Reading YA books for what feels like your entire life, then getting to a point where Young Adult isn't offering enough anymore, is weird. Ya spans so many years of a young person life, from pre-teen to early 20's. And it's not that YA can't be enjoyed for many years past that, but there comes a point where some YA books just don't offer as rich as an experience. You start craving something more in your reading life.
I got to that point around a year or two ago, and I didn't know where to go. I had so many favorite authors that wrote YA, knew what type of YA's I liked, knew what was being hyped. I didn't know anything about the adult genre. I didn't know where to start.
Where to begin:
For me, it started with getting into BookTube. Watching booktubers like Daniel Greene, Murphy Napier, who both review mainly adult fantasy. If you're struggling to know where to find book recommendations, I highly recommend finding a youtuber that reads/reviews books in your genre of choice.
I quickly picked up a few books that they'd reviewed that seemed to fit withing the tropes I'd grown to love in YA and found so many I loved. I started by picking back up Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson after DNFing the second book 2 years prior. I tried (and fell in love with) The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. I read the Shades of Magic series by V. E. Schwab, and I finally read the Lord of the Rings.
What it took for me to get into adult books was realizing a lot of them offered the same things YA was offering me: great characters, thrilling storylines, epic magic, and beautiful worlds. I thought I was going to miss out on reading a lot of my favorite tropes, and the complexity of emotion packed into YA books with these young characters going through really hard things at this age that is already hard.
But adult books offer this too.
I quickly found out adult books offer a lot more. Worlds so large and complex, so much emotional depth, insane storylines. Reading Mistborn, which has been marketed as YA and adult, I was in awe. Not only does Sanderson have a magic system like none I've ever seen, but he created a world more complex than I'd ever read. It wasn't just this one city that we get to see, there's multiple cultures and so much history and so so many religions. I was in awe of how he wove together the story so at the end I still had no idea what the final reveal would be.
Also, a lot of characters in the adult fantasy I was picking up were young. In Mistborn Vin is only 16. Kell from A Darker Shade of Magic is only 21. There's a lot of these books that live somewhat on the boarder of YA and adult that some people call New Adult.
There's no right answer. It can be recommendations from friends, searching for the best selling adult book in your genre of choice, picking up a random book from the library.
Where I stand now:
But after all this, I have to say, I still love YA, I just read significantly less of it. I don't think any less of YA, but more often than not, I want to explore the things adult books give me that YA doesn't always. I still read about 75% Ya and 25% adult.
As I get older, I want to read about characters that reflect the new problems and challenges I go through. There are some Young Adult books that have a strange almost timeless quality to the characters, where you can re read it when your older and you imagine the characters being the same age as you. And there's some stories you read for the magic and the world and not for the characters as much. There are books that are nostalgia reads. One things moving to adult novels does, it takes away the content line YA authors can't cross. Certain topics YA authors can't touch, levels of darkness they can't go to. It's really refreshing to find some of your favorite tropes used in an adult novel and have them go as far with it as you've always wanted, but couldn't in YA.
But in the end: read what makes you happy, that be middle grade, YA, or adult. What others say doesn't matter. Read what you love.
~ Thane
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