So lately I’ve had several book recommendations here and in other subreddits for novels or audiobooks that sounded great, but when I pursued them, I found these were young adult novels. Despite long discussion threads, no one mentioned this.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the occasional YA book. But it seems like something people should mention it is YA, like you might mention if something was softcore. It makes me wonder: Is this is not a big deal to people? Or do people not even realize these are YA?
The most recent was Red Rising, which was suggested as an audio book recommendation. One comment mentioned that they found this after looking for something like Game of Thrones . This is a fun book, and the audio narrator is great, but it is definitely YA and nothing like Game of Thrones, lol.
Anyway, just a thought…
Within the communities of adults who still read a lot of YA (and the most YA-adjacent SFF) there is a pretty strong insistence that YA is no different than any other kind of fiction - gotta wonder what the appeal to them is if that’s the case - and, if you dig at all, a real defensiveness about being judged for still reading a kind of books that some people think of as a deliberately adolescent style they ought to have outgrown. Neither of those things incline anyone involved to identify this stuff in their recommendations.