Young Adult Fiction

In this post I will be examining a genre that I tend to read a lot: Young Adult Fiction (YAF). As a self proclaimed expert of this genre, I have noticed some trends in these types of books and would love to share them with you, so as to enlighten you all. Basically, what I've notice is that there are really two types of young-adult fiction nowadays. The first of which includes some sort of forsaken society where a young hero discovers that only have the power to save the world. The other story would be the simple romance, where a troubled guy meets a troubled girl, he charms her and they fall in love. Now sometimes, the best writers can ash up these two ideas and create an action-romance novel, which teens seem to just adore(i.e. Twilight, Hunger Games, etc.)

The simple romance story has been around for a while, dating back to back to the 16th century, when William Shakespeare wrote the famous story of star-crossed lovers: Romeo and Juliet. Now that may be a play, not a "young adult fiction novel, but it is literature nonetheless. romeo an Juliet is the classic tale of star crossed lovers, copied hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times in history. What happens is we see  story we like, but there is a detail that we think isn't quite right, so we rewrite the story  to our own liking. This seems to be a common theme: copying old works and making them new and fresh. For example, Disney put lions into centuries-old Hamlet and made a blockbuster hit: the Lion King. That's all writing is, I believe, is taking old stories and tailoring them to fit our beliefs. Another fine example of how history repeats itself.

The other type of writing in YAF has been around much longer than romance. Dating back to 700 BC, the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey of Ancient Greece tell similar stories to those we see today. "Unsuspecting Hero saves the world" is very popular, almost as popular as the story of the underdog, Cinderella, or the dark horse. We saw it in Ancient Greece and we see t now, as recently as in 2011 when the Harry Potter "Era" came to an end. But there's one thing: the era is not over. Believe it or not, there will be another Harry Potter, because there always is. He might not be the unsuspecting boy-wizard in glasses with the lighting bolt scar, but he (or she) will have their own attribute that make them special and lovable. We will have more heroes to look forward to until readers stop reading and writers stop writing.