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…
When you ask for a recommendation, essentially you are asking people what they like. YA novels are fairly popular, including with adult audiences. So it is completely unsurprising that, when you ask for recommendations from a broad audience (like r/books or any moderate-sized to large sub), you will get YA recommendations.
The smart thing to do when asking for recommendations is to not only mention things you like, but also things you don’t like/don’t want (such as YA).
That should help, but is complicated by the fact that there is not a clear definition of what constitutes a YA novel (e.g. you declared that Red Rising is “definitely YA” while many comments in this thread have stated that it is not, with varying degrees of certainty).