And Jen, I had never really thought about the criteria as an effort to encourage publishers to find, publish, and promote more YA books… that does make sense! In addition to helping to manage the reading load, limiting eligible titles to teen-published stuff allows librarians to remove the whole “appeal” question entirely — some adult titles speak more to teens (teens generally, as I generalize wildly some more) than others do, and that’s a difficult conversation to have without talking about appeal.

Also, I still don’t see anyone talking about nonfiction. How is a story about the history of sugar and its relationship to the international slave trade (Sugar Changed the World) about teenagedom in any way? Or a set of accounts of archaelogical digs (Every Bone Tells a Story)?

To me, you can only define these books as teen based on one or more of three things:
1) teen interest/appeal
2) reading level
3) publisher’s categorization

If you want to take out 3, that only leaves us with 1 and 2, which we’ve already discussed as being problematic. That’s why I think we have to keep 3. Maybe it has to be some combination of all three, but I just don’t see anything about the story arc having anything to do with it.

So, I personally have never been able to come up with a satisfying exterior standard, but I have, through the years, seen many attempts to define what YA means, but these are often descriptive rather than prescriptive, oftentimes true to the point of being cliched or hackneyed, until a book comes along and challenges our definition.

I am not trying to get out of discussing any titles. I am wondering if it’s possible to define YA Literature with words rather than age ranges provided by publishers. I am wondering if we can find some kind of exterior standard that will fit the concept of YA Literature. We have the luxury of having this discussion precisely because we are a Fake Committee having Internet Discussion. This seems to me like the very best place to have this conversation.

Take Conspiracy of Kings. You have Sophos who is a poet and not a warrior, who wants to hide away with books and not deal with things military. (Sophos, I get you. Substitute Things Military for The Gym, and we are on the same page.) Suddenly, stuff happens, people invade, life gets in the way and Sophos has to be an adult, or at least try to. And he hasn’t really had to before. He’s been able to hide away in books and not deal with invasions and sword fighting. And maybe his father’s been displeased and unimpressed, but Sophos has had the luxury of making that choice and not having it matter. Up to the invasion where his family dies (or most of his family, right?) the sword fighting has only been practice and hasn’t meant much — until now when it means everything. That actually feels like a good metaphor for teenagedom — when you’re moving back and forth between practicing at being a grown up and not — and then suddenly you find yourself actually working at being a grown up.

(And, OK. It’s not necessarily so sudden for most people, and, really, aren’t we all working at being a grown up, most of the time? A lot of this discussion feels like we’re talking about The Renaissance. Because it’s not like people just looked at a clock or the calendar and said, “hey, it’s Renaissance Time!” the way we might say “It’s Miller Time!” Or the way I have decreed 9:30 “Pie O’Clock.” The Renaissance was big and complicated and was really just lots of people living their lives. It happened in different places at different times, and even so we can generally agree on what it is — enough to have a discussion about it, anyway.)

I definitely don’t mean that the adolescent journey has to involve typically US-ian adolescent trappings in order to count. It just means, to me, that the protagonist has to be trying on grown up roles with some degree of seriousness.

The stakes for Sophos are particularly high, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he’s working, consciously working, at growing up. Which I think is what I mean when I say “the business of adolescence.”

So much to say, and in my post holiday dinner (Christmas and Hannukah, so I am bursting), I’m not actually capable of saying it tonight. But in the meantime, thank you, fake committee members, for challenging and pushing me (and sometimes driving me nuts) but always making me think harder and think again. For all of you in the peanut gallery, this, more than anything, models what it’s like on a committee: passionate, invested people arguing like cats and dogs and finding their way slowly to a winner.

But now to respond to some of Sarah’s rejection of points 1 and 5.

1. You can’t tell us that young adult is about the business of adolesence and then not expect the book to feature adolescents, and in fact most, if not all, YA novels feature them. You’ve mentioned I AM THE MESSENGER (high school graduate) and I’ll toss in Zusak’s other book (THE BOOK THIEF) with a 9-year old protagonist. Incidentally, both of these books were published in their native Australia as adult books, and probably because neither of them are about the business of adolescence. Moreover, while I think the age of the protagonist is greatly overrated, many teachers and librarians tell me otherwise.

5. I agree that an author’s reputation does not indicate anything about the inherent YA-ness of a book, but it can contribute greatly to whether it has a wide audience. We’ve already mentioned Gantos having a fan base that would read this book. I think Laurie Halse Anderson is another example. Wouldn’t her fans try CHAINS/FORGE even if it straddles the border of juvenile and YA just as DEAD END does? Or let me rephrase this point . . . DEAD END IN NORVELT is a YA book simply because it has a YA audience (and that audience is enhanced by Gantos’s YA fan base).

So I reject your rejection of my points. Where does that leave us? Do we have to agree? I don’t think so (see comment above). I don’t really have a unified field theory of YA anyway, but rather a checklist of a couple dozen things, and I would be happy to consider any borderline book that earned several checks.

When we talk about excellent books at the young end of the spectrum, we’re really only talking about a half a dozen books a year, and this year, looking at my compiled best books list, those would include HEART AND SOUL (ages 9 and up), DRAWING FROM MEMORY (ages 10 and up), WONDERSTRUCK (ages 9 and up), DEAD END IN NORVELT (ages 10-14), OKAY FOR NOW (grades 5-8), and ROOTS AND BLUES (grades 3-7). All of these fall partially in the Printz range. These two–AMELIA LOST (ages 8-12) and AROUND THE WORLD (ages 9-12)–do not, but I would be interested in exploring them, probably in discussion on the listserv first, and then possibly with an official nomination. I’m not necessarily saying anything about the chances of any of these books making it into the final five, but since the committee will likely carry three dozen nominations into Midwinter discussion (give or take a dozen) there’s absolutely no reason these books should not be included.

Now since Elizabeth, Mark, and I have forced ourselves onto your Fake Printz Committee, it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, for us to discuss our way to a more workable definition of young adult literature, one that can account for Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series, the Nonfiction Award shortlist, and adult literary fiction masquerading as YA fiction (Mal Peet and Jenny Hubbard). Now if your Fake Printz Committee had a different group that was more agreeable, or if your Fake Printz Committee had a chair that really wanted to put us through this exercise, things might work out differently.

Even so, let’s say the six partial age range books are all nominated, but the two “juvenile” books are not. So we go to Midwinter and discuss them, and find that the committee is split–and not necessarily along the same lines–as to whether each of those books are YA or not. So they stay on the list and we discuss the literary merit of each of the titles, and then move to voting. Most, if not all, of those books will fall out of contention, but for different reasons. Perhaps some people reject them because they are not really YA books, other people do not like those genres, other people will have specific literary problems with each of the titles, and yet others will find that these youngish books simply come up short relative to other books on the list. (I would probably fall in the latter category as DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE, LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM, ANYA’S GHOST, and BOOTLEG are currently vying for the three spots on my ballot). So our Fake Printz Committee would probably not choose any of those borderline books either, but that doesn’t mean we’ve agreed (or that we’ve made a call) on this thorny issue of whether they are YA or not.

I dislike the effort to build a working definition of young adult literature because I feel it is an attempt to avoid discussing certain kinds of books, or if we discuss them we do not focus on their literary merit, but we focus on whether they are really YA or not (or several other things that are irrelevant) and that does a disservice to these youngish books that have every right to Printz consideration under the official criteria. It is an attempt, as Roger Sutton says, to “stay stuck in [your] own criteria rather than having to align [yourselves] to an exterior standard.”