Growing Up without YA

I know that this being Sunday means this post technically isn't within the past week, but I'm still gonna post it, 'cause I haven't posted anything all week. :)

So I read a blog post by Natalie Whipple over on her blog (click here) about why she's glad YA is girl-centric and the types of books she read when she was growing up, and it got me thinking about my own experience with YA fiction growing up. I've only been out of high school for six years (though sometimes it seems a lot longer), so I had a few more options when it came to YA than some other, more experienced writers and bloggers. And yet, there wasn't a lot of strong writing in the genre, even then.

Harry Potter was published when I was in middle school, but I didn't read it until I was almost finished with college. Twilight was published in my second year in college, though I avoided it until I had graduated. When I was younger, in early middle school and into high school, there just wasn't a lot of good YA writing out there. I stumbled across Tamora Pierce's writing in middle school and ate it up. It was exactly the type of writing I'd been looking for since I read The Chronicles of Narnia. She gave me a strong fantasy with a strong female protagonist. After I read all of her books, I went searching for more; I was a voracious reader after all, and I had to feed my habit.

The problem was that, growing up, there just wasn't much good writing for teenagers then. It wasn't until I got into college that YA really began to take off. Then, there was this explosion and now, there's more YA than I know what to do with. Which is a lovely problem to have for a person who reads as much as I do. There is an abundance of strong girls in great books. There are a few middle school girls that I talk with at my church and I'm always so happy when I can recommend some good YA books to them, because when I was their age, there weren't really any. And I love giving book recommendations, so having books to recommend is wonderful.

So yeah, that's my thoughts on the whole YA thing. I love that there are strong females in abundance now, and I hope that one day my own leading ladies will be counted among them.