (YA) literature powerhouse, was about a fourteen-year-old girl named Toni who believes her life to be close to […]