Adelaide Jensen

Do you ever truly move past?

It's funny because I still read, I think, quite widely across it, but it's interesting what you say about only coming back for specific authors because I think there's been such a change of readers, especially like teen readers that are kind of who YA is for, even though the readership is so much bigger than that, own like reading up into romanticism and then like that sort of pigeonhole of like books that are truly for teens is harder now to find readers for that space.

Yeah.

And you have some big authors like Lynette Noney who always do really well, but breaking new people into that space is difficult.

And what has that changed about our genre that everything's more spuddy and for adults?

What does that mean for the genre going forward?

Well, that is one of the questions that I'm always asking myself is where is the line?

Where does something become adult rather than YA?

Yeah.

It always has classically been that like the age of the characters and like the life experience that they go through.

Like, is it more a coming of age book where they are kind of their issues are more about discovering who they are as a person?

Or are they like big real world issues being forced upon them because they're a 22 year old budding assassin prodigy or et cetera, et cetera.

But then is the romance part of it?

And then like the actual nature of those scenes.

Yeah.

changes the conversation but those books that we read when we were teenagers were not necessarily like I don't think quite as hard on the barriers there and it didn't seem to be quite interrogated quite so much and perhaps like the readers and the gatekeepers are trying to control what teens are reading harder because they feel that maybe it's gotten more inappropriate but I don't know that it's changed that much from what I read because I read some inappropriate things when I was a teen I feel like what I read when I was a teen was

The whole point of fiction is that there needs to be some adversity there.

But also, like, this is how you learn as a teenager, I feel.

And I guess in with Lynette's writing in particular, she does explore quite a lot of dark themes in her writing.

Like the Prison Healer trilogy especially had a lot of dark