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Post by Hermes on May 29, 2015 9:48:01 GMT -5
I was reading something recently about the way books are assigned to categories, and it became clear that a lot of the time this depends on the age of the protagonist - it's children's if they are a child, YA if they are a teenager, and (old) adult if they are an adult. This seems to me rather weird - readers are quite capable of reading about people of a different age than themselves, and the way books were traditionally sorted depended on themes and manner of telling, not just people's ages - but it does seem to be a policy that publishers often follow.
This got me thinking about Daniel Handler. He has only one book that was actually planned and originally published as YA, Why We Broke Up. But the ASOUE books are often referred to as YA - this may in some cases be because some people call all young people's fiction 'YA', feeling that 'children's' wouldn't be polite, but it may also be because Violet is fourteen (later fifteen). And conversely The Basic Eight, written as (old) adult fiction, is now being republished as YA, since it's about teenagers.
I also wondered if that had actually affected some decisions DH has made in his books. In ATWQ, Lemony is almost thirteen - rather spoiling the continuity, since from TBL you would expect him to be at school later than that - and though it's likely he turned thirteen at the end of the last book, this fact isn't being played up. Might this be to ensure the book isn't reclassified as YA? And on the other hand, could it be that in WAP, the character of Phil - who wasn't mentioned in early accounts of the book - has been played up to make sure it's treated as an adult novel, despite having teenagers in a central role?
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Post by gliquey on May 29, 2015 11:02:43 GMT -5
I had always assumed Lemony's age was chosen just to add another one of the ever-prevalent thirteens in Snicket books, and the "almost" could foreshadow that his thirteenth birthday will happen on some important occasion. (And didn't a preview of ?4 feature Lemony saying he was still "almost thirteen"?) I wouldn't think that this is some conscious attempt by Handler to have the book categorised as 9-12.
Looking at ASOUE, I don't think it would make much difference if Violet and/or Klaus' ages were adjusted up or down a few years (as long as Violet was still under 18). The books are categorised as 9-12 and I began them younger than that; the fact that the protagonists were several years old than me didn't affect how much I enjoyed them, because I wouldn't be on this forum if I didn't still empathise with and enjoy reading about Violet and Klaus. I think it was nice that Klaus turned thirteen in TVV and Violet becoming fifteen worked well for the "V.F.D." balloons (although it would have still worked with "fourteen" and "date" was a bit of a tortured backronym), but other than that, I don't care much about their ages.
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Post by Hermes on May 29, 2015 12:00:33 GMT -5
I had always assumed Lemony's age was chosen just to add another one of the ever-prevalent thirteens in Snicket books, and the "almost" could foreshadow that his thirteenth birthday will happen on some important occasion. (And didn't a preview of ?4 feature Lemony saying he was still "almost thirteen"?) I wouldn't think that this is some conscious attempt by Handler to have the book categorised as 9-12. The clue to his possible change of age is at the end of SYBIS, where L says 'I've been a little lonely all my life: I see now reason why it should stop at age thirteen', and Josephine responds with something he can't catch. Dante very plausibly theorised that this might have been 'Happy Birthday'. The 'almost thirteen' in the preview could have been written by publicists, who one can't expect to catch points like that. Oh, I totally agree that appreciation of the story doesn't depend on characters' ages; it was indeed sold as 9-12, and the design, the illustrations and so on all fit the idea of it as a children's series. But I get the sense the rules are getting more rigid, and it's possible that if he had started now, he wouldn't have been able to sell it as a children's series and yet have a teenage heroine. |
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Post by bandit on May 29, 2015 13:07:16 GMT -5
My local library shelved We Are Pirates in the YA section.
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Post by Dante on Jun 3, 2015 12:19:53 GMT -5
I've often noticed that age categorisation often seems to be done according to the age of the protagonist, sometimes misreading the nature of the book in the process - with a few exceptions; the protagonist of Temeraire is an adult, for instance, but that series seems to be generally skewed towards YA these days, although again, I don't know if that was the original intent. I know that The Belgariad, the epic fantasy series, has been reprinted as YA despite clearly having been originally aimed at the primarily adult epic fantasy market of its period, but that also reflects changing marketing realities - children's and young adult fiction have surged in popularity and really come into their own since the millennium. While Handler I think has indicated that he doesn't necessarily write with an audience in mind, I think it's pretty clear that he didn't imagine We Are Pirates being read primarily by teenagers, for instance, although it is very true that "YA" fiction has embraced such a diversity of topics and tones that there really is nothing that can't be done under its scope, except perhaps to be boring.
As to how this applies to ATWQ, I think that on Handler's end it doesn't; I think that if you tried, as a publisher, to tell him what to do to be more marketable, he would simply ignore it or take his work elsewhere. I don't get the impression he has much truck with talking down to readers, and frankly he's rich enough now to not have to compromise his views in that way to get published. I do think, though, that on a marketing level, ATWQ has suffered by perhaps an internal categorisation of the series as "9-12"; the presentation of the covers, for instance, take the series far less seriously than ASoUE's covers did, and indeed I feel one of the hallmarks of the Snicket style is that it takes itself dead seriously even whilst describing absurd things. And I think this probably hasn't done the series any favours, frankly; hence the recent "deluxe" redesign from a "more commercial angle," File Under not getting published in the U.K., and so on. I don't think consumers are getting the same impression from ATWQ as they did from ASoUE, and I don't think they're getting an accurate impression.
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Post by Hermes on Jun 3, 2015 16:15:54 GMT -5
It's tricky. I think ATWQ clearly comes from the children's book tradition, and is rightly classified as such: if YA means something like WWBU, it isn't YA. And nowadays the children's category is generally taken to end at 12 - I think at one time it was allowed to go up to 14 - so that's the shelf it goes on. This, of course, doesn't mean that it isn't suitable for older readers as well: I have always found the idea that adults shouldn't read children's books ludicrous. But there does seem to be a growing tendency to call everything interesting YA nowadays, which may mean that anything still classified as a children's book is going to be looked down on. (And this will be self-reinforcing; if things classified as children's books aren't appreciated, that leads to them being reclassified as YA, which means that the reputation of children's books declines even more, as all the interesting books flee from the category, which in turn leads to...)
I still think that the 'betrayal' of The End is the main reason why ATWQ isn't as successful as it should be, though.
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Post by Dante on Jun 3, 2015 16:35:55 GMT -5
I have always found the idea that adults shouldn't read children's books ludicrous. Adults write them, edit them, illustrate them, review them - but heaven forbid adults should read children's books for pleasure! I'm sure all of the people involved in a children's book's road to publication are totally disinterested in their subject matter. |
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Post by MisterM on Jun 4, 2015 2:57:14 GMT -5
Not trying to derail the conversation to much, but in reference to that line about lemony being thirteen at the end of SYBIS : I wouldn't be suprised if lemony has actually forgotten his birthday, with all thats going on. Maybe i'm wrong though.
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