So I’m a bookworm right? I’ve been a bookworm my whole life so obviously I’ve developed some very strong opinions about writing and books in general. as I’ve gotten older I’ve read books with higher age ratings- namely, young adult. I’ve noticed some problems with the YA genre and the overall quality of YA books. YA stands for young adults so naturally you would think ages 18 to 25- people who are ADULTS. But in reality it’s not exactly that way. YA books end up appealing to a range of people. Sometimes people who are 13 , 14, 15, people who aren’t even adults yet. Sometime it is 18-25 . So when you’re picking up a young adult book you don’t know if you’re getting something appropriate for 15-year-olds, or if you’re getting like full on rated R stuff. This is frustrating to me to no end because in a lot of the inappropriate books you can’t tell from the blurb and also this explicit content isn’t necessary to further the plot of the book. And it’s just exhausting to never be able to find books that are both appropriate and well written. This brings me to the second part- the quality of YA books. Anybody can publish a book these days regardless of quality- just cause they can get it published doesn’t mean it’s good. In dystopian area of YA it feels like no one has a original ideas after the hunger games and divergent. Every idea is just a mashup of a lot of dystopian stuff that came before or, if it is an original idea, the characters are incredibly similar. the same love triangles are not necessary even the love interest is not necessary in a book. A strong female heroine can be a strong female heroine without a bunch of dudes fawning over her. She doesn’t need a dude to make her stronger and you know what- it was fine the hunger games, but that doesn’t mean everyone should take that as a green flag to be like “well we gotta have two hot dudes”and you know what they’re always like the same kind of personalities- there’s like the mysterious dark and, reckless one of them there’s the uptight noble one. read fourth wing or lightlark and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The other thing is that noticed is that in many books the plot starts pretty solid. Then once the romance gets involved the book just completely forgets that there’s plot. case point here is shatter me which was supposedly a great book. Very excited about it. Love the author, but like 50% of the way through, she decided that “you know no plot anymore. We’re just gonna have romance.” lately, I’ve gone back and reread a lot of books that I’d read up to like two years ago just because I can’t find anything that pulls my interest. there’s not a lot of things that I find very compelling to read anymore,and a lot of the BookTok books are actually not that good because those are more following an algorithm with dark fantasy, dark romance, kind of vibes and less character driven + plot driven . also I have gotten very tired of these female MC’s. They are always reportedly very strong and like ready to fight people but when you listen to them, they’re very whiny and they’re always waiting for a dude to save them. not trying to offend anyone here but I am so tired of the quality of books rn. -aster
