Books for Young Adults and Children (BYAC) is a new series for Readers and Booklovers Thursdays at 11:00 AM EDT/EST. This series will discuss both fiction and non-fiction for infants to high schoolers. Traditional topics such as children's book awards, classic books for children and young adults, themes and genres will be covered. I'm hoping this will be an eclectic place with lots of different voices. As a politically progressive person, I'm also hoping we can generate reading lists for children and teens on progressive topics such as global warming, sustainable living, nutrition, etc. I encourage you to write a diary for this series -- everything from reviews of books your children love to science you think every child should know.
Wikipedia has a good write-up of the History of Children's Literature and the History of Young-adult fiction. Books have been written specifically for children since the 17th century. However the designation of Young Adult is relatively recent.
The modern classification of young-adult fiction originated during the 1950s and 1960s, especially after the publication of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. This book focused on a group of teens not yet represented and instead of having the nostalgic tone that was typical in young adult books written by adults, it displayed a truer, darker side of young adult life because it was written by a young adult.
As publishers began to focus on the emerging adolescent market, booksellers and libraries, in turn, began creating YA sections distinct from either children's literature or novels written for adults. The 1970s to the mid-1980s have been described as the golden age of young-adult fiction—when challenging novels began speaking directly to the interests of the identified adolescent market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Later in the Wikipedia article, it details how many of the books written for young adults in the past 30 years address themes such as sexuality, race, death, depression and alcohol abuse.
However many of the books considered to be classics for young adults and children were originally written for adults. Authors that pop immediately into my mind because I read them in my teen years are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens and HG Wells. I read early Heinlein books in my teens, which I believe were specifically written for children, but most of my reading after the age of 12 were books written for adults.
In the 1970s when books for young adults started to surge, I was already in college. At that time, most college coursework about books for non-adult readers were in Education and Library Science Departments. I was at one of the few universities beginning to teach Children's Literature in the English Department. I felt like Cinderella putting on the shoe that fits perfectly. I returned to my childhood love of fairy tales and reread them with the scrim of Jungian analysis.
In the 1990s, I career changed to Elementary Education. I taught into the early 2000s until health issues (since resolved) took me out of the classroom. A number of those years were spent teaching 5th Graders. Fifth graders average 10 years of age but their reading abilities ran the gamut from non-readers to competent readers of books written for adults. Working with children and watching them select their independent reading gave me an entirely different perspective on books for young adults and children than my English major years.
In this series, Books for Young Adults and Children (BYAC), books will be discussed from a variety of angles as we all read for a variety of purposes. When adults and children read together, it helps to stretch the child's reading muscles by reading a book that's a bit challenging both in vocabulary and content. But when a child reads independently, it's time for fun. So as this series develops, I am hoping to see the BYAC range from serious reads to the light and fluffy to non-fiction. Whether a publisher classifies a book as being for children, YA or adult, if kids and teens are reading it, then we should be discussing it.
So what were your favorite books as a child or teen?