My girlfriend has a fellowship this summer to work with children and their parents, reading and discussing a variety of young adult fiction. She gave me one of the scheduled chapter books, "Skellig," which I read in a few hours of intense young-adult-like fascination. It's an interesting mix of spooky and sentimental, and I won't say too much about it lest I will give it away. But it involves strange figures in broken down shacks and attics filled with owls.
What distinguishes young adult fiction from adult fiction? There's definitely more of a black and white approach to literature written for young adults, but that's not to say something can't necessarily be literary. There are some fantasical/spooky novels that have a lot of critical respect. ("Skelleg" would fall solidly in the gothic category of literature.) At one point the children are having a discussion about pomegranates and their many seeds. They muse that if all the seeds in one pomegranate became trees and then all the seeds in the pomegranates that grew on that one tree became trees of their own the world would quickly become covered by pomegranate trees. Then there is a theme woven through the book about Persephone, the mythological figure who spent six months a year in the underworld due to her consumption of six pomegranate seeds. Both of these themes would fit right into a literary novel, and I think it's important as an adult reader of young adult fiction to recognize that (just like in adult fiction) some books are better than others.
