What are YA books
Finding more about Young adult reading within our libraries By: Lola Buitron For a very long time, there was a whole group of people not being appealed to within literature. Then young adults or YA came into the mix. YA is a relatively new thing. But it isn’t really a genre. Young adult is often classified as a genre of reading but that isn’t quite accurate. It is a large category of reading with many sub-genres within itself and its own tropes. A trope is a plot device, theme, character arc, or other storytelling elements that have become formulaic through repeated use. It is also a relatively new category. It was not as prevalent now as it was in the 70s or 80s. It was a very small genre. Alanna Graves, a youth librarian at Carver Public Library helps young adults and people of all ages find
books that people will enjoy. “I think that YA is one of those categories as you are growing up and you’re in high school,” Graves said “I think that this is an opportunity to really encourage kids to read. And if kids don’t see themselves reflected in books, why are they gonna become readers? And that part of my job is to encourage and foster a love of reading. But it’s important to me to find titles who can learn about themselves and reflect in literature.” So much of the way we contextualize books and our feelings about them relates to ourselves. It’s much easier to like characters that remind us of ourselves or have motivations, value systems, struggles, and backgrounds similar to ours.
New books display at Bowie High school Photo taken by Tara Leon
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There is not a lot of diversity within books, so when picking out the books they put into the library that is a checkmark on the things to consider. There’s still a major gap with diversity within books. “What I don’t like about YA is diversity and this is a challenge with the publishing industry as a whole, we need more diverse voices, we need more diverse books in general,” Graves said. There are movements to help increase diversity in young adult books. The We Need Diverse Books movement is loud and growing. We need a diverse movement and the demand for more diverse books within our libraries is available and accessible to us in general. So everyone can see themselves represented within literature.
