a while.
Riveting stories: Storytelling that absolutely sparkles and makes all those apps on the young adult’s smartphone or tablet nonexistent.
Language: Writing that uses language to paint pictures in the mind and writing that has style and voice (which we delve into in detail in Part 3).
Voice: A unique voice that stands out — arguably the most important element of good YA fiction.
Audience: A clear grasp of the audience and their concerns.Teenagers are serious about their lives, problems, and issues, and people who write for them have to treat the subject matter seriously.
Chapter 3
Exploring the Genres
IN THIS CHAPTER
Genres are the general nature of major children’s book categories. They’re like big buckets into which publishers throw a bunch of books that the authors wrote by using certain similar conventions. For example, mystery is a genre of fiction, as is action/adventure.
In this chapter, we explore many of the various genres in which you can find children’s books. If a distinctive style, form, or content composes the very nature of certain genres, we talk about those, too. We also dip into the series pool, where single characters can take off into multi-book adventures.
Going Out of This World
Some children’s book genres are quite literally out of this world — or at least beyond the conventional, everyday life that most of us are familiar with on this planet we call Earth. You can take a look at some of the most popular of these genres in the following sections.
Science fiction
Writers of science fiction can manipulate settings to fit narratives or make up out-of-this-world settings altogether. Sci-fi writers rely on the utter suspension of disbelief, which is a fancy way of saying that you have to believe what you read, no matter how implausible it may seem. If the writer of science fiction does their job well, they set up the story and characters in such a way that they seem to be describing something that seems familiar enough to the reader because the author bases their fictional time frame on things that already exist today. Science fiction takes existing scientific principles and theories and uses them in the plot. The author wants the reader to take this unreal setting literally, not metaphorically, and you need to make your sci-fi characters believable.
Subgenres of sci-fi include apocalypse, space travel, utopia/dystopia, cyberpunk, first contact, high tech, space exploration, space opera, speculative, steampunk, messianic works, and more. One of my (Peter’s) favorite books when I was in first grade (although it’s hard to find today) was Louis Slobodkin’s The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree (Aladdin).
Writers usually write science fiction for older children, so the formats that work best for it include middle-grade books, young adult books, and graphic novels.
Fantasy
Fantasy relies on the notion that real people in real settings can encounter magical things and can often perform magic. In other words, some people have special powers, whereas others don’t. Fantasy can also involve mythical creatures such as fairies and unicorns, as well as talking animals that may or may not interact with humans. Subgenres of fantasy include urban fantasy, epic fantasy, historical fantasy, paranormal romance, the supernatural, fairy tale retellings, magical realism, high fantasy, sword-and-sorcery tales, and visionary fantasy.
Fantasy is written for children of all ages from, say, three years of age and up, so the formats that work best for it include picture books (see Figure 3-1), early readers, first chapter books, middle-grade books, and young adult books, graphic novels — basically all the formats!
Cover only from The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry & the Big Hungry Bear by Audrey Wood. Illustrated by Don Wood. Copyright © 2020 by Audrey Wood and Don Wood. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
FIGURE 3-1: The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry & the Big Hungry Bear, a classic tale in picture book format.
Great examples of classic contemporary children’s fantasy include Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda (Puffin Books), J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (Scholastic Press), Eva Evergreen by Julie Abe (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), and Curse of the Night Witch by Alex Aster (Sourcebooks Young Readers).
For recently published fantasy examples targeted at young adults, check out Where Dreams Descend, by Janella Angeles (Wednesday Books) and the anthology A Phoenix First Must Burn, by Patrice Caldwell (Penguin Books).
