Where Do You Draw the Line Between YA and Adult Fiction? > Likes and Comments

I’ve always been interested in YA novels that sit right on the edge of adult fiction - coming-of-age stories that still focus on teenage characters, but deal with darker, more emotionally complex themes in a grounded way.

Books like The Outsiders, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower come to mind for me, where the characters are young, but the emotional weight and consequences feel very real and universal.

Lately I’ve been wondering where people draw the line between YA, “new adult,” and crossover literary fiction. Is it the age of the characters? The writing style? The subject matter? Or just the way the book is marketed?

Curious what books people think handle that crossover particularly well.

TLDR: I determine it's this category of Adult / YA adjacent based on who it's written for. We should have an Adult YA category. Authors should include on the back cover that it's written for adults.

This is a great question, S. It's one of the few areas I think should have its own label, its own box. My opinion is that we are, in general, trending toward too much categorization, but this particular Adult / YA type of book hasn't been sectioned out. I would love it if the industry did this.

I think its silly that if the protagonist is 18 ish or younger, that automatically makes it YA by definition.

When I was writing my "YA," I was writing it for adults who remembered 1974, and the protagonist happened to be 14. I also discovered it could be Historical Fiction since it was set 50 years ago. Yikes.

There are stories that can only be told from that younger viewpoint, but they aren't necessarily FOR young people.

It's easy to pull out certain topics as not appropriate for YA, but thats a range as well. I didn't market mine as YA, but it started being called that in reviews, so I adopted it.

These coming of age stories you listed are some of my favorite reads, but finding them in the sea of YA is a challenge.

What I do to draw the line (after all that explanation, sorry) is to determine who it's actually written for. And authors rarely say that on the back cover. I should have done that and you've prompted me to maybe add it to the back cover. It will be the only YA that I write (I think), so the question is more for me finding them in the future.

Thanks for the question. I'm interested to read how others find them. Maybe there's a secret!

I really like your point about stories being told from a younger perspective without necessarily being for younger readers. I think that’s where a lot of the confusion comes from. People often associate protagonist age with audience automatically, when tone, emotional complexity, and intended readership can be very different things.

And I agree that some stories almost need that younger viewpoint to work properly. A coming-of-age story loses something if the narrator already has the benefit of hindsight and maturity.

It’s interesting too that readers and reviewers sometimes end up categorising books differently from how the author originally saw them. That seems to happen a lot with crossover fiction.

I’m very similar to you Steve.

I wanted to create a book that was a crossover - something that YA readers would enjoy but also something that adults would want to read. But it’s a balance, between your age of the characters and the how you incorporate adult ways, romance, spice etc. so I kept my books very low in those terms but the theme progressively gets more mature as the books evolve - as though growing up… if you’re into things like the Xmen you might well enjoy my books. As I say, I tried to write them in the mind of people who enjoy the theme more so than age… probably not answering your question but I just believe people should enjoy what they enjoy and not be pigeon holed into categories based on their age..