"New Adult" fiction

[_ocelott_]

The teen blogger/reader over at In Which A Girl Reads brings up a very good question: why is there such a gap in fiction between YA and "adult" novels? Either the protagonist is a high school student or they're established in their adult life, with seemingly no transition between the two. There's not much out there that depicts, say, a 19-year-

Comments

[vyrdolak1998]

Interesting question! I think that's a recent trend in fiction. I can recall reading, some 45 years ago, a ton of fiction with young women protagonists who were out of high school, but not yet married--either they had jobs or seemed completely fancy-free. That was true of Nancy Drew, for instance, who seemed to be college-aged, but was never seen in class, and I read similar series in which the young women did have jobs--either horse stories, or mysteries like Nancy Drew. Stories for girls about independent young women in that age range (18-22, roughly) used to be very popular, whereas no one wrote much about high school. Then we started to get stuff like the Sweet Valley High series.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer set the standard for "high school angst" in paranormal fiction, but Buffy moved seamlessly into freshman college/young adult angst with season 4 and did so quite brilliantly

[future_guardian]

I thought the blog post was interesting, first of all. It would be interesting to see if publishing companies take note that there are people who want New Adult to be a legitimate category with all publishing companies