I was recommended **Lightlark** \-the new fae book obsession. I saw the author’s interviews online and read up to chapter 8. The visuals were not that imaginative or just weren’t detailed enough for me.
All these fae based books have a protagonist who has brown hair who has no powers, falls in love with the night/emo/dude in black and the big twist at the end of the book is the girl is more powerful than anyone else in the book. It’s like……I know there are no new ideas but, I’m so done with YA fiction.
by Just_Listen4931
29 Comments
Maybe don’t judge an entire genre by whatever mass market book has picked up hype in the algorithm?
could part of the problem be that you are not a young adult anymore?
Lightlark isn’t even a fae book.
You do know their target audience is teens, right?
I’m guessing you’re aging out of it, rather than it getting worse.
I don’t see much difference in the YA fiction offerings these days compared to the 00s when I was a teen.
Perhaps you have aged, my child.
YA novels have always been terrible, you’ve just developed higher standards.
Read other genres in YA? I mean, twilight is a lot worse than stormlight archive.
Hunger games is a lot better than fourth wing.
The quality hasn’t changed, there are good books and bad books.
“Children’s clothes just don’t fit like they used to…”
It’s just what tik-tok book community likes. Last year, I also bought Lightlark because it suddenly got crazy popular, and I thought it must be good. Well, I wasn’t able to finish even the first chapter. Same with Fourth Wing -> I didn’t get past the second page (but at least I didin’t buy that one; I was able to try it during a trial on a ebook/audiobook app)
But I wouldn’t say it’s the problem of all YA fiction. There are good books, and there are bad books. Just for some reasong book-tok loves the badly written fae romances. Adult fantasy romances can also be bad.
Rule #1 about books and the arts is that there is a survivorship bias. There were some fantastic books years and decades ago. But they were also buried under piles of crap published at that time as well.
Give it time for the cream to rise to the top.
They were never good
Probably a combination of aging out and survivorship bias. Sure there’s not a Wizard of Earthsea or Ender’s Game coming out every year, but those books also are some of the only YA books even remembered from their time.
Is it that YA books are getting worse or is it that with almost any genre, 95% of it is bad, 4% is good, and 1% is genuinely great? Keep in mind that there is a fuck load of forgotten YA fiction because the only ones that are remembered for any length of time are the “great” ones (putting great in quotes because that’s obviously subjective).
Source: I’m a horror fan, I’ve seen/ read a LOT of garbage
YA hasn’t been good since 2016. You do the math on why…
Popular modern novels tend to be really schlocky, but I think that has always been the case in the YA genre. The vampire books sucked too and were criticized the same way when they were new.
You’re reading books for kids as an adult, idk what you expected
I mean, when I was in the YA target demographic, there were books that were complete gems and those that were utter trash.
Pretty sure that’s still the case. The Girl Who Drank the Moon is pretty dang recent and it’s up there with the best of them.
You’ve just described harry potter but with more romance. The chosen one trope is not new, it’s a staple of books for teenagers.
You don’t need to read that genre? I’ve recently been getting into YA gay romcoms, which tend to be cute and pretty dumb, but really relaxing as well
Wasn’t Lightlark that book that had the huge controversy because the author supposedly had “hundreds of rejections” and calling herself a rags-to-riches self-made author when the pitch for Lightlark went viral and she got a publishing deal and a movie deal and then it turned out she had loaded parents who subsidized her career?
I had to stop reading most YA, but it isn’t all bad. Anything focused on romance is out but there is other sci-fi and fantasy that features teen protagonists and the stories are still good. For romantasy I’m solidly moved on to protagonists in their 30s.
Back in 2010 there were a lot of YA books were about a human girl falling in love with a vampire, inspired by Twilight.
Back in 2012 there were a lot of YA books were about a common girl finding herself the center of a revolution in a dystopian world, inspired by THG.
Back in 2014 there were a lot of YA books about a geeky guy falling in love with a quirky manic pixie dream girl, inspired by John Green.
In all of these, there were great books, and another chunk of them of questionable quality.
This is the current trend in YA fiction, probably brought upon by SJM and other similar authors in 2016. It’s been long-lived yes, but I would attribute that more to the fact that the fae fantasy tropes you mentioned can be placed in a lot of time periods, places, and situations. Add to that the boom of tiktok, trope-based reading, and a refusal of those YA readers from 2012 to move fully into adul, thus leaving YA in a weird in between that doesn’t grow on depth.
Maybe you have aged out of it, too. I realized I was no longer feeling the YA books in 2021. Sadly it happens. And a lot of the times, books become trendy for familiarity more than quality.
YA books have never been good. You’re finally grown up enough to realize it. Congratulations.
Of course there are good books in every genre but YA has always just been simple, predictable romance stories that leap onto trends but try to give it a small twist. Usually an extra special female protag, a powerful ‘monsterous’ man that has feelings only for her, and some kind of horrific social system that she solves while at the same time getting the guy. Its read by late teens and underdeveloped women. Always has been.
Doesn’t sound particularly different from YA 10 years ago. You just don’t enoy it as much anymore, which is fine.
There’s definitely still excellent YA out there. The Aurelian Cycle series by Rosaria Munda is fantastic if you want a recent fantasy YA series. But also you could just be aging out of reading YA. I’m definitely a lot pickier about YA now than when I actually was a teen.
Book Tok has made reading A Thing again (at least, according to Corporations worshiping the Algorithm), so the market is being flooded with a lot Works Of Questionable Quality that probably didn’t get enough time being edited, as a cash grab. There’s still a lot of good in there, but also a lot of bad or mediocre.
There’s probably the same amount of Quality YA, it’s just harder to find when you got so much flooding the market, and things becoming popular not through organic word-of-mouth, but publishers pushing certain titles hard with influencers and the like. There are a lot of questions about Lightlark’s rise to infamy, and it wasn’t particularly well liked by a lot of reviewers, so you’re not alone in feeling that. [Personally I didn’t feel like the plot made any sense, world-building was bad, and there was a lot of ham-fisted cliches; cliches can be done well, I just don’t think Lightlark did that.]
While I feel their might be a slight downturn in the overall quality of books in recent years, I also think a LOT of things have gone down in quality across industries (clothing, movies/TV, prepackaged food, etc). I don’t think it’s simply YA fiction in particular.
I was never a hunger games fan as a kid, I read the books but just never really got into them. I read them again for my senior seminar in college and I think it’s unironically a super good book. It was only downhill from there
It’s probably more of a sign that you’re growing out of them.