If you are a book lover of a certain age, you may have spent a lot of time reading authors like Judy Blume, Paula Danziger, Gary Paulsen, or Christopher Pike when you were a teenager. Although books began to be categorized as ‘young adult” as early as the 1960s, when we were teens we didn’t know that, and we certainly didn’t care what the boring grownups were calling the books we gravitated to.

While it blows our minds to think that it has been 30+ years since the end of the 80s and early 1990s, a lot has changed in the book publishing industry since the time when we were young adults. Young adult literature is everywhere and has many subgenres, including dystopian, romance, and historical fiction.

Our guest this week, Mindy Jett, is a self-professed book nerd who still gravitates toward YA fiction even though she has teenagers of her own. She talks about how reading YA is just like immersing yourself in a sci-fi world or a different time period except it is the world from a teen perspective. We discuss how reading YA fiction has given her more insight into her own children, and how much nostalgia from her own childhood plays into her love of books from that era.

This is our last regular episode of 2020. Next week we will have a wrap-up episode where Carrie and I discuss some of our favorite books of the year that we overlooked during past episodes. Then we will take several weeks off for the holidays but will be back in early January to start season 4 with a whole new crop of cool and interesting bookish guests.

Books mentioned--