I began thinking, over there, about whether one could define YA by working out what conversations it’s part of, too. Because I do think YA is a genre of its own, and I do think there are things I look for there that I don’t look for elsewhere. And so I began … going on at length, and realized it would perhaps be appropriate to bring my thoughts over here.
Because the thing about YA fantasy is, I’ve been realizing as I think about this, in addition to being its own thing, it looks in two different directions when for the conversations it holds: towards adult fantasy, and towards YA not-fantasy. YA fantasy, to my reading, is as much descended from Judy Blume as from J.R.R. Tolkien*; and when new YA fantasy books are written, they’re engaging with the concerns of writers such as Laurie Halse Anderson and Ellen Wittlinger as much as those of Mercedes Lackey or Ursula K. Le Guin.
This may explain a sort of dissonance I sometimes feel as a YA and middle grade fantasy reader, too. Whether I’m having a conversation about the books I love, either in the children’s/YA community or the adult SF/fantasy community, I sometimes have the feeling that something is missing from the conversation, in a different way in each community. And maybe it is, because maybe the full conversation draws on the concerns of both communities and both communities’ books, even though outside of YA SF/fantasy, they’re not communities that have cause to talk with each other very often.
*For an example of a book that directly engages with both Tolkien and Blume, I keep finding myself thinking of Aprilynne Pike’s Wings. In that book, the fairy folk are struggling to protect their sacred land — and the protagonist learns she’s a fairy and part of that struggle when she literally “blossoms” into adolescence, sprouting a flower from her back as fairy folk are wont to do …