What The Heck Does YA Mean?

The term of I have chosen for this assignment on the surface seems like it should be fairly easy to understand, but it has perplexed me for ages.

That term is Young Adult, or YA.

On the surface, it feels like people should know what young means, and people should know what an adult is, so taken at first glance, one might think that a young adult reader should be someone who is an early adult.

The problem is, that is not the case.

I remember in college, when the law declared that I was an adult at the age of 18, looking at all the freshmen women who showed up that fall wearing diamond engagement rings. I remember being shocked at how many of them were no longer wearing those rings by the end of our first semester, and how many of them had upperclassmen boyfriends. This left me with a decided opinion that even at the age of majority, an 18-year-old had a lot to learn, and a lot more growing to do, so even though the law considered my peers and I to be adults, I knew I was far from being one.

When I was a freshman, all I wanted to be after graduation was a disc jockey. I had been involved with a local radio station since age 14, I loved it, and I was prepared to pay thousands of dollars of tuition to do that which I had already been doing for years. That and show off to my peers just how much better I was than them by virtue of this head start to my career. So when I enrolled, I was a communications major and an English minor.

Fast-forward four years, and I recall telling my friends that if I had to choose my major and minor then, I would have been a political science major and philosophy minor, which would mean that I never would have even attended my alma mater, because they did not have a political science major (they did have a minor, though), and though we were required to take 9 credits of philosophy, they did not even have a minor in philosophy.

The point is that even in my late teens and early 20s, I still had a lot of growing to do, and I knew it. You can understand, then, why I would scratch my head and wonder why the book industry considers a young adult to be someone as young as 12.

Imogen Russell Williams (2014) attempted to address the question in her article in the Guardian, titled “What are YA books? And who is reading them?” Unfortunately, reading that article did not help clarify it at all. Some people, according to Williams, say that from age 12-14, that is a teen audience, but YA kicks in at 14, until you run into New Adult, which features more college-aged themes. This was not even a term I had ever heard until I read this article.

Williams further confuses the matter when she reports that 55 percent of books the industry considers YA are purchased by adults.

A new question that just entered my mind is how to consider a book that features characters who are, say, 14-18, but they are set in a science fiction realm. Is this a young adult or scifi, or some hybrid of the two?

I’m still confused.

References

Williams, I.R. (2014). What are YA books? And who is reading them? Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jul/31/ya-books-reads-young-adult-teen-new-adult-books