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Notes -
People wrote books about young people in the 70s, but that's not the same as YA as a publishing category with genre conventions almost as strict as those of say, romance, which is a much more recent thing.
Indeed, stumbling upon a YA novel in a publishing category can be jarring. I was reading through Battletech fiction and you might think that pulpy action novels based on a game would already be considered YA. And yes, if you define YA as books read by young adults, you would be right. But that’s not what YA is.
I came across a Battletech novel that was specifically designated as YA fiction. The strange tropes it introduced into the 100+ novel body of work that is Battletech were jarring and uncomfortable. Other Battletech novels involved kids, even kids at academies dealing with cliques and bullying. So how different could an explicitly YA novel be?
It’s hard to describe. All those other kids in Battletech were more “Hero’s Journey” stories, whereas a YA novel is more of a metaphor for puberty. YA fiction, even for boys, is predominantly written by women. This Battletech novel was no exception. So it was a metaphor for puberty with a female perspective.
Which novel was this?
The Nellus Academy Incident I don't recommend it.
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Dude the GPTese accent is so strong on this one that it barely makes sense.
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YA was an established category in the 1970s and 1980s. There were sections in libraries dedicated to it, by name. There was fiction recognizable as what we now call YA well before that, of course (the coming-of-age novel is particularly recognizable, but also teen adventure like Robinson Crusoe or the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew serieses, and the Heinlein juveniles)
YA was not, and is not, a genre.
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