If you’ve been tapped into literary discussions over the past 15 years or so, you may be aware of the concept of the New Adult genre.
It’s an oddly controversial topic. At the very least, I assume it is controversial. Authors and agents whom I follow in Twitter keep throwing up their hot takes, usually presenting some book or snippet from a book and making some sarcastic remark to the effect of, “Oh, but New Adult totally doesn’t exist.”
The City of Brass (the review series for which begins next week) might be considered a New Adult work by some people. This is based upon the ages of the protagonists and upon the content contained within the book. However, I am not in that camp. This has less to do with the book itself and more with how I view the concept of New Adult genre in general.
This little interlude is not intended as a comprehensive thesis or magic bullet that will definitively end the discussions about the New Adult genre. Rather, much like Part 0 of my Obi-Wan Kenobi rewrite, I am presenting these thoughts so that you will understand my approach to reviews. If I am going to be making concessions in my ratings to account for Young Adult versus adult literature, it’s important that I explain why I won’t offer the same consideration to another genre.
This will be a quick one, but hopefully enlightening for everyone. Let’s get to it.
WHAT IS NEW ADULT
According to what I could dig up on the Internet, the concept of the New Adult genre was coined by St. Martin’s Press in 2009. The publisher did a writing contest that requested Young Adult fiction that could be marketed to an adult audience.
Jericho Writers did a rather nice analysis article on the genre and its attributes (which you can read in full here). In summary, New Adult typically possesses the following attributes:
· Protagonists aged 18 – 25
· Narrative voice that fits the aforementioned age range
· Explores concepts of leaving home, finding one’s identity, and starting one’s life
· Higher tolerance for mature content (swearing, sex, drugs, violence)
The basic concept is that one is deliberately writing to an audience in this specific age bracket, one that has left behind the Young Adult demographic but might not yet be ready or interested in adult literature.
New Adult is something that gets tossed around a lot in publishing circles. Agents will often request (or refuse to read) New Adult works. However, I cannot name a single bookstore where I’ve seen New Adult shelved separately from other books. It has always been shuffled in among the adult literature of the relevant genre, without anything to distinguish it from books that don’t fall into the category.
THE PROBLEM WITH NEW ADULT
The big question that needs to be asked with New Adult is: why is it being treated as its own genre? Why are the books that fall into this category not assessed individually and then sifted into either Young Adult or adult literary genres?
A major problem with New Adult is that it is a young genre without an extensive catalog of successful works to use as a metric of style and quality. What falls into it is therefore rather amorphous. Going off the description alone, it sounds like a dumping ground for authors who wanted to write Young Adult stories but weren’t willing to trim back the mature content to market their books to minors.
That’s not a fair interpretation, yet that does appear to be how the genre is being used.
Looking at the examples of New Adult presented by Jericho Writers, I couldn’t help but notice A Court of Thorns and Roses on that list. I have not read that book myself, but from what I have heard, the book (or, at least, the series) is Young Adult with porn. Going off something I have read, I just finished reading Fourth Wing (to be reviewed after The City of Brass). This book checks the boxes for all four of the points I listed above, and it reads like a fever dream. Imagine if Shou Tucker tried to recreate Dragonriders of Pern by fusing Eragon with a smut fanfiction of Divergent, and you’ll have an idea what reading Fourth Wing was like.
I suspect that this is part of the reason why there are people who insist that New Adult is not a real genre. Publishers may have a clear vision in mind, but writers are not yet on the same page as them. The writers who have gotten on the same page have good reason to be proud of their success – hence the loud proclamations on Twitter – but the number of people who haven’t gotten their act together muddies the waters.
MY POSITION
New Adult is an arbitrary marketing label that publishers are pushing to try to recover something valuable from all the smut-saturated Young Adult and immaturely written adult fiction that is being dumped on them. It is an effort that I do not believe to be worthwhile. Continuing to pursue it just floods the market with sub-par writing and thereby encourages a further deterioration of standards.
I realize that’s a crass take. Please, hear me out.
I believe that, from a certain point of view, all genres and subgenres are arbitrary marketing labels. The only objective dividing line in books is that between fiction and non-fiction. All other delineations – separating Children’s content from adult, Young Adult from children’s, Fantasy and Science from general Literature, and so forth – are about helping a book’s target audience to find it in a shop. New Adult is no more or less valid than an established genre in that respect. Genres that are financially successful survive, while those that don’t fade from view.
The issue is that, at least for now, I don’t think the New Adult label is accomplishing anything productive.
Narrative Voice
I can’t recall reading a New Adult book that has a meaningful different in narrative voice from Young Adult or adult literature.
Maybe this is just an issue of what I’ve been exposed to, yet all the New Adult books I have read or been told about read like Young Adult literature. The potential exceptions that I could name are books that predate the New Adult genre but which would theoretically be sorted into the genre today due to themes, content, and the ages of the protagonists … and all of them have a distinctly adult voice.
· Red Thunder and Red Lightning were published as adult Science Fiction in 2003 and 2007 respectively. Both books feature protagonists within the age bracket, have sex scenes that would have been deemed too excessive to drop down to Young Adult at the time of their release, and are coming-of-age stories that align with New Adult themes.
· Prep was published as an adult Literature novel in 2005. It follows a protagonist of Young Adult age, but given that it still checks the boxes for themes and mature content, one could argue that it is New Adult. Again, this is a book that is very much written for adults.
· In 2007, Exit Here was published as Young Adult. The main character is a college student, and the book features copious amounts of sex, swearing, drugs, and violence while exploring the main character’s apathy towards the adult world that he is entering. This is more of a toss-up than the previous three books. The narrative voice didn’t stick with me as vividly as the overwhelming apathy or the mature content. The snippets I do recall, though, are very adult.
I simply have not seen a compelling example to convince me that the voice argument justifies this genre’s existence, unless the implication is that everyone under the age of 26 is cleanly split between the maturity of a 15-year-old and the maturity of a 35-year-old.
Mature Content
I think that New Adult arrived too late for the mature content to matter.
I can’t recall a time when violence, swearing, or drugs really made that much of a difference to Young Adult, but when I was in high school, I do recall that there was some restraint regarding sex. Even the novels in which a lot of sex happened, like Gordon Korman’s works, employed a fade-to-black approach. For that matter, Young Adult books about rape, like Speak, were written in such a manner that they were able to show the rape from a first-person POV and not traumatize the audience.
Nowadays … yikes.
The Ember Quartet was marketed as Young Adult. This makes sense, even in an era with New Adult content, given that age of the main characters, the narrative voice, and themes do not align with New Adult. At the same time, this series is very heavily laden with mature content. One of the first things established about the Evil Empire of this series is that raping the subjugated peoples is considered a recreational activity by the cadets of the Empire’s elite military corps. Then there was the sex scene – or, rather, foreplay scene, which somehow sounds worse – in the third book, A Reaper at the Gates. This scene was very uncomfortable to read. A certain action was described in detail that would not be out of place in pornography. This was despite the fact that the characters involved were minors (or, at the very least, they were minors at the start of the series, and we had not been provided adequate information to gauge if enough time had passed for them to reach adulthood by that point). Given that the second book had already included a sex scene (albeit a fade-to-black one), this foreplay scene really felt like the author was testing how much she could get away with.
And this is not the only example. Throne of Glass is supposedly Young Adult, yet I’ve heard stories about the sexual content in the later books of the series.
We live in an era where “sex positivity” has eroded the barriers that separate minors from adult material. For New Adult to really make sense from a content perspective, we would need to strictly enforce content restrictions for Young Adult, with New Adult serving as a means to separate out anything that fails to comply with those restrictions. Maybe if New Adult had come onto the scene 20 years earlier, it could have found a foothold. With things as they are now, it’s a limp classification.
Mature Audience
There is one argument in favor of New Adult that I feel does have merit: the idea that publishers are trying to streamline the process of getting books to the readers most likely to buy and read them.
I do think this is a strong argument. The tricky part is that this argument leans on the assumption that the number of people who feel they have outgrown Young Adult, but are unwilling to read adult literature, is large enough that it’s worth delineating an entire genre for them and writing to meet their specific expectations. I’m not sure this is the case. I’m sure the publishers are seeing some sort of feedback, statistics, or sales numbers to convince them that this is worthwhile, yet my personal experience clashes so aggressively with this idea that I just can’t wrap my had around it.
I started reading books from the adult Science Fiction and Fantasy sections when I was 10 years old. It started with franchise tie-ins – namely, the Star Wars Expanded Universe and Magic: the Gathering – but I did start to branch out to other books that I was seeing in those sections. I had a motivation to explore these stories, so I read them. The fact that there was an age barrier didn’t really play into it. At the same time, I still read Young Adult and Children’s books, only moving out of those categories as I found myself being less and less satisfied with the quality and complexity of the stories that I was reading.
My experience does not reflect all readers. I nevertheless find myself wondering whether the need for New Adult is truly that urgent. If older readers want to read Young Adult, they will read Young Adult. If they want to read adult literature, they will read what interests them. I’m just not grasping how much positive impact is added to the reader experience by an intermediate genre. All it seems to accomplish is allowing writers to claim that they are writing more complex stories while just rehashing the mistakes of Young Adult.
Last Thoughts
New Adult is not a terrible genre in concept. I just don’t think it has the positive impact that the publishers are hoping for. Maybe I’ll change my tune if I read enough examples of New Adult literature that address my concern about the narrative voice and the quality of the writing. For now, I wish it would fade away so that I won’t keep running into books with the flaws of Young Adult writing without the youthful charm.
THE REASON WE’RE HERE
I have no intention of showing New Adult books the leniency that I do to Young Adult. If a book is marketed as Young Adult (or, if in the case of The City of Brass, was written as Young Adult), I am willing to make concessions to account for audience expectations. If a book is not going to be written or marketed as Young Adult, then there is no reason to make those concessions. It is possible to write in a Young Adult style without treating your audience like they have Young Adult maturity or experience (or, worse, acting like Young Adult readers are unintelligent). New Adult books are supposedly written for a mature audience than Young Adult books. They should be able to endure the same levels of scrutiny that all other books for more mature audiences, regardless of their style.
Next week, we start The City of Brass. This is a book that some might call New Adult. However, all evidence I could find point towards it being written for a Young Adult audience and then being published as adult Fantasy. After reading this interlude, I hope that you will understand why I will not make any consideration for the New Adult genre, and why the words “New Adult” will not appear at any point in that review series.
Thank you all for bearing with me. I hope to see you all next week. Have a good day.
