Paranormal Romance Blog

Rachel Vincent is the author of two paranormal series: Shifters, an urban fantasy series from MIRA Books, and the brand-new Soul Screamers series for Harlequin TEEN. Rachel joins us today to blog about the first Soul Screamers book My Soul to Take and the differences between her adult and YA books…

by Rachel Vincent, author of My Soul to Take and the free eBook prequel My Soul to Lose

One of the questions I’ve been asked the most since I started writing YA is, “What’s the difference between young adult and adult books?” Is it content? Tone? Language? Age of the characters?

It’s a little bit of all of that, but not wholly any of it.

The truth is that young adult fiction ranges just as broadly across genre, subject matter, and content rating as adult fiction does. In the YA section of your local bookstore, you can find clean cut, girl spy action/adventure books next to dark, gritty, post-zombie-apocalypse novels and lush, Victorian-era society sagas. Some of these books aim for the younger tween/teen audience, while others target the older teen/college age range. 31 Flavors-everyone has a favorite.

But since I’m hardly an authority on the subject, I’m going to answer the question regarding the difference between my own adult and YA novels.

I write two difference series: the Shifters novels and the Soul Screamers series. Shifters is an adult urban fantasy series about a twenty-three year old female werecat named Faythe Sanders, who’s trying to carve her own path in life and to better the political system from the inside. Because of the world Faythe lives in, her stories are violent, and passionate, and gritty. She makes mistakes, and she makes enemies, but she also makes friends and would die fighting to protect them, if she had to.

The Soul Screamers books are a YA series about a high school junior named Kaylee Cavanaugh, who discovers (in the first book) that she’s actually a bean sidhe (banshee). Not only can she predict death with a brain-rattling scream, she can help prevent it under certain circumstances-for a very scary price.

Regarding content, my books fall in line with what you might expect-but not for the obvious reasons. If they were movies, the Shifters books would be rated R for violence, language, and sexual content, while the Soul Screamers would only be PG 13. While some of that is because of the target audience–I’m not comfortable writing open-door sex scenes in YA–it really has more to do with the world-building and individual abilities unique to each series/character.

Unlike Faythe, Kaylee doesn’t have great physical strength or reflexes. She does have a unique ability, but it is not physical or offensive in nature, so her particular talent actually leaves her more vulnerable to the things that go bump in the night than are most humans, who go largely unnoticed. Kaylee’s world requires someone who can outwit the bad guys, so her assets are a quick mind and a big heart. So the Soul Screamers books have much less physical violence in them than the Shifters books do.

But Kaylee’s world–even the human half–is not sterile, because the real world is not sterile. Sex, and drugs, and colorful language, and violence are not deep dark mysteries kept shrouded until that magical eighteenth birthday. They are a daily reality, and ignoring them in books meant for the older YA crowd will not stop teens from being exposed to them. But it may keep them from reading the books. Teenagers are a very smart, skeptical audience–that much hasn’t changed since I was in high school–and they know when adults are faking it. When the pristine characters they’re reading about are more of a fantasy than are the actual magic powers, the book loses relevance.

What does that mean regarding content? That my YA characters see/discuss sex, drugs, and violence–even the ones who don’t participate in any of it. And they do occasionally cuss, because… well, have you heard teenage conversation lately?

So what about tone? Well, let me put it like this: my Shifters series (adult) is about life. Clinging to it, fighting for it, enjoying it, making the most of it, and sometimes flaunting it. But my young adult series is about death. The Soul Screamers books are dark, and while I like to think I balance that out with a strong ray of hope, the good guys don’t always win, and the consequences in Kaylee’s world are very real–and very permanent.

Language? This is a tricky one. A delicate balance. Teen readers are smart (yes, I said it twice-because it’s true). They don’t need narration fed to them point-blank in one-syllable words and in fact, would probably be insulted by that. They understand context clues even if they don’t know the actual SAT word they’ve just read–or realize that they’ve just learned a new one. This is no different with adults. So I don’t “dumb down” my narration for teen readers. But at the same time, teens don’t speak like adults. Not even like adults still in their late twenties. So while the narration has quite a bit of freedom, the dialogue does not. Teenagers should speak like teenagers. And they should think like teenagers. Period. Trust me–I learned this the hard way.

The age of the characters-this one seems pretty straightforward, and for the most part, it is. YA books are almost always about teenagers, worrying about teenage things, even if those things are cloaked in the guise of urban fantasy. But YA characters’ ages can also branch into the college years, or, in the case of certain immortal/long-lived creatures, into previous centuries. And the other side of that coin is that sometimes adult books are about or narrated by teens and children, even if the target audience is neither. Remember Stephen King’s It, and The Body? Or The Long Walk? Laura Lippman’s Every Secret Thing?

So honestly, the difference between YA and adult literature is less well defined now than it’s ever been, but YA has never been more popular, with either teenagers or adults. Why is that? It’s because of those 31 flavors. Whatever you’re looking for, you can find it in YA.

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