Young Adult and New Adult – separate book genres or all part of the same messy package? To be fair, I hadn’t really heard of New Adult as a genre until the last few years. To me, there were children’s books, then YA, and then you were thrown straight into the deep end with adult fiction, each with its own endless subgenres.

Some of my favourite books are YA, including Percy Jackson, Alex Rider, Shadow and Bone, and Radio Silence. But at what point does a YA book become just ‘adult’ then? Is it when the protagonists hit eighteen? When they finish education? Is it to do with themes?

Take Six of Crows, for example. I love that book, but I’ve always found it hard to call it YA. The characters are older, the stakes are higher, and the situations are definitely more mature than your average YA fare. That’s where “New Adult” comes in – a label for stories about the transition from teenager to adult, when you have the independence but not necessarily the experience.

So, why is young adult a more visible genre? I see books marketed as both YA and NA all the time (I do the same with my Power Wielder series). My protagonists are old enough to fit NA, but there’s nothing in the books that would be inappropriate for young adults to read either.

As I’ve now, tragically, passed into my 30s, I find myself gravitating more toward NA than YA. Maybe it’s because YA is so varied – some books are clearly for older teens, while others feel closer to middle grade. The range YA covers is huge, and sometimes the lines get blurry.

So, what do you think? Should New Adult get more recognition as its own genre, or is it all just part of the big, messy YA family?

Let me know your thoughts!