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Hi. I'm Adam. I have about a dozen YA/middle grade books out, mostly through Random House. I'm occasionally known to point out that a lot of YA really sucks.

Until around the 1990s, there was really no such thing as a "YA section." There were books referred to as young adult; in 1982, in Daniel Pinkwater even wrote a book called Young Adult Novel (he told me awhile ago that he was trying to kill the form with it).  But these books would have usually been mixed in with the "juvenile" or "children's" section. When my library first added a "young adult" section, it was mostly Christopher Pike. My friends and I devoured those for about six weeks before finding out there was even more explicit sex in the horror books in the adult section, at which point we moved on.

The lack of YA meant that what we would now call "middle grade" was a much broader section than it is today. I sometimes equate this with movies; go watch a PG-rated movie from before there was a PG-13, and you might be shocked. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, PG-rated movies featured nudity and strong language. Could anyone possibly make a movie like The Goonies, where the kids use the word "shit" and talk about sex constantly, anymore?

I don't think so. Gritty realism in middle grade is uncommon today - you see a lot more poop jokes now, for sure, but for kids in a middle grade book to swear or talk about sex half as much as real kids do is basically unheard of. A bit more realism is possible in YA, but not very popular. When I hear people talk about how great YA is, and how it's just as big with adults now, and just as "literary" as adult fiction, I feel like those people are thinking about the YA market from five or six years ago.

Now and then someone will write an article about how bad YA is, or how immoral it is, and all of us authors are supposed to jump up and defend it, but I'm sick of doing that. I hardly see a thing I want to read in the YA section at Barnes and Noble anymore. When called upon to defend YA, I usually just read a few excerpts of Fifty Shades of Grey and point out that the books dominating the adult market sure aren't any better.

Going back to old YA, I keep being shocked at how literary some of it really was, and at the things they got away with, and at how much the market has changed.

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