I have a Q&A in the works with Margo Rabb lately of "I'm Y.A. and I'm O.K" fame as well as a short interview with Jenny Davidson, author of the fabulous YA novel Explosionist. More on both in the next couple of days.

I am also embarking on Week 3 of running - you are all still praying for me right?!

Here's what everyone has been sounding off about so far (If you want me to link, then post a comment or email me):

Little Willow responds to Margo Rabb's article: There are many adults who regularly drop by the YA shelves of bookstores and libraries, myself included. Some of these adults are booksellers, like me, while others are librarians, teachers, or parents - or simply readers who know a good book when they see one and pay more attention to good writing than age branding. While some bloggers and/or book reviewers are professionals who get paid for the time they spend reading and reviewing books, many book bloggers hold whose day jobs or dream jobs may not be related to novels or the publishing industry at all. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Readers come in all shapes, sizes, and ages.

Janni didn't like the article one bit and some of her readers get downright angry: Via much of my reading list, the latest article by a writer who has just discovered YA, and so is going to tell us things we already know, presented as if she's one of the first to learn them.

I was about to cite all the YA-specific reasons for this, but then I realized those reasons don't matter--if you can't approach any genre your book is being published in--YA, adult SF/fantasy, romance, mystery, mainstream, whatever--this way, that's likely not the right genre for you.

Meanwhile, after reading the article, at the new blog Kidliterate Melissa points out something that James Patterson might have missed: James Patterson claims his Maximum Ride books didn’t sell as well as his adult books because “in this country we tend to pigeonhole things� and they were only shelved in the YA section. I hate to break it to him, but they didn’t sell well because he’s writing for the wrong audience. Generally readers of that sort of fantasy tend to be a little younger. Also, according to the kids we know who have read them, they’re not that great. And honestly, what are we talking about here? They all made the NYT bestseller list. Isn’t he already rolling around on cascading piles of cash?

At Random Wonder, Tasses explains why, from a teacher's perspective, age-banding works: The silly little label for age appropriateness, which the US publishers already put in our editions, was one less step in my crazy teaching life. Sure, I know how to perform a readability test on a story, and I was going to pre-read the whole thing anyway, but taking that step out of the equation made sorting to best choice so much easier. By knowing to look for the RL5 or Ages 8-12 label, my task was lessened and I could concentrate on planning lessons to meet the needs of my students. (She has some great points about teaching The Giver at this post.)

Becky points out how you can "find" yourself in books - and thus how negative stereotypes, etc. can really hurt those who need books: With obesity on the rise in America in particular in both kids and adults, it is important to see this reflected in literature. In many types of literature, it is rare to see anything but a perfect heroine. She may be blond, brunette, or redhead. But chances are that she's far from obese. You might have a heroine be a size six or eight and think she's "fat" and have some melodrama thrown in round the lunch table. You might see characters talk about how "awful" their lives are because they're not a size two or a size zero. (I think of the scene in Clueless where one of the characters is bemoaning the fact that she ate a handful of peanut m&ms.) But it's rare to see characters that are really and truly in the overweight category. I hate, hate, hate it when characters make such a big deal about being "fat" when they are anything but. What they are is normal. Size 2? So not normal!

At the YALSA blog Megan wonders where the teen perspective is on all this: As a teen advocate, I value YA literature not just for the enjoyable reading experience it provides for me but for the impact it has on teens’ lives. I’m glad adults are warming up to teen literature, but I also know that publishing is a business and that adults far outweigh teens in buying power. So when I hear adults talk with delight about “discovering� YA books, I’m both pleased and concerned.

How can librarians and educators speak up to publishers about the literary and recreational needs of teens? How can teens advocate for themselves? Or is all publicity good publicity?

At Reading and Breathing, middle school librarian Paige has a rant about teachers: It’s incredibly frustrating to watch a teacher bring in a class to check out books and then to sit down and grade papers while their students wander about aimlessly instead of helping them find books and recommending books that they have read and enjoyed. Now I grant you that it’s my job to help students find books and actually it’s one of my favorite aspects of my job; however, it’s hard when it’s one person helping 28 – 30 – it goes so much better when there are two people helping a class. For one thing we can bounce ideas off each other as we are trying to help students find the “perfect books.� I think it sends an unconscious message to students when teachers don’t read young adult literature – a message that says “your books aren’t good enough for me.� And that, while not illegal, is a crime.

The divine Justine Larbalestier is quite pleased not to have suffered any condescension for writing YA: Also I think the idea of having an adult and a young adult edition of a book (which happens a lot in the UK) screams of not respecting the YA genre. Why would you need an adult edition (which is always the exact same text but—usually—with a different cover) if you felt no shame about reading the young adult version? (Lots of great comments at this one - be sure to read them all.)

TadMack weighs in on how it feels when someone suggests that publishing YA is less than impressive: I struggled for so long to be published anywhere that I was thrilled to tears to be included in the YA pantheon, even on the fringes where my first book lived. It cut me deeply that someone thought it was only "okay," and that I should move on from the one thing I'd wanted my whole life, and ...well, essentially, "grow up." That hurt stayed with me a long time.

This incident was years ago, and the person has since insisted that he didn't mean things badly, but I know what he meant -- it's an opinion that many people share. Writing for kids is viewed as wallowing in childhood. It's embarrassingly non-upwardly-mobile, and it isn't a career builder that's going to get you on Oprah -- and that's the new question, the one which has replaced the gauche query about "something better." "Don't you want to be on Oprah?"

Liz weighs in on the cover issue and the wrong cover can spell doom for a book - no matter the readers age: As you check out the photos with the PRINT article, ask yourself seriously, "would I have checked out the older books as a teen? Would I now? Would teens?" Covers are so, so important; both for kids wanting to read the book, but also for kids being seen reading the book. Which, also, the article points out!

Laurel Snyder shares how it is when you jump from poetry to novels - not everyone is pleased: So no matter how thrilled and excited and happy I am to be writing mg novels and picture books, and no matter how much I believe in these books and have made a choice (the right choice!), I did feel strange the day I realized I couldn’t apply to colonies to work on such projects, because such places only fund ADULT LITERARY writing. And my books, it would seem, aren’t literature now that they come from a children’s imprint. And my books won’t help land me the teaching job I still dream of, because I love teaching…

Honestly, it does still feel weird when I tell people I have this novel coming out and they say, “But you’re still writing poetry, right? Right?�

Ed Champion has a very interesting comment there that I think is worth repeating: But the fact of the matter is that what we do as artists doesn’t always translate into HOW we’re perceived. When we’re finished with a piece of art, it isn’t always ours. It’s given to the world to figure out.

Jen Robinson has an engrossing post on ignoring current titles while focusing on "the good old days", class in current MG and YA fiction and the struggle the kidlit blogs have finding their audience. This is a great post; don't miss it: Seriously? The best solution she can come up with to counteract the messages in Gossip Girl is to go back to 30-year-old literature? I have nothing against offering up the occasional classic to today's kids (if they enjoy it), and I am certainly in favor of providing kids with a diversity of literature about people of all races and classes. But ... hello! There are hundreds of current books that fit the latter description in bookstores and libraries today.

Bennett Madison weighs in with why YA is an important genre that teens need: I read WEETZIE BAT for the first time when I was fifteen. I don't remember what caused me to read it; like I say, I didn't really read YA books when I was in high school. But for whatever reason I read Weetzie Bat, and at the cost of sounding like a jerkoff, it completely changed my life. I think the assigned reading in school at the time was Billy Budd or something along those lines. Billy Budd is admittedly an extremely hot book, but at fifteen it was just not doing it for me or any other person I knew. Weetzie Bat, on the other hand, left me walking around in a daze for a week after I read it. I was exhilarated by the lushness of the world Francesca Lia Block had created and at the same time kind of depressed because that world didn't actually exist. It was the same feeling some of my friends got from certain types of music. Block was my Moz.

I just want to say that Bennett is fabulous and everyone should be reading his books.

Laurie Halse Anderson knows of what she speaks on the subject of modern YA: Idiots don't deserve my time or energy. They are the ones who make grand pronouncements on literature, who believe that the best way to educate a 14-year-old who reads below grade level is to shove Great Expectations down his throat. Then, when the kid says that the book sucks and that all books suck, and he reaches for his game controller, they are shocked and appalled at this horrifying, illiterate generation.

TadMack talks about reviewing and bloggers (with a killer line about the Horn Book blog): Since blog reviewing is, of old, an unpaid position, it really is difficult for a person of good conscience to keep up with the tide, yet most of us will not not review what is sent. Boundaries have to be made, people. And maybe we have to find our voices and be honest -- about the potential for "squishiness," even. We have to rediscover our desire to connect readers with books, and leave it at that.

At I.N.K., Linda Salzman weighs in on how, yes indeed, nonfiction for kids and teens is overlooked and it shouldn't be: Many of the nonfiction books kids would choose on their own are not well suited to quiet independent reading time. When I broke the rules (shhhh) and let the kids pick any book in the classroom for reading time, that’s when the nonfiction really broke out. Kids like to huddle together over the nonfiction books, pointing out photographs to each other and reading interesting facts out loud. Several times some one who had not uttered a word all day came over to me to share something they read they thought was interesting (aka "cool" or "awesome").

My overall conclusion? Kids love well-written, creative, thoughtful nonfiction. Now what do we do about the adults?

I echo this opinion big time. My son is 6 and we read nonfiction all the time. He LOVES it. I'm incorporating more nonfic into my column lately; whenever I can. This is an issue I'll be returning to a lot in the future.

Sarah Rettger takes a look at Newsweek and has a few choice words for the idea that girls serve primarily as "sidekicks" in literature today: I can't fault Ramin Setoodeh too much - it seems like half the pages in the latest issue of Newsweek have his work on them. But perhaps he wasn't the best person to try to put the longevity of Anne of Green Gables into context:

I don't have any BookScan sales numbers in front of me, but here are a few mainstream YA titles featuring "strong heroines" and "smart girls" the author and his expert have overlooked...

She then goes to list a lot of great books and invites others to chime in. All I could think when I read this tough was "Good God - Anne of Green Gables? Are they kidding?????" (I expect Jen Robinson to choke when she reads this one.)

I weighed in on the issue of reviewing and brought up the environmental issue surrounding all those unwanted ARCs: Publishers have been sending out ARCs relentlessly to reviewers for decades. If I'm on track for 1,000 books this year then I can only imagine what the Washington Post is getting. It has to stop and I'm realizing that while it is costing them the most money to maintain this craziness, they still don't seem to get that it is a bad way of doing business. So I think we need to stop it.

And Sarah gave us all a classic toon making a point about on ARCs as well. She also had a bit to say on the subject: But I'm NOT a full-time reviewer. I don't get paid for any of this. I want to be able to give due attention to the books I do write about. I hate having to ignore anyone who was kind enough to send me a review copy simply because I'm swamped with them, but that's what tends to happen when I find myself inundated--it will take me ages to get to the review, which isn't really fair to the person who sent it to me; and it will turn into a chore.

The biggest issue for me was the one of social and economic class depiction in kid and YA literature. I rounded up a lot of stats for this post where I came to this conclusion: There are certainly some excellent books out there today that reflect the current economic situation for the majority of Americans (and I will be posting on some of them next month), but there are not nearly enough. That is what we should be talking about. Why do writers continue to write above the means of the average American kid and why do kids continue to want to read them?

Why must it so often be about the life you do not have, instead of the one you should aspire to?

Gwenda had a post on the subject as well with this to say (among many many other things): It makes me wonder if this if this isn't a result of the poor or slightly-less-poor being edited out of our larger cultural narrative. You see this in the political seasons too, right? Where everyone, regardless of their economic status, is convinced by a certain party that doing away with estate taxes, and etcetera, is really in their best interest. I'm hopeful we won't see that this cycle, because so many people who vote really are hurting, but hopeful isn't the same as convinced. Class is always an undercurrent, but it is rarely engaged with in a direct and honest way.

Liz has a lot of helpful links and thoughts in her post on boy books vs girl books: Here, Dear Readers, is where I see the potential harm for too much labeling of girl/boy books. If a reader such as the one interviewed at Guys Lit Wire approached our desk, would we ever have recommended The Awakening? (Actually, would we ever recommend it, regardless of gender of the asker?) In talking about boy/girl books too much with readers who are at a point in their lives where peers mean everything, do we risk keeping a boy away from a book he would really love because we just called it a girl book?

And finally, the last word to Gwenda againwho nails the YA vs adult thing perfectly: Like Justine, I've rarely encountered these attitudes directly (though I have encountered them occasionally), but I still have no doubt that they exist since people love erecting borders around things and declaring them ghettos.

We do like building fences don't we - even if they are the kind only some of us can see.