YA fiction isn’t irredemable. My biggest problem with it is that they’re trying to write in danger, but there are limits to what they can put in. So you often end up with this ‘implied danger’ that has plotholes a mile wide, while they try to make your fear for the character. There was this one book, somewhere in paritals, where the heroine was somehow stuck between two lab machines, and one of them wasn’t grounded correctly, so she kept getting intermittently shocked, and as she tried to escape, she would get shocked again. It felt like an entire chapter, but it was likely only a few paragraphs. amounted to, she’s stuck, she got a little shocked, she got out.
As with literally everything else, there’s good YA and bad YA.
Check out Brandon Sanderson’s “Mistborn” or “Skyward”. I’d say they’re both the “good YA” kind where danger is real (as much as any danger towards the protagonist before the very end of the book, obviously they won’t get killed off in the first chapter) and the story relatively original. The world-building is excellent, though.
YA fiction isn’t irredemable. My biggest problem with it is that they’re trying to write in danger, but there are limits to what they can put in. So you often end up with this ‘implied danger’ that has plotholes a mile wide, while they try to make your fear for the character. There was this one book, somewhere in paritals, where the heroine was somehow stuck between two lab machines, and one of them wasn’t grounded correctly, so she kept getting intermittently shocked, and as she tried to escape, she would get shocked again. It felt like an entire chapter, but it was likely only a few paragraphs. amounted to, she’s stuck, she got a little shocked, she got out.
As with literally everything else, there’s good YA and bad YA.
Check out Brandon Sanderson’s “Mistborn” or “Skyward”. I’d say they’re both the “good YA” kind where danger is real (as much as any danger towards the protagonist before the very end of the book, obviously they won’t get killed off in the first chapter) and the story relatively original. The world-building is excellent, though.