Yes, I am 25 years old. Yes, I still read YA Fiction. To be fair, YA stands for Young Adult and I would still consider 25 a fairly young adult! However strange you may think it is, I love YA Fiction. It comes in at a close second of my favorite types of books behind Non-Fiction/Self Help/Motivation. Here are some reasons why.
1. Nostalgia
It's easy to be swept up in the nostalgia of reading a book you loved when you were a teenager. For me it goes back even farther. I've been reading at a highly accelerated level for as long as I can remember, and I mean chapter books by the end of Kindergarten accelerated, so by the time I reached age 11 my parents had no choice but to let me enter the world of YA Fiction. I have 14 years of YA memories and every time I pick up an old favorite it brings me so much joy.
2. Fantasy
I firmly believe that YA Fantasy is 1000 times better than Adult Fiction Fantasy. I just can't get into Adult Fiction Fantasy at all and I think that is for a very specific reason. YA Fantasy is so much more vivid. Teenagers (and kids in general) have much more active imaginations than most adults and can create so much more of a world in their heads from some words on a page. For this reason YA authors create these overly elaborate worlds of magic for kids to imagine. As a director my brain still works in the childlike world-creating way and so that appeals to me.
3. Schedule
I may read at superhuman speeds no matter what I'm reading, but it takes far less time to read a 250 page YA book than a 250 page book written for adults. I like being able to pick up a good book and finish it in an afternoon. That is much easier with YA.
4. Movies
Like I said before, I'm a director by career so I love seeing something come from page to screen. Though I usually like books better than their movies and am often critical of the things left out, I still thoroughly enjoy that journey. I'm a huge movie buff on top of being a book nerd, so tying those worlds together brings me so much joy. Plus, directing a YA Film Adaptation is a HUGE bucket list item for me, so I have to be deep into the world of YA Fiction and Film adaptation.
5. Innocence
This one is a little weird. Let me first start by saying that I am a 25 year old woman, of course I love a sexy romance novel as much as the next woman, but to be honest, if that's. all you read... that's a little sad. It hyper sexualizes romance and you have to remind yourself that real world romance does not come out of the pages of a book about Fabio the striking stablehand. Now that's not to say YA romance is anymore realistic, but at least it is slightly more relationship driven and sometimes it's nice to get your head out of the gutter! (Though if I'm being honest, I think I made up some of the illusion of innocence in some of my favorite YA books because reading them back now I'm like "WHOOOAAAA. I read this when I was 13????)
6. Connection
This may be one of my favorite reasons why I love YA. It also is the reason I most recently discovered. I work with teenagers as a big part of my job, and since we can't be together in person right now we do a lot of Instagram Lives. On one of these more recent lives we started talking about books and it was magical. We talked about Harry Potter and which book was our favorite and why we thought book Ginny was ten million times better than movie Ginny. We talked about The Selection and why I was torn between being Team Aspen or Team Maxon. It made my heart so happy to have this connection with my students and I realized it was one of the biggest blessings of this quarantine, that we still had things to talk about even when we weren't making theatre together.
So there you have it! Six reasons why I LOVE YA Fiction. Head over to IGTV and check out the most recent episode of FIVE to hear what my top five favorite YA books and series are and leave a comment of what your favorites are below so I can check them out!
xo,
Kayla
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