I Don’t Believe in New Adult

Mom,

Here’s what I think of “New Adult.”  Let me give you a list of titles:

• The Great Gatsby
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Brave New World
• Sound and the Fury
• Catch-22
• Sons and Lovers
• The Grapes of Wrath
• An American Tragedy
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Native Son
• Appointment in Samarra
• USA
• Winesburg, Ohio
• Tender is the Night
• The Studs Lonigan Trilogy
• The Good Soldier
• Sister Carrie
• Go Tell it on the Mountain
• Lord of the Flies
• Point Counter Point
• The Sun Also Rises
• Tropic of Cancer
• Naked and the Dead
• Portnoy’s Complaint
• Light in August
• On the Road
• Parade’s End
• The Age of Innocence
• Zuleika Dobson
• The Moviegoer
• From Here to Eternity
• The Catcher in the Rye
• A Clockwork Orange
• Of Human Bondage
• The Alexandria Quartet
• A House for Mr Biswas
• The Day of the Locust
• A Farewell to Arms
• Scoop
• Kim
• A Room With a View
• Brideshead Revisited
• The Adventures of Augie March
• The Death of the Heart
• Lord Jim
• The Call of the Wild
• The Magus
• Wide Sargasso Sea
• Under the Net
• The Ginger Man

New Adult

Mark,

No, I’m actually not going to get into the whole “New Adult” book discussion, because, frankly, I’m not that interested, and also because others have done it much better, especially Angela on AB4T today and Liz on Tea Cozy  over the weekend. But I realized when I was reading Angela’s article today that I had just read a book that is marketed as a YA book, but that is, in fact, focused on that college-age period.

Just One Day, by Gayle Forman, is due out next week from Dutton. The story takes place over the course of a year. It begins the summer after Allyson graduates from high school, when she takes the “Teen Tours! Cultural Extravaganza” to Europe, along with her best friend, Melanie. Allyson is a good girl from Pennsylvania–she gets good grades, she doesn’t drink, she does what is expected of her. So she even surprises herself when, on the tour’s last day in Stratford-on-Avon, she persuades Melanie to skip the scheduled performance of Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company to go to the free outdoor “Guerrilla Will” production of Twelfth Night at the Canal Basin. There, she is completely smitten by the young man who plays Sebastian.

Amazingly enough, the next day, as she and Melanie take the train to London for their last three days on their own before heading back home, she runs into “Sebastian,” who, it turns out, is a 19-year-old Dutchman named Willem. One thing leads to another, and suddenly, Allyson–whom Willem has decided to call Lulu, after Louise Brooks–is headed for Paris with Willem for just one day. It all seems to make sense, since Paris is just a couple of hours by train from London, and it’s the one city they weren’t able to see on the “Teen Tours!” trip, because of an airport strike.