Sixteen-year-old Julie Gross knows what she likes: rain, vintage clothing, Tori Amos, journal writing and, especially, books. The Santa Monica High School student says she likes "a wide variety of genres" but prefers "real-life stories, things I can relate to."
Her taste might be merely a curiosity, except for one detail: What Julie thinks about what she reads influences teenagers across the country. She is a member of the Teen People Book Club's "Review Crew," one of 21 teens paid to write book reviews for the club's Web site and catalog.
"We hear so much that teens don't read, that they aren't interested, but clearly that's not the case," says Laurie Calkhoven, editorial director of the club, a collaborative partnership between Teen People magazine and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Since the club launched last year, industry sources say, it has enrolled nearly a million members, who buy books from the club's Web site and catalog.
Julie and the rest of the review crew are part of a marketing force that in the last six years has transformed literature for young adults--the market description for 12-to-18-year-olds--into a $1.5-billion industry. Seven years ago, the book world was wondering whether such literature would survive. But by increasing the variety of books being published for teens, launching new ventures and rethinking how to market to a media-savvy generation, librarians, publishers and booksellers have managed to resuscitate the genre. Though far behind the curve of other media, the book industry is beginning to cash in on the economic power of the teenager. And this is not just a "Harry Potter"-inspired craze; youth literature is in the throes of what librarian, author and Booklist columnist Michael Cart--who in 1994 first sounded the death knell for teen literature in a speech to the Young Adult Library Services Assn.--calls a second "golden age."
The "young adult" genre began, quite specifically, in 1967, with the publication of S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders," a book about a group of "greasers" caught in the middle of a class war that captured the turbulent life of many American teens and shattered the notion of what teenagers could and would read. More books followed--authors Robert Cormier and Judy Blume wrote about "real-life" issues such as sex and suicide and drugs--and by the mid-1970s, an astonishing number of so-called "problem novels" had found an audience.
