TOTW: "Boy Books"

[leah_cypess]

A few weeks ago I was in a Barnes & Nobles signing stock, and I passed by two sections shelved side by side. The first, the science-fiction & fantasy section, was populated by a group of guys sitting on the floor reading. In the second, the YA section, a couple of girls were discussing the books on display.

One anecdote does not a pattern make, but

Comments

Twilight clones

[anonymous]

Cindy said it. Boys don't want to read about a girl pining after dreamy supernatural creature X. Most YA books post-Twilight have become just like the adult female chicklit section, only substitute something paranormal in place of attractive, rich male love interest, and substitute high school in place of manhattan apartment and publishing job. Guys have no interest in that, and frankly, neither do I.

And to the poster above who said women are excluded from Sci-Fi and Fantasy-- just look at the Sci-Fi and Fantasy section. You'll see plenty of female skewed books there.

Re: Twilight clones

[dpeterfreund]

Anonymous, I'd LOVE for you to point out to me the "adult female chicklit" section of any bookstore, or ANY book published in the last 12 months that features the manhattan apartment and publishing job scenario. Heck, find one in the last 24 months!

I think you'll find about as many "female skewed" books in adult SFF as you'll find "male skewed" books in kidlit SFF. A few RECENT releases to get you started: Monstrumologist, The Maze Runner, Leviathan, ANYTHING by Rick Riordan... And then you've got the books that are very boy friendly even though they aren't written by boys and/or star boy MCs: like The Hunger Games, Uglies, White Cat, Going Bovine, etc.

And then you've got all the realism in YA that is boy friendly and boy written, books by Barry Lyga, Chris Crutcher, Jay Asher, John Green, David Levithan, etc.

Re: Twilight clones

[leah_cypess]

Diana, I actually compiled the list already (it will go up on Wednesday) and was surprised at how many boy-friendly YA fantasy books I found, given how certain everyone at the chat was about the problem. Yet at the same time... if you walk into the Borders YA section, it does seem to scream "paranormal romance." I wonder if the issue is not so much which books are published, as which books get the attention.

Sarah Rees Brennan is an interesting example - I can imagine her publishers going nuts trying to categorize it, what with the switching POVs. Interestingly, her re-jacket (to me) looks more like an adult fantasy cover than what you normally see in YA.

Re: Twilight clones

[dpeterfreund]

I think because Twilight was single-handedly floating its publishing house for a few years, a lot of other publishers got on the bandwagon and bought those kind of books, so yes, that is a lot of what you have been seeing on shelves in the past year or so. Additionally, much like what happened in the heyday of chick lit, many books that weren't chicklit were packaged to resemble it (I remember buying a bright pink book with a headless girl on the cover only to discover it was a serious novel about a young woman struggling with anorexia who went in and out of psychiatric institutes

Re: Twilight clones

[readwriterock]

So I think that things *look* a certain way even if they don't really match that on the inside.

Oh, yes, this. One of my favorite recent (realistic) YA books is Natalie Standiford's How to Say Goodbye in Robot. I think boys who enjoy, say, John Green would really like it, but the odds of them actually picking it up are slim to none because the cover is bright, screaming pink - there's even pink spot coloring on the inside. It looks super girlie, and while the narrator is female, there is nothing "chick-lit-y" about the story at all. While the issue of wny boys won't read "girlie" things is an important one, the fact of the matter in this particular case is, the cover is not reflective of the content. Which makes it seem to me like the publisher shot themself in the foot by limiting their audience, but apparently, they thought upping the "girl" appeal would still give the book a wider audience than trying to catch with boys?

Tying this into Cindy's Twilight-effect: My husband is a fan of pro wrestling, and in the weeks leading up to

Re: Twilight clones

[leah_cypess]

It's possible, of course, that this is a perception issue... but I don't think so. As it happens, on that trip to B&N I also took pictures of the 2 "display sections" - the table when you walk in, and the end-section of the bookshelf - because I have friends whose books were there. Looking at the pictures again, these are the books I see:
Tell Me A Secret
Wayfarer
Something LIke Fate
Spirit Bound
It's Not Summer Without You
Sisters Red
Beastly (arguably a boys book, but probably not with a huge flower on the cover...)
A Kiss In Time
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
Romeo & Juliet

Of course, anecdotal evidence is tricky and unreliable. Maybe there's a selection bias because my friends are both women, and a similar number of boys books were actually on the other side of the display table. But I doubt it.