-The recent award-winners, of course!
-The Goose Girl
-The Hunger Games
-The Forest of Hands and Teeth
-Mister Monday
-The Golden Compass

I haven’t read Octavian Nothing yet, but I have a feeling it belongs on the list, as well.

Exactly, Hope. It’s a fallacy that denies a wide range of styles and subject matter in both adult SFF and YA SFF and refuses to see that wide range as a good thing. It’s easy for people to consider sub-categories not just as organizational conveniences but as stereotypical types — all romances are the same, all SFF stories, all mysteries, all YA, etc.

I have not read LeGuin’s Powers, for example. It’s LeGuin, so it’s not like it’s out of left field to be nominated or win, YA or no. I have some regret that Brasyl didn’t take the award instead, and I can understand that some people would be annoyed and feel that the two works are not comparable to each other. But whether short or thick, YA or adult, dark or not dark, a story is a story and should have an equal chance at the major SFF awards. And having a lot of YA SFF that many are finding intriguing and valuable has innumerable benefits for adult SFF, not the least of which is that many authors write both.

KatG@93,

If that is really how the argument goes, then I can understand the grumblers’ position. I could even agree with it . . . if I didn’t know so much YA that was more the moody, twisty, daring, indie stuff and if it wasn’t exactly that kind of YA that’s snagging the awards.

And to Rick all the way back at 58

I know you are trying to play devil’s advocate, but I’ll pick up your gauntlet. If someone nominated Shaun Tan’s book The Arrival for a Nebula, I’d vote for it. Not in the novel category, but I bet there’s somewhere it would fit just fine.

I read some of the BEST books I’ve ever encountered in that class. The people who took it thinking the reading would be easy, or the reading list shorter, were quite disappointed. I clapped my hands when I found my cache of books from that class the other day and immediately socked about five of them on the shelf of to-read-agains.

I’m 28 years old and I read Justine Larbalestier and Louise Rennison with a fannish fervor. Why? They write good books with characters I care about. Is being a grown woman who reads about freshmen in high school a bad thing? I don’t think so. It hasn’t stopped me from reading anything else I like, and it’s my quick and easy reading. And sometimes it kicks me in the ass by being not easy at all. I was on my couch just the other night crying like a baby over the end of “Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush.” I don’t remember the last time a book aimed at adults was able to do that to me.

YA was just starting to be a genre when I was a kid. But I am frankly envious of everything that kids growing up now have to read that’s aimed at them. Feed by M.T. Andersen? Kicked ass. Didn’t know it was a “teen” book until after I got it home.

I personally love the fact that my bookstore lady has “award-winning” YA to point out to parents who know little Susie really likes Harry Potter and Twilight but want her to broaden out her reading some. So much more the better if the awards aren’t for outstanding books for kids but outstanding books, period. Because I’d dearly love to see little Susie not drop the whole “reading” thing as a fad now that Meyer isn’t going to release her last “rape is love, aren’t vampires nice & sparkly” epic.

Looking at those numbers, I imagine the older sf/f crowd is burning with envy.

My kids are on to you. When I found I could place books on hold at the local library from home via the internet; the library would autodial our phone number to let me know the books were available. My sons (teens then) would always give me the message by saying “Your pusher called.” Now they e-mail me but my now-teen daughter, as well as her brothers roll their eyes (and we get nagged by the firefighter about the dangerousness posed by these books) at the stack of books on the stairs and the nightstand and….