I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.
I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.
When I was young, I loved a series of books by an author called Maud Hart Lovelace and the series, which is still around, I'm happy to say, is - they're the 'Betsy-Tacy' books.
I wrote a screenplay for a 'Sweet Valley High' adaptation, and it's really amazing to me how many women who are my age have responded to the idea and are excited about the movie.
I don't think I would ever inch my way up to Y.A. That audience is very well served. There are a lot of wonderful writers writing for Y.A. I feel like I'm in the right place.
The popularity of fantasy surpassing science fiction and the popularity of apocalyptic fiction, particularly for young adults, may indicate a desire to escape a more difficult and confusing reality, even in astrophysics and particle physics.
I always figured there would be a kid audience and an adult audience, and there is. That's true for 'Hunger Games' and 'Twilight' and 'Harry Potter.' And 'Maximum Ride,' for sure. In particular what happens is a lot of parents share the books with their kids, and the mom has read it, and the kids, and they talk about it.
Misconceptions about Young Adult fiction aren't new to fans of the genre. From being dismissed as mindless fluff for 'Twilight'-obsessed tweens, to constant warnings that the genre is dying, kerfuffles between the media and readers occur with alarming regularity.
I love Chris Crutcher, Sara Zarr, Lois Lowry, Elizabeth Scott, Madeleine L'Engle, Gordon Korman, Michelle Magorian, Heather Bouwman.
Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.
I never read the "Bobbsey Twins" or "Boxcar Children."But I did remember being downtown, at the bookstore by myself and having an allowance and spending it on a Nancy Drew mysteries. And I was probably eleven, twelve.
I actually have a young readers' series that I wanna do, kind of in the same lane as a Harry Potter or Narnia or Twilight. I want to write stuff like that.
'Harry Potter' really harnessed the imagination of so many young-adult minds, and it's the same with the 'Divergent' series.
For me, a good YA novel is the best kind of comfort food.
[The Outsiders] was all new to me. It's been fun to be a part of that ride, where it's become on the level of Catcher In The Rye in terms of people's required reading in schools.
People in the know say 'The Giver' was the first young adult dystopian novel.
One of the interesting things about YA books - I don't know about Percy Jackson, but I do know about 'Twilight' and 'Maximum Ride': There are a lot of adult readers. In fact, we released 'Maximum Ride' both as a paperback for kids and as a mass release for adults.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.
I think more people are going to continue reading YA as well as reading other books because they have learned that they can find books there which they will truly love: a teenage protagonist is close enough to adult so readers of whichever age can sympathise and empathise with them.
A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.
One of the great things about writing middle-grade books is that it's really a nice break, when you're writing super intense stuff like 'Coldtown', to be able to write something a little lighter - calm down and do something different.
The YA author community is generally pretty friendly, and they care.
There's a kind of funny gap between 14 and 20 when young people don't read very much. Nobody really knows what to do about it, although we've tried to reach these dropout readers with the 'young adult' book.
When I was in the YA age range myself, I didn't feel like there were a lot of books for me.
I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
