It's a Children's Book (Not Young Adult)!

From Book Riot:

For me, it’s The Baby-sitters Club and R.L. Stine’s FEAR STREET novels. They’re not the most highbrow selections–not by any stretch–but they’re the series that defined my young adult reading life (back in the days of yore when YA lit wasn’t quite the The Legit Thing it is today). Maybe for you it’s the Lord of the Rings, or Lois Lowry’s Giver and its sequels, or Judy Blume, or, well, the possibilities are endless.

In this Riot Recommendation sponsored by Fortress of Mist (which is, incidentally, the second book in a young adult series), we want to know: what are the YA series you read as a kid–or, heck, as an adult who loves YA books–that you still think about today?

Grrr….the Baby-sitters Club series was/is NOT YA.  Nor are many of Judy Blume’s books, believe it or not.  (Thanks to Ceane for alerting me to this one.)

Great panel discussion yesterday at the New York Public Library featuring Jeanne Birdsall, N. D. Wilson, Adam Gidwitz, and Rebecca Stead, moderated by Betsy Bird, on “middle grade fiction and popular culture’s attempts to rebrand it YA.”  

From flavorwire (one of the worst offenders when it comes to mislabeling kid books as YA): 

Opening this Saturday at Gallery1988′s Melrose location, the Young Adult show, a collaboration with HelloGiggles, celebrates YA classics like Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew, and Harriet the Spy through original works of art.

Not sure why this creeping annexation of children’s books by the YA moniker, but it has bugged me for a while. Enough a few months back to write this cry over at the Huffington Post: “Stop Calling Books for Kids’ ‘Young Adult.’”  Check the comments for a taste of what I’m up against. 

With the title “6 Latest Young Adult Trends” and subtitle “Some young adult books are so engaging that adults want to read them too” you’d figure  that only young adult books would be discussed. Not so. The article writer mentions both middle grade and children’s books . So why that headline and subtitle?  Children’s books and middle grade books are distinctive from young adult, not sub-categories.

Thanks to Betsy Bird for reminding me of this mislabeling of Suzy Bishop’s imaginary CHILDREN’S BOOKS in the movie, Moonrise Kingdom.  

Suzy Bishop is a girl after our own hearts — when running away, she brought only the essentials: a suitcase packed to the brim with her favorite books. Though she reads from a few of them — YA novels with strong female leads all — we couldn’t get enough. 

In John Crowley’s excellent Boston Review piece about Joan Aiken’s wonderful Wolves books he writes:

Why do some books written for children draw adult readers while others don’t? Which ones deserve the attention of adults? I’ve tried to read (as I entertained the possibility of writing one) a large number of children’s books and am usually stopped by the simplifications of language, life, and fictional possibility that “YA” writers are required, or feel compelled, to adhere to. I grew almost instantly bored with the Harry Potterseries, but Louis Sachar’s Holes, beloved by young readers, is masterful—a grownup could love it for the grand chutzpah of its plot machinery and be as moved as young readers are by its hero’s dilemmas and bravery.

Many YA authors have half an eye on adults who may be reading these aloud, as I first read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and are generous with double meanings to delight the knowing—think Lemony Snicket. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase can be mistaken for a parody Victorian—country houses with secret passages, orphans, evil governesses, railroad-train compartments—but it is a rarer thing than that. It’s never coy or arch (which Aiken said books for children should never be), but it is heard differently by an adult reader, who greets the arrival of common plot turns, descriptive tropes, and matched good-evil characters with pleasure, like old friends showing up suddenly at the door, even as the young reader wants to know only what happens next. Aiken’s swift exactness in her chosen mode and period, and her honesty in fulfilling her contract with young readers, are continually tickling. My kids wondered why the dreadful dangers seemed to cheer me so.

For that matter, Holes isn’t YA either.