YA is facing a serious image problem. Before you immediately sharpen your knives and proceed to go after the usual anti-YA targets, let me say that I’m not talking about those snooty literary types who will occasionally deign to admit that a YA novel ‘is almost good enough to be shelved with the adult fiction’ – as if to imply that the very best of YA is still not as good as the latest Laurel K. Hamilton train wreck. No, I’m talking about YA’s other image problem, one that is going almost unnoticed in many YA circles and which might just be (whisper it) entirely justified.

Put simply, YA is becoming the laughing stock of the speculative fiction world. I’ve now lost count of the number of times I’ve seen (amateur) reviewers assure their readers that a book is ‘not YA-ish’ despite the presence of a teenage protagonist; or, conversely, they might criticise a book for being ‘embarrassingly YA’. They’re not discussing YA as a publishing category here. It is a matter of objective fact whether a book is published as Young Adult or as something else. No, what’s at stake here is whether a book possesses a certain YA-like quality, one that a good portion of readers seem to intensely dislike.

What exactly are we talking about here? Rather than rehashing what’s wrong with the content of many YA books these days, I’ll just point you to the post I’ve already done on the subject (or if you’re not in the mood for that much long-winded negativity, try The Sparkle Project for something that manages to make many of the same points while also being entertaining). YA, or popular YA at least, is turning into a clearing house for dozens upon dozens of badly-written, amateurish romance stories that – let’s just be honest here –  would probably never pass muster in any other publishing category. But that’s something that only becomes apparent after you’ve read a good deal of YA and kept abreast of the latest trends, and people who are put off by anything with a teenage protagonist are unlikely to put that much effort into following the industry.

So how do they know what YA books are like, if they rarely ever read them? How do they make up their minds about what constitutes ‘embarrassingly YA’? Simple: they walk into a bookstore.

I swear I've seen this model on five or six different books recently.

Rather than harping on about the contents of YA books, today I’m going to focus a little bit on their exteriors; the face that YA shows to the world, to put it in slightly dramatic terms. And Jesus, but that face is getting more worryingly shallow by the day.

I remember when it was fairly common for YA books to have abstract, illustrated or even downright artistic covers. There seemed to be an unspoken rule against showing any of the main characters directly, something that still holds true in a lot of adult genre fiction; now every second book has an adult model acting as an odd stand-in for what I assume is supposed to be a character from the book. I’ve seen these covers described as ‘glossy’, which is the perfect word for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were assembled from the same clip art repository used to assemble the back pages of the likes of Vogue.

This is what teenagers look like, right?

Do you know what these remind me of? The vapid, unrealistic images of women that are already clogging up virtually every form of media in existence. The women are thin, blandly attractive and photoshopped so heavily that they look like they’re on loan from Madame Tussauds. The men, when they’re present at all, are either hilariously inappropriate body builders or rejects from the cast of The OC (or whatever godawful imitator has stolen its crown).

Uh-huh.

And you know what? For the most part, those covers aren’t lying. Oh sure, sometimes it’s a case of a publisher slapping a generic photo onto a book that deservers much better (look at this and then this: same book, two different editions), but a lot of the time those glossy, brainless covers are entirely appropriate for the story they’re supposed to be advertising.

Do I need to point out that this isn’t a good thing? Do we really want to get to the point where there is some justification for calling a book ‘embarrassingly YA’?

Oh, and it turns out that it isn’t just book covers that are part of the problem. Thanks to Phoebe, I was recently introduced to the horrifying phenomenon of ‘book trailers’, which I had previously read about but never seen firsthand (I must be some sort of eccentric, because I can’t help but think that a low-budget movie trailer isn’t the best way to advertise a novel).

Here’s a screenshot from the trailer for Torment by Lauren Kate:

Yes, really.

If you’re feeling masochistic, you can watch the whole thing here.

Imagine for a moment that you’re not a ‘YA person’. Maybe you tried a few of the blockbuster titles and were put off when you realised that half of them appear not to have been edited (trust me, that’s a blog post for another day). But surely, you might tell yourself, all YA couldn’t be like that. Then you walk into a bookstore or look at the NYT Children’s list and see nothing but this:

Keep in mind, you don’t know much about YA. (And before you demand that our hypothetical reader become better acquainted with a publishing category before dismissing it, ask yourself how much you really know about epic fantasy or chic-lit or whatever genres you’ve decided you don’t care for.) You don’t know about authors like Justine Larbalestier or Meg Rosoff; there’s a good chance you won’t even realise that contemporary YA still exists, so rapidly has it vanished under a rising tide of badly-written pap.

I certainly wouldn’t blame you for thinking that YA begins and ends with this season’s ‘big name’ paranormal/dystopian romance. Which is exactly why YA has an image problem.

Now, on a more positive note, I’ll give you a few examples of what I think are good covers. If you’ve got some of your own, be sure to mention them in the comments (links probably work better than trying to embed images).

NOTE TO PUBLISHERS: This is how you use stock images in your covers.

I think this might be my favourite book cover ever.

I cannot get a copy of this soon enough.

And finally:

If you haven't read this yet, go buy it.

That’s the old cover. The new one looks like this.

Enjoy your weekend!

Sean on Meg Rosoff

Artistic merit is not a guarantor of popularity. Everybody knows this: you know, it, I know it, the critics know it, and the people queueing up all over the world to be overcharged for a ticket to see Gnomeo & Juliet (sorry, Shakespeare!) most likely know it. Everybody complains bitterly that Transformers 2 made millions and millions of dollars while the Scott Pilgrim movie tanked, yet nobody could honestly claim to have been surprised. It almost seems as though there is an inverse relationship between creative or artistic merit and the potential for profit; again, everybody knows this.

But those examples are from the world of cinema, where hundred-million-dollar budgets reign supreme and creativity is a rarified commodity. Surely, you might say, the world of publishing is different? It deals in books, for God’s sake. Books are intellectual. Books are respectable, even, as long as they’re written by the right sort of person and have other right sorts of persons on the cover. Surely books are different?

Well, no, although it seems to be an enduring myth that they are. I’ve come across the idea many times before that a truly ‘good’ book, defined here as something with genuine literary merit (answering a question with a question there, but let’s go with it), will be appreciated and championed by readers even as it becomes a commercial disaster. It feels almost unfair that a really good book could fail to make millions for its author while simultaneously being underrated by readers.

Exhibit A: Meg Rosoff.

Rosoff’s first novel, How I Live Now, was released to massive acclaim and a string of awards. It tells the story of an anorexic American girl who gets sent to stay with English relatives on the eve of WWIII – or at least, the reader is left to assume that the conflict is a third world war, since it’s never explained in any detail. More interesting is the fact that her cousins appear to have supernatural abilities. Oh, and she falls in love with one of them.

So yes, it’s a magic-realist ‘issues’ novel featuring an incestuous relationship at its core, set to the backdrop of a near-future armed conflict. It’s also brilliantly written. I read it when I was a teenager and was completely entranced from start to finish – it may even have been my introduction to ‘literary’ fiction, since I distinctly remember thinking that I had never encountered a book like it before. It deserves its accolades, and the reputation it garnered for its author.

Go and look up How I Live Now on both Goodreads and Amazon. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Good: you now know that, according to the forces of the democratic rating system, the book is of about average quality. It has a solid 4 stars on Amazon (very few widely-reviewed books get less) and a 3.7/5 rating on Goodreads. By comparison, both The Hunger Games and Catching Fire have higher scores on both sites: 4.5 stars on Amazon, and a 4.5/4.05 rating respectively on Goodreads. All three of the main Uglies books also edge it out on Goodreads, although only by a thankfully small margin.

Am I being elitist if I say that How I Live Now is a much, much better book – better written, more important, of greater merit – than any of the others I just mentioned? Well it is, and yet its target audience has apparently decided that it is the worst of the lot.

The second book I’d like to mention is also by Meg Rosoff. What I Was is, again, something of an oddity: its unnamed protagonist is a 100-year old man telling the story of how he fell in love at the age of sixteen. Exiled to a Spartan boarding school on the east coast of England, he sees nothing but mediocrity in store for him until he meets Finn, a strange boy who lives in a fisherman’s hut close to the sea. What follows is a beautifully written and painfully evocative account of their very odd friendship/one-sided romance. The standout scene for me involves Finn and H (as he’s known) taking a kayak out to a submerged Roman fort. Rosoff’s description of the ancient, sunken building has stayed with me since I first read it, and I doubt I’ll forget it any time soon.

I’ll admit that What I Was is not as good as How I Live Now. The plot is meandering yet simple, the main character is not always likeable (although I maintain that main characters don’t need to be likeable in a story like this) and there’s a near-infamous plot twist at the end that almost reverses a lot of the thematic buildup that came before it. There’s also a fairly important side character who I still think was handled very badly. But even if all of those faults were orders of magnitude more serious, they still wouldn’t diminish the strength of Rosoff’s prose or her genuinely brilliant portrayal of obsessive first love. This is the kind of book where plot and pacing almost don’t matter; it is pure emotion on the page.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Goodreads average: an unusually low 3.49. Part of this may have to do with the fact that the book straddles the line between YA and ‘adult’ fiction, although people claimed the same thing about The Hunger Games and still showered it with praise. Apparently a book is allowed to cross publishing categories only if it does so unproblematically, retaining thematic simplicity while adding a smattering of violence.

What bothers me more than the not-great ratings from Goodreads users, though, is the fact that authors like Rosoff are practically unknown compared to the heavy-hitters in YA. Suzannne Collins has become a household name by writing mediocre science fiction, Scott Westerfield has become a household name by writing bad science fiction, and as for the paranormal romance crowd…well, let’s not go there.

I’m not one of those people who chide adults for reading ‘kid lit’ and insist that they go and cleanse themselves with some Faulkner every time they accidentally walk through the YA section of a bookstore. No, I’m one of those people who chides adults for only reading the ‘blockbuster’ children’s titles: Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, if you insist, but why not also Meg Rosoff or Patrick Ness?

It’s because both of those authors are still underrated by YA readers as a whole. Based solely on the quality of their writing, they deserve to be up there with the popular luminaries.