In which Sam rants
about the new NA genre, raves about The
Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby,
and accuses summer of inducing the mass delusion that we are all young again.
In 2009, in an effort to reach a growing cohort of YA
readers over 18, St. Martin’s Press held a contest seeking fiction for a “new
adult” category. Though it’s been four years since the term hit the blogosphere, I still hadn’t
heard of “NA” fiction until Meg and Kate mentioned it to me a few weeks ago.
After some Google sleuthing, I discovered the fabulous NA Books Blog, which aptly describes the category here.
I’ll give you Heather’s summary of NA in brief:
NA books are the bridge between Young Adult (YA) fiction and Adult fiction. Main characters are 18 to 30 years old. Themes include leaving home, gaining independence from parents, developing sexuality, and romance, as well as making education and career choices.
Heather
also points out the controversy among publishers that NA isn’t “real” somehow –
that there is no such category, and it’s just a marketing tool. She musters the
strong evidence of NA existence from the success of contemporary NA fiction
like Beautiful Disaster. I agree, but
I also think that NA has been around much longer than four years, or fourteen years.
I think it’s been around for at least eighty-eight.
