Why I dig young-adult fiction?

It started way-back then I realized, but I made peace with this few days before the big 2 and 0 loomed over my life. Of all the genres, the one that I have been picking up is young-adult fiction! Make no mistake about it, it’s not Romantic Mills and Boons thingy, or even those desperate fantasy, that never make sense to me (or anyone!). It’s a much underappreciated, misconstrued stream, that has lost its basic voice in presence of Teen Vampires, Attractive high-school students (Hooking up in different permutation across the length of entire book.), Americanized (New Yorkized) hip-street crowd.

Ok, that may have become a part of it, but that’s not all to Young-Adult Fiction. This genre is how a child, a teenager envisages the world. It’s about changes that made us who we are. For as long as I remember, teenage I presumed to be a very erratic, pathetic and exaggerated bumpy ride, I wanted for it to be over. In a Dramatic chick-litty kind of way, it struck me on my best friend’s 20^th birthday, (Roughly a month before mine.) ‘This is it! That’s an end of an entire decade. That’s the most we could have changed. This decade marked something really intense!’

This made me realize how Teen-age is important! (In spite of pimples, Acne, weight fluctuations, mood swings and what not!) When I read Young-Adult (Non-fantasy, grounded or no Romance novel,) I could relate to weird characters. The under-dogs, loners, one with thoughts but no voice, A young thirteen year old Daniel, in midst of Spanish civil War, (The Shadows of the Wind), Sixteen year old Mattie, who lives in North Woods and dreams of attending New York University in 1906, in spite of poverty and no rights of her own (A northern light).

All these characters, youngsters, in-making, great in their own way, have meant more to me than other themes or genres. I guess I am big on under-dog winning, or finding their own story in chaos of life.