Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  There would ultimately be a dozen Gossip Girl titles that, through June 2009, had sold upward of 5.5 million copies in the United States and had spawned at least two other spin-off series from von Ziegesar: The It Girl (which has sold 1 million copies since its 2005 launch) and the Carlyles. The latter, which debuted in 2008 with a two-hundred-thousand-copy first printing (Lodge 2008), features triplet sisters who, newcomers to Manhattan, happen to move into the penthouse that Blair Waldorf’s family had previously occupied (precisely why von Ziegesar names her characters for hotels is one of the more tantalizing imponderables of these series; perhaps it’s for the same reason that Antonio Pagliarulo’s the Celebutantes, another recent series starring wealthy triplets, names its protagonists after fashionable Manhattan streets: Madison, Lexington, and Park!).2

  Gossip Girl publisher Little, Brown found the holy grail of synergy in 2007 when the books inspired a highly touted television series on the CW network. Interestingly enough, it was an earlier television series, Sex and the City, that has often been cited as the source of inspiration for the whole burgeoning mean-girl movement. “I give you Sex and the City as told by Carrie Bradshaw’s kid sister,” the Manchester Guardian wrote when the Gossip Girl books debuted in Britain in 2003 (Cooke 2003).

  Sex—casual and otherwise—is certainly a fixture in many of these books, but it is couture that might be their most deliciously meretricious aspect. The New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip (himself an author of fiction for middle school readers) wrote an interesting piece about this in July 2008. “In Novels for Girls, Fashion Trumps Romance” quotes an academic study of Gossip Girl and two of the series it spawned—Clique and the A List—that found 1,553 brand-name references in the books’ collective 1,431 pages—slightly more than one commercial per page (though none was actually paid placement, Winerip decides after some reportorial digging) (Winerip 2008).

  It’s hard, thus, to disagree with the cultural observer Naomi Wolf (2006), who concludes that in these books, “success and failure are entirely signaled by material possessions—specifically by brands. Sex and shopping take their place on a barren stage, as though, even for teenagers, these are the only dramas left.”

  Given this commercial patina, it’s no surprise that many of these series—though published by all the major houses, including Little, Brown, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Delacorte Press, and others—are created by book packagers, the most successful of which is Alloy Entertainment, which produces some forty books a year and is responsible not only for Gossip Girl and the A-List but also the Clique, the Au Pairs, Pretty Little Liars, Privilege, Luxe, and the more benign Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Alloy Entertainment is a division of the larger Alloy Media + Marketing, which describes itself as “one of the largest and most successful marketers and merchandisers to the youth market.”3

  The goal in this still-burgeoning field is to create an instantly recognizable brand or franchise that can be spun off into a variety of economic opportunities—books, television series, movies, products—and then promoted through interactive websites, contests, and social networks.

  Typically published as trade paperbacks (though some—Luxe, Traveling Pants, etc.—may also appear in hardcover editions), the books are targeted at the retail market, their covers replete with references to the New York Times Best-Seller List and to contests (“Win Shopping Spree—Details Inside”). Their sophisticated cover art, usually featuring photographs of drop-dead gorgeous girls (and boys), is designed to appeal to a broad age range. “Though ‘Gossip Girl’ was originally published as a YA novel,” its editor Cynthia Eagen told Publishers Weekly, “we thought the book would have crossover appeal and we specifically designed the cover to have an older, cosmopolitan look. Pretty soon we discovered that women and gay men in their 20s and 30s were buying a ton of these books. Our first Gossip Girl ‘Win a Trip to New York’ contest winner was actually a 32-year-old woman” (Alderdice 2004, 26).

  Genre fiction of all sorts has always had considerable crossover potential, though it has traditionally manifested as teens reading adult titles. The discovery of YA books by adult readers is a new—and fascinating—development that we will examine in greater detail a bit later. In the meantime, it should be noted that, just as the lines of demarcation dividing adult and young adult readers has increasingly blurred since the late 1990s, so have the lines separating genres. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of romance fiction, where genre bending and blending have become commonplace. In addition to the chick lit, Brit lit, mean girl, and privileged chick lit we’ve been discussing, there are historical romances (Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy and the Luxe novels of Anna Godbersen); mystery-suspense romances (virtually anything by Joan Lowery Nixon); gay and lesbian romances (Annie on My Mind, Boy Meets Boy); and the myriad marriages of science fiction, paranormal, fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction with romance (think Melissa Marr and Stephenie Meyer).

  Contemporary romance (which includes chick lit) continues to lead the other subgenres in terms of reader popularity, however, and it’s here that we find many of the most popular contemporary YA authors—writers like Anne Brashares, Kate Brian, Meg Cabot, Zoey Dean, Melissa De La Cruz, Megan McCafferty, Lurleen McDaniel (all hail the uncrowned queen of the weepies!), and the more mainstream writers who tend to combine romance and realistic fiction—Sarah Dessen, Maureen Johnson, Lauren Myracle, Catherine Gilbert Murdock, and others.

  What Harry Hath Wrought

  No matter how successful the many-splendored subgenres of romance fiction have been in the twenty-first century, they are all eclipsed by the jaw-dropping success of the fantasy field, this in the wake of one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the history of publishing: the international success of the Harry Potter series. From the 1997 British publication of the first volume, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone when the American edition was published in 1998) to the seventh and final volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, published in 2007, the series broke record after record while dramatically—some might say seismically—changing the world of publishing for young readers.

  Although no one could have predicted the ultimate enormity of the phenomenon when the first book was published, the seeds of that success were already sown. It didn’t hurt, for example, that the book arrived with an irresistible backstory: its previously unpublished author, J. K. Rowling, was an attractive, divorced, unemployed single mother who was on the dole and living in an unheated Edinburgh flat while writing the book. To keep warm, she reportedly wheeled her baby daughter into cafés and coffee shops, where she wrote the book in longhand (the story varies in its details, of course; according to Time magazine she would “sometimes jot down Harry Potter ideas on napkins” [Gray 1999, 71]). That its British publisher then paid £100,000 for the first novel added a fairy-tale patina to the story, which was further burnished when Scholastic ponied up $100,000 for the U.S. rights, an unprecedented sum for an American children’s book. Sales more than met expectations as the book became a best seller in both the United Kingdom and the United States, where it appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List within three months of its publication. A mere year and a half later, the top three hardcover slots were held by Potter titles, and a fourth was on its way, with a first printing of 3.8 million copies, the largest for any book ever.4

  Harry had appeared on the cover of Time magazine (September 20, 1999), Warner Brothers had acquired film rights (the first film was released in 2001), and Harry Potter was now more than a series of enchanting books; it was a full-fledged publishing phenomenon. Ultimately, of course, there would be seven novels that, together, sold more than 375 million copies and were translated into sixty-five languages. By 2004 the New York Times had received enough complaints from adult publishers about the Potter books taking so many slots on its best-seller list that it responded by inaugurating a new—and separate—children’s best-seller list!
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br />   This was only one of the significant changes that the Potter books would visit on the worlds of publishing and bookselling. Their international success also encouraged the more widespread publication in the United States (and in the United Kingdom) of books first published in other countries, while international cooperation was served when Bloomsbury and Scholastic quickly agreed that each new Potter book should be released simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States (typically the U.S. release would have followed the British publication by a year or so). Each new Potter release subsequently became an event—no, an EVENT! The books were embargoed until their official publication date: no advance reading or review copies were released prior to publication, and bookstores put them on sale at precisely one minute after midnight on the official publication date, staying open until the wee hours to accommodate the hordes of overstimulated children (most of them dressed as Potter characters) and their bleary-eyed parents (some also in costume), all waiting in serpentine lines to purchase their anxiously awaited copies.

  The normally book-shy mass media ate all this up and hyped Harry relentlessly. Rapturous headlines greeted each new printing or sales record, and when the motion picture versions of the books began appearing, the hoopla approached hysteria. In the meantime, the Internet came alive with fan sites and fan fiction; there were fan gatherings (à la Star Trek conventions), promotional tours, rock bands, and more—enough more that Melissa Anelli, webmaster of the Leaky Cauldron, the premiere Potter fan site, wrote a fascinating account of it all in Harry: A History (Pocket, 2008), a book that will be of interest not only to Potter fans but also to future literary historians and cultural anthropologists alike.

  The books themselves soon became almost lost in the larger phenomenon that was Pottermania. And that’s a pity because they remain extraordinary works of fantasy and J. K. Rowling, a brilliant writer. My personal feelings about the Potter titles has not changed since I gave a starred review in Booklist to the very first one in 1998, calling it “brilliantly imagined, beautifully written, and utterly captivating.”

  These dozen years later, I would still use the same words to describe the books that followed, as well. Rowling has proved a gifted storyteller with a remarkable ability to create a detailed alternative world that coexists with ours. Yet, having read all seven volumes, I believe it is the characters and their interrelationships that will remain with me longest, in part because Rowling permitted them to grow up with their readers over the course of the series (Harry is a year older in each new volume). Thus, though the first several titles were clearly aimed at middle school readers (I recommended the first for fifth to eighth grades, and the literary historian Leonard Marcus [2008] regards the early titles as for eight- to twelve-year-old tweens), each volume thereafter became increasingly sophisticated and, frankly, darker. The final three—Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows—are clearly young adult titles. Thus, the changes that Harry Potter visited on publishing affected not only children’s books but YA ones, as well. At this writing, only three years have passed since the publication of the seventh volume, and another decade or two must flow under the bridge of history before one can, with any validity, assess the series’ lasting place in world literature (or describe them as “classic”).

  That said, it is indisputably clear that they will command a very large place in all future histories of publishing, for their impact there is already abundantly evident. The international success of the series helped turn young adult literature into an increasingly global phenomenon and sparked a new interest in fantasy as a genre not only for children but also—and perhaps more important—for young adults. It is hard to argue with Holly Koelling’s (2007, 64) flat declaration: “Plain and simple, fantasy is a predominant trend in current teen literature.” Not only did Harry’s success stimulate an amazing outpouring of new fantasy titles (that virtually every one of these must now be part of an ongoing series may be a less salutary trend), it also spurred readers to discover other long-established fantasists whose work had not previously received its due—Diana Wynne Jones, Eva Ibbotson, Margaret Mahy, Diane Duane, and others.

  Meanwhile the multigenerational appeal of the Potter books spurred a rush to publish crossover titles and began attracting record numbers of established adult authors to the newly profitable field of books for young readers. The books revived an interest in family reading, too, and demonstrated that, given something they actually wanted to read, boys would embrace books as enthusiastically as girls. The increasing length of the individual volumes (three of the last four exceeded seven hundred pages) also proved that, contrary to traditional wisdom, contemporary young readers would welcome books more than two hundred pages in length. As a result, YA novels have now routinely become many hundreds of pages longer—whether or not they need to be.

  One of the less benign aspects of the Potter books was their introduction into the children’s field of event publishing, which had long been a fixture of the adult world. Indeed, the runaway financial success of the Rowling series seems to have accelerated a trend that had already begun: the transformation of children’s publishing into its adult counterpart, with its relentless focus on the next big, high-concept thing and its corollary shrinking of the backlist and its neglect—benign or otherwise—of the more modest-selling midlist title.

  Fangs for the Memories

  No surprise that publishing became relentlessly—some might say obsessively—focused on finding the next Harry Potter. To date, the closest it has come is probably Stephenie Meyer’s fevered Twilight series, the four-volume saga of teenage Bella’s love for the exotically beautiful vegetarian vampire Edward Cullen, a boy who has been seventeen since 1918 (I’m not making this up).

  The first volume of the series, Twilight, was published in 2005, the same year as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It, too, came with an interesting—and highly marketable—backstory. Its previously unpublished author, Stephenie Meyer, was an attractive, thirty-one-year-old Phoenix housewife who reportedly found the inspiration for her series in a dream so vivid that she felt compelled to write it down. Three months later it had become a 498-page novel. Over the next three years, it would sell 1.5 million copies. Three more volumes quickly followed, each one more successful—and longer—than the previous ones. New Moon, which introduced Edward’s rival Jacob—a werewolf no less—appeared in 2006 and weighed in at 564 pages; Eclipse (640 pages) followed in 2007; and Breaking Dawn (768 pages) came along in 2008 and sold 1.3 million copies in its first twenty-four hours of publication, a record for its publisher Little, Brown/Hachette.

  To the unbridled delight of the media, some of the same promotional hoopla that had surrounded the publication of the various Harry Potter titles quickly began to gather around the Twilight titles. “Yes,” the Washington Post observed, “the creation of Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight Saga’ series, and its subsequent arc toward fame, recall J. K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ success story to no small extent” (Yao 2008). “Stephanie Meyer: A New J. K. Rowling?” Time trumpeted; “Harry Potter and the Rival Teen Franchise” the Wall Street Journal chorused; Entertainment Weekly hailed “the second coming of J. K. Rowling” (Valby 2008).

  Meyer herself has generously acknowledged her debt. “J. K. Rowling, we owe her so much,” she told Associated Press reporter Hillel Italie. “First of all, she got publishers to believe that millions of people will pick up an 800-page book. She also got adults reading YA literature. What a gift: she got kids reading and she got adults reading” (Italie 2008).

  The similarities between the two as publishing phenomena were startling: once again, each new title was embargoed until one minute after midnight on the official publication date, when it would go on sale to hordes of costume-wearing fans (many of whom call themselves either Twilighters or Twihards); no advance review copies were released; there were a plethora of Internet sites (including one for adult fans called Twilight Moms), fan fiction, Twilight-themed rock ba
nds, and more. As a result, Meyer—with 22 million sales—became USA Today’s best-selling author of 2008. The next year she was named to Forbes’s Celebrity 100 List of the world’s most powerful celebrities, her annual earnings being estimated at more than $50 million (cited in Wikipedia entry).

  There were—and are—differences between the two series, however. Unlike Rowling, Meyer launched hers with an implicit fan base. According to the Romance Writers of America, 71 percent of the 58.1 million American romance readers opened their first adult romance novel when they were sixteen (Engberg 2004). The runaway success of Meyer’s series is surely at least partly responsible for making the genre the biggest fiction category in 2007 (Hesse 2009). As for the vampire romance subgenre: thanks to Anne Rice it, too, was already a hugely popular genre with an established crossover readership (Google the term and you’ll get 2 million hits!). Ironically, its hallmark is often steamy sex, though the hallmark of the first three Twilight volumes was sexual abstinence. This changed dramatically with the fourth volume, however, when Bella and Edward finally married. As Sonya Bolle wryly wrote in her Los Angeles Times article “Why ‘Twilight’ Isn’t for Everybody,” “The fourth book answers the burning question about what vampires do with all their free time, since they don’t sleep. It turns out that married vampires have a lot of sex” (Bolle 2008).