Unpopular Opinions About YA Books That Might Start a Fight

Young adult fiction gets dismissed by a certain kind of reader as a lesser category almost by default — simpler prose, simpler stakes, a genre you graduate out of once your taste matures. That framing survives mostly because the people repeating it haven’t argued with anyone who reads YA seriously, because the readers who do read it seriously argue about it constantly, with the same granularity and stubbornness as readers of any other category. The dead parent, the present-tense narration, the twist you saw coming, the heroine who cries instead of fights, the verse novel that “isn’t really a book,” the fact that half of YA’s readership has a driver’s license — all of it gets litigated, book by book, with real disagreement about what’s craft and what’s crutch.

The six takes below push back on complaints that have hardened into consensus faster than the evidence supports. None of them argue that every YA book nails these choices — plenty don’t. They argue that the choices themselves get blamed for failures that belong to specific books, and that’s a harder distinction to hold onto than the discourse usually bothers with.

Dead and Absent Parents Aren’t a Lazy Trope — They’re How YA Buys Its Protagonist Room to Act

The dead, absent, or otherwise removed parent shows up so often in YA that readers treat it as a punchline — Harry Potter’s parents murdered before the story starts, Percy Jackson raised by a single mother with an absent godly father, Katniss Everdeen’s father dead in a mine collapse and her mother checked out from grief, Lyra Belacqua in His Dark Materials raised by neither parent at all. The joke is that authors can’t be bothered to write functional families, so they clear the board instead.

What the joke skips is the actual problem a YA plot has to solve: a story about a teenager’s choices mattering needs that teenager operating with real authority over their own life, and a present, competent, attentive parent is structurally opposed to that. A capable adult in the house either solves the danger the plot depends on, or has to be written out of every single scene through some contrivance flimsier than just removing them at the start — called away, distracted, disbelieving, conveniently upstairs. Removing the parent upfront is the more honest version of the same move a hundred adult thrillers make when they send the protagonist somewhere isolated and cut off the phone signal. It’s not an absence of imagination. It’s clearing the one obstacle that would make the rest of the plot impossible.

The trope fails when the removal is unmotivated and nothing in the story acknowledges the hole it leaves — when a dead parent is set dressing instead of a wound. It succeeds when the book knows exactly what it took away and makes the protagonist carry that weight, the way The Hunger Games keeps Katniss’s grief and her mother’s collapse present in every decision she makes about who gets to depend on her. Complaining that YA “always kills the parents” mistakes a load-bearing structural choice for a failure of craft.

Present-Tense, First-Person Narration Isn’t a Fad — It’s the Right Tool for a Teenager’s Interiority

Present-tense narration became so common in YA after The Hunger Games and Divergent that it started getting mocked as a trend authors chase rather than a deliberate choice — readers roll their eyes at “I walk into the room” the way they once rolled their eyes at first-person narrators generally, treating it as a stylistic tic imitated because it sold rather than because it does anything the past tense doesn’t.

That complaint misses what present tense is actually doing. A past-tense narrator, by definition, already knows how the story ends — they’re narrating from a vantage point after the events, which quietly implies survival, resolution, perspective the character doesn’t yet have inside the story itself. Present tense removes that implied safety net. Suzanne Collins didn’t choose it for The Hunger Games as a stylistic flourish; she chose it because Katniss narrating an arena death match in the present tense means the reader doesn’t get the reassurance a past-tense frame quietly offers, that the narrator lived to tell it in a settled, retrospective voice. Veronica Roth’s Divergent and Marie Lu’s Legend use the same tense for the same reason: YA is a genre fundamentally about characters discovering who they are while they’re still in the middle of becoming that person, and present tense is the grammatical version of that unfinished state.

It isn’t the only valid choice — plenty of excellent YA runs in the past tense, including Harry Potter and The Fault in Our Stars, and the past tense does its own work there. But “present tense” isn’t shorthand for lazy or trendy prose. It’s a tense selected because it matches what the genre is trying to simulate: a character who doesn’t have hindsight yet, because the story hasn’t given them any.

A “Predictable” Twist Isn’t Automatically a Flaw — YA Often Plays Fair for Readers Meeting the Trick for the First Time

Adult readers who return to YA after years of reading widely love pointing out how early they clocked the villain, or how the “shocking” reveal was obvious from chapter three. Professor Quirrell’s turban in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Luke Castellan’s resentment building across Percy Jackson and the Olympians before his betrayal, the faction-system twist in Divergent — all get cited as proof that YA plotting is thinner than adult fiction, easier to see through, less sophisticated in its misdirection.

What that complaint leaves out is who the book was actually written to surprise. A twist can only be judged against the reader it’s built for, and a huge share of YA’s core audience is encountering the shape of these twists — the red herring, the trusted mentor with a secret, the loyal friend radicalized off-page — for the first time in their reading lives. A book that plants real, fair clues rather than hiding them behind narrative sleight of hand is doing exactly what a mystery is supposed to do: giving an attentive reader the chance to solve it before the reveal. That the clues also work on a first-time twelve-year-old reader and a well-read adult who’s spotted the pattern across two hundred other books isn’t a contradiction — it’s the twist succeeding at fair play for the audience actually reading it for the first time.

The twist genuinely fails when it isn’t earned by the clues at all, when it depends on information the book withheld rather than planted. But an adult recognizing a well-planted pattern early isn’t evidence of a bad twist. It’s evidence that the adult has read enough books to have outgrown the demographic the clues were built to surprise, which was never a knock on the writing to begin with.

The Backlash Against “Not Like Other Girls” Went Too Far — Punishing Soft, Girly Heroines Isn’t Feminist Progress

For a stretch of the 2010s, YA and its adjacent romance shelves ran hot with tomboyish, stoic, reluctantly-heroic girls who didn’t want makeup, didn’t want romance getting in the way of the plot, and made a point of distancing themselves from more traditionally feminine girls around them — Katniss Everdeen refusing to perform softness even under the Capitol’s makeover, Tris Prior choosing Dauntless bravado over Abnegation’s quieter domesticity. Readers eventually, correctly, called out the pattern for what it often was: girls being coded as interesting only in proportion to how much they rejected femininity, with “girly” implicitly meaning shallow.

The correction was overdue. But the backlash against “not like other girls” has, in plenty of BookTok and Goodreads discourse since, curdled into its own opposite problem — a reflexive suspicion of any heroine who is soft, romantic, emotionally expressive, or invested in traditionally feminine things, as though those traits are now the tell of a poorly written character rather than the exact trait the earlier critique was defending. Lara Jean Song Covey in Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is unapologetically sentimental, writes love letters, cares about baking and matching outfits, and cries when she’s overwhelmed — and the book treats every one of those traits as a legitimate personality rather than a flaw to overcome on the way to becoming someone tougher. Cath in Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl is anxious, homebody, deeply uncool by conventional teen-heroine standards, and the book never asks her to file down those edges to be worth rooting for.

Punishing softness was never actually the feminist position — the feminist position was that femininity shouldn’t be a prerequisite or a disqualifier for being taken seriously as a character. A genre that swapped one mandatory personality template for its exact opposite hasn’t fixed the problem. It’s just moved which kind of girl gets told she’s not enough as written.

Verse Novels Aren’t a Shortcut — the White Space Is Doing as Much Work as a Full Paragraph Would

Verse novels get a specific, condescending flavor of dismissal that prose YA rarely receives: that they’re a workaround for reluctant readers, padded out with line breaks to look longer than the word count actually is, an easier book dressed up as a literary one because it takes an afternoon instead of a week to finish. “It’s basically a poem, not a novel” shows up often enough in reviews of books like Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X and Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down that it functions almost as a genre-wide asterisk.

That dismissal treats white space as absence rather than as a compositional choice doing real work. Long Way Down compresses an entire ride down an elevator — sixty seconds of a teenager’s life — into a book-length meditation on cyclical violence precisely because the verse form lets Reynolds slow down and dilate a single moment the way prose paragraphs, built for continuous narration, structurally resist. The Poet X’s line breaks aren’t padding; they’re breath, the pacing of a girl who’s discovering slam poetry as the only register that can hold what she isn’t allowed to say out loud at home. Cut either book down into paragraph form and you wouldn’t get the same book with different formatting — you’d lose the actual mechanism doing the emotional work, the same way converting a screenplay into prose loses what the white space of a script page was doing.

Word count was never the right way to measure a book’s difficulty or seriousness in the first place — plenty of dense two-hundred-page prose novels do more than bloated six-hundred-page ones. Verse novels just make that fact impossible to ignore, which is closer to why they get dismissed than any real deficiency in the form.

Adults Reading YA Doesn’t Steal It From Teens — Crossover Success Means the Stakes Are Legible, Not That the Books Were Secretly for Adults

YA’s adult readership is enormous — surveys of the category have found the majority of YA buyers are adults, not teenagers — and that fact gets weaponized from two directions at once. Literary gatekeepers use it to argue adults reading YA are avoiding harder, more sophisticated fiction. A different, newer strain of the argument runs the opposite way inside fandom itself: that a book’s adult popularity proves it was never really written for teens to begin with, that the “YA” label is just marketing, and that teenage readers are being crowded out of a category that’s supposedly theirs.

Both arguments misread what crossover success is actually evidence of. The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, and The Fault in Our Stars didn’t attract adult readers because the books smuggled in adult themes under a YA cover — they attracted adult readers because grief, first love, systemic injustice, and the fear of not becoming who you’re supposed to be are stakes that don’t stop being legible once you turn twenty. A book working for a wider audience than its marketing category isn’t proof the category was fake. It’s proof the emotional stakes were built well enough to travel past the demographic line publishers drew around them for shelving purposes, not storytelling ones.

None of that requires teen readers to share anything with adult readers beyond the book itself. The audience a book was written for and the audience it reaches are related but not identical categories, and a YA novel doing right by its teenage readers loses nothing when it also lands with readers twice their age. The category was never a locked room. It was always a doorway.

What the Discourse Around YA Keeps Getting Wrong

Every take above shares the same shape: a real, specific craft failure — an unmotivated dead parent, a present tense used for no reason, a twist with no planted clues, a soft heroine written as a punchline instead of a person, verse used as filler instead of form, a book that leans on adult nostalgia instead of earning its stakes — gets generalized into a rule applied to every book carrying the same label, whether or not that particular book earned the criticism.

YA absorbs this kind of flattening more than most categories because it’s easy to talk about the genre as a monolith defined by its age bracket rather than as thousands of individual books making individual choices. The more useful habit, here as everywhere else in genre fiction, is asking what a specific book is doing with a structural choice rather than whether the category is allowed to make that choice at all. That question is slower than repeating the consensus complaint. It’s also the only way to actually tell a dead parent that’s doing real narrative work from one that’s just set dressing — instead of writing off a shelf that includes some of the most emotionally exact fiction being published, on the strength of its laziest examples.

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Keep track of every YA book that proved the discourse wrong — and every trope you’ll defend to the death — in Bookdot.

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