When I worked at Borders many of those were in Intermediate no YA.
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
I think A Wrinkle in Time is much more middle grade. Again, not that teens won't read them.
Speaking of Weetzie Bat, I just read the latest one, Pink Smog, and loved it. Even tho' part of it made me cry. (It hit some buttons I've been talking about in therapy.)
Yeah, we had L'Engle in my elementary school's library.
Weetzie Bat is definitely YA, yes.
I'd always thought it was a children's book series, huh. But I don't know anything about it, so there's that.
I do love that The Enchanted Forest Chronicles got a mention, though.
Earthsea was originally sold as children's, but certainly it gets read by teens (and adults).
Are there really hard-and-fast distinctions between YA and younger categories? Or is it just a marketing category?
There are, Consuela. You're not going to publish a first-person novel about a sixteen-year-old girl who gets pregnant as a middle grade book, for instance.
A lot of it is marketing, and certainly a lot of books cross over to many audiences, but most middle grade books are a) shorter, b) uses language geared maybe three or so years older than the audience, and c) features children as protagonists (usually).
Yeah, middle-grade is generally aimed at 8-12 year olds, and the protagonists are children, middle school at the oldest. There's usually no or only the mildest of romantic content.
YA is aimed at middle-schoolers to teens. If your 8-year old, however good a reader, is too immature for the themes, it's not middle-grade.
I did not know that. At my library growing up there were only three sections- children's (which was picture books), young adult (which is pretty much what is now being described as intermediate- it ranged from The Bobbsey twins to The Outsiders and Judy Bloom) and adult
I'd always thought it was a children's book series, huh.
The first book deals with AIDS and goes to a leather bar South of Market.