Young adult literature–YA lit–came into the 21st century on a high note. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Walter Dean Myers’s Monster, and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower all published in 1999. Many of the authors we’ve come to know and associate with YA, including Sharon Flake, Jacqueline Woodson, and Sarah Dessen, were establishing their careers before the calendar brought us into the 2000s. But the 2000s have been an era when YA books have grown not only in quantity but also in quality. Those early books, alongside the decades of evolution from the “first” of many “first” YA books, helped establish the importance of literature for teen readers.
The 2000s is where the category began to truly spread its wings. We saw more attention paid to comics for teen readers, as well as the establishment of awards honoring the best debut YA novels and YA nonfiction. We saw books about shiny vampires and overthrowing authoritarian governments capture the attent...
English (US)