Someone once asked me what I was working on. I responded by telling them about a young-adult novel I had just signed a contract for, and how I was mid-way through a middle-grade book. They looked surprised. “Why are you returning to young-adult books?” they asked me. By that time, I had published two more novels along with a few short stories, and they were far from young-adult. It took me a while to figure out what they were talking about. I mean, why wouldn’t I write young adult? Did they think that just because I could write more adult books, that I was wasting my time by not doing so? It almost seems expected for writers to seek to break from the YA mold, to progress up into the big boys. I wondered if I was wasting my time, if I should focus on the big books, but then I thought about it some more and realized that the reason I chose that genre for my introductory novel, and why I keep coming back to is very simple.

The reason is the most important aspect of reading, if you ask me,. It’s the simple fact that young-adult books are a ton of fun to both read and write. I’m twenty-two years old, have a vast collection of books at my disposal including numerous classics, and read widely. But time and time again, I find myself drawn back to books that I’m supposed to have “out grown.” In the past month alone, I’ve read: The Lost Years of Merlin, Artemis Fowl, and The Seventh Tower. All of them are intended for middle school to early highschool age students. But I love them. I throw them in between readings of Dickens, Stoker, King, and Grisham. You see, young adult books are written for the purest of reasons. They aren’t there to preach at you, to convince you to see their way, or to enlighten you to some great disaster in the works. They aren’t meant to shake your faith in humanity or to make you too scared to sleep without a nightlight—well sometimes they do; I’m looking at you R.L Stine! They’re only there to entertain you, so when life gets a little too hectic, too stressful, or just plain too serious, I reach for a young-adult book to take a load off. Because when you read young-adult, pretensions disappear. You’re reading for fun, plain and simple. So if you’re ready to just relax, enjoy a casual afternoon with a good story, pick up your son or daughter or nephew or maybe even the kid next door’s book—he keeps leaving stuff on your lawn, so it’s only fair.