YA Section, Happy Teens!
Call it a lack of interest, but my town’s local bookstore closed about two years ago. A mom and pop shop. I assumed a chain store would swoop in to save the day, but no dice. As of today, there are no bookstores in my little burg (there’s still the library, thank God). My wife to be and I, both avid readers and writers, take a monthly trip 30 miles north to the nearest bookstore. A trip with a new adventure every time.
As we entered the store, I couldn’t help myself. A kiosk for the Nook awaited. My WTB’s opinion on e-readers is pretty straightforward.
“They solve a problem that doesn’t exist.” Fair enough.
Still, I picked it up and I was a little impressed. Nonetheless, I recently found gadget religion: it must do more than one thing…and do each thing well. No Nook for me. Anything it can do, my DROID can do as well (or, in the case of the web browser, better).
Technological advances out of the way, we returned to old fashioned books. I rarely go in looking for a specific title. The titles come to me as I browse.
I saw the paperback of Big Machine (read the hardcover edition. Dope). “Maybe they have The Ecstatic.”
No.
Still, I looked around. Maybe someone placed it on the wrong shelf. Maybe on the endcaps. Maybe behind the front desk.
No means no.
Viva la interwebs: without the blogs and feeds, I wouldn’t know about the newest releases. I found a hardback of Next which, according to the internet, was supposed to dope. Book 1 acquired.
The rest of the sections let me down: poetry, comic books, biography, fantasy. My WTB found me wandering about. Then, it was as if seeing the reds and blues of a circus: sudden and attention grabbing. The both of us realized we never perused the Young Adult section. As we browsed, I said to her, “Now we know where the old lit fiction budgets are going.”
Beautiful and inventive covers, snappy titles and the blurbs with actual exciting plots: the section was alive with teens and adults ravaging the shelves. My WTB hands me a copy of Little Brother.
“His (Marcus) whole world changes when, having skipped school, he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.”
Book 2 acquired. My first YA purchase.
In line to check out, I’m staring at the Moleskine journals when my WTB asked, “Would you ever write a YA novel?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The immediate feeling of illegitimacy ran through me. Write for teens since you can’t write for adults. Irrational, but a true representation of my thought at the time. And I doubt the thought is exclusive to me.
It later occurred to me that most of my stories, at the least the ones I like, tend to involve teenagers. The main character in my first (and dead) novel was a teenager. Being new to the genre as a reader, I don’t know if a teenage protagonist equates into a YA story. Would Catcher In The Rye qualify? If that’s the case, throw in …Oscar Wao while you’re at it. That is to say, something’s missing; consider me “YA-curious” at the moment.
Similar Posts:
- None Found
