Despite being a consumed by a diverse and constantly growing age group, protagonists of Young Adult fiction hardly ever clear 17 years old. Young Adult is meant to mean someone who has recently reached adulthood or is right on the cusp, and yet the YA genre caters almost exclusively to the middle school–high school age range.
As a result, there’s a huge deficit of books written with 18 to 25 year old protagonists, and college-age people and twenty something’s deserve to see themselves represented, too.
The YA genre is flooded with books about young people coming of age in various situations ranging from the realistic, such as anything by John Green, to the extremely fictional, like Harry Potter, and everything in between. There are plenty of 17-year-olds leading rebel armies, harnessing their magical prowess, or learning to love themselves, but it’s a rarity to see a book about a college-age person facing these kinds of issues.
So much of YA literature’s appeal is wrapped up in the fact that the narratives are, at their core, about people who are still trying to figure out how they fit into the world and what they want to do with their life, but so much of this self–discovery happens to people who publishers consider too old to helm the novel. YA literature is very diverse, and yet completely ignores a huge percent of its audience.
18+ protagonists are few and far between unless you take into account the New Adult genre. NA was supposed to be the market for all of the 19-year-olds who wanted to read a book about someone their own age, but with all the fun-to-read flavor of YA.... except it didn’t fill that void.
People expected some like Hunger Games narrated by a 20-year-old from Na, but the NA genre is composed almost entirely of books that attempt to be fresh and edgy by including lots of cursing and gratuitous sex scenes but have no real substance. If you want to read a novel about a futuristic dystopian society as told by a young person, you’ll either have to settle for the main character aged 16, or you probably won’t get one at all.
The summer before college or an 18-year-old protagonist is viewed by most publishers as the proverbial ceiling for YA fiction, although this barrier makes no sense. There’s no reason a 19-year-old couldn’t be the Chosen One, and it makes just as much sense that a 21-year-old Econ major can find out she’s a witch as it does for a 16-year-old high school outcast.
The YA category is already largely unrealistic, so why make it even more ludicrous by refusing to accept that people a few mere months older than the hundred’s of 17-year-old protagonists could fit into the story?
None of this is to say that high schoolers shouldn’t have representation in books, but rather than the older young people — the actual young adults — should be represented as well.
