Sharing the Love

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

When Lori Lansens’s second novel, The Girls, was released, she assumed the readership would be people with full-time jobs, bills to pay, a grey hair or two. You know, adults. The Girls chronicles the lives of Rose and Ruby Darlen, conjoined twins from a small burg near Chatham, Ont. Structured as a memoir marking the Darlens’ 30th birthday, the book explores the lives (and loves) of two sisters who possess distinct personalities while inhabiting – for the most part – the same body.

When the book was published last September, critics and adult readers extolled it almost immediately. While promoting the book across Canada, however, Lansens discovered The Girls was also resonating with, well, girls.

"There was this 13-year-old girl, she stuck in my mind. She was clutching her hardcover copy, and she told me it was the first hardcover she ever bought, and she did it with her own money. I was very charmed," Lansens recalls. "She asked me to sign it: ‘To Granny Cookie: I love you as much as Rose loves Ruby.’" Despite the extraordinary circumstances of her characters, Lansens found that many young readers identified with the book’s confessional tenor, particularly the Darlens’ remembrances of their childhood.

Based on these unexpected encounters with teens, Lansens suggested to her publisher, Knopf Canada, that the book also be promoted to young adults. When Vintage Canada prints The Girls in paperback this spring, the book will also be marketed as a young adult (YA) novel.

The fact that teenagers are picking up ostensibly grown-up fiction is hardly novel. I remember spending recesses in Grade 7 thumbing through Sidney Sheldon’s salacious trash with other curious 12-year-olds. And lest I forget my high-school English reading list, which included gems like The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, as well as a whole lot of tedious, self-consciously portentous fiction. The difference nowadays is that publishers and vendors are becoming more proactive with young bookworms.

"It isn’t a new phenomenon in terms of seeing that there’s an appeal, but consciously deciding to target those readers is relatively new," says Marion Garner, publisher of Vintage Canada.

For many, the current crossover vogue began the other way around, with a YA title that cultivated an enormous adult following – namely, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. One of the most eminent adult-to-young-adult crossover successes is Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a disarming first-person narrative about a 15-year-old autistic boy who solves a mystery involving his neighbour’s hound. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, a magic-realist fable about a teenage shipwreck survivor, has also been a brisk seller for both markets. Both Haddon and Martel’s books have sold in excess of two million copies worldwide.

The hardcover book jacket for The Girls. Courtesy Knopf Canada.

The paperback version, which will be released in May 2006 with an eye to the young adult market. Courtesy Random House of Canada Limited.

There’s no fail-safe formula for winning over teens, but The Curious Incident, Life of Pi and, to a certain extent, The Girls provide hints as to what it is in adult fiction that engages young readers. All three narratives feature youthful protagonists, are told in the first person and exhibit a healthy scepticism about grown-up behaviour.

In some cases, the so-called re-branding involves tweaking the cover imagery to rouse younger readers. The Curious Incident got two separate covers in the U.K., one for adults, one for young adults; the most obvious distinction is that the latter looks finger-painted and mentions Haddon’s nod for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.

In conceiving a newfangled wrapping for The Girls, "there was some consideration taken in to the YA appeal," says Garner. The hardcover version wasn’t particularly friendly to youngsters; the title was placed in a large orange band, with images of young girls relegated to the outer edges. The paperback will contain a smaller title font and a large silhouette of a female that wraps around the spine. It’s fanciful without looking sophomoric.

For many Canadian publishers – notoriously strapped for capital – recasting covers for kids is a luxury. Many re-brand a title simply by adding it to their children’s catalogue, thereby tapping into a potent secondary market: libraries.

One example of this is Midnight at the Dragon Café by Toronto writer Judy Fong Bates. When Bates’s publisher, McClelland & Stewart, discovered that the book had attracted YA readers, the company added it to its children’s imprint, Tundra Books. "People who are selecting for the kids were saying, 'This is one we would recommend to young adult readers,'" says Bruce Walsh, McClelland & Stewart’s director of marketing and publicity.

Those "people" behind much of the selecting of YA titles are librarians. They scour children’s catalogues and write reviews for influential trade papers like Booklist. Librarians are not only YA tastemakers; they pretty much invented the category. Back in the 1950s, books were either targeted at small children or adults. Bemoaning a dearth of titles for teens, librarians (gently) pressured publishers to produce fiction with storylines that addressed the foibles of adolescence – thereby satisfying a major stratum of readers. It advanced the careers of kid-lit mainstays like Judy Blume and S.E. Hinton.

That said, young readers always want to be reading something that’s slightly beyond their experience – whether in terms of situations, themes, structure or language. Ultimately, the growing intersection of readerships reflects the fact that young readers are becoming more sophisticated.

"In the past, YA was considered the 13-to-17 age range, but now, publishers seem to be marketing to 11- to 14-year-olds," says Scott MacDonald, a staff writer for publishing trade magazine Quill & Quire. "By the time you get to 13 or 14, most readers are advancing to the adult sections [of bookstores]. It appeals to teenagers, I think, to feel that they’re reading up."

The growing exodus of young adults to adult books might be partly attributable to how bookstores display YA fiction. Many lump YA in with baby lit. The YA sections in many Indigo stores, for example, are either swarming with ankle-biters or utterly deserted. Either way, it’s anathema to attracting teens.

Lynn Popham, manager of McNally Robinson for Kids at Winnipeg’s Grant Park location, has some insight into teen book-buying habits. Her two-level store has two children’s book sections, one upstairs, one downstairs near the adult books. The store has a teen section (12-18) upstairs, but employees were finding "that there comes a point when those high-school readers don’t want to come upstairs because it’s the kids section." Thus, the store set up a new section, PG-15 (for kids over 15), which she says is "a little grittier." The section features higher-level YA books that deal with big issues, including Alex Sanchez’s Rainbow Road (homosexuality) and Martha Brooks’s True Confessions of a Heartless Girl (relationships), as well as approachable adult books, which include The Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice and more contemporary titles like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness.

"We sort of think of it as a high-school reading section," says Popham, saying that many young readers are daunted by adult literature sections. "It’s kind of a stepping stone."

If there’s a pattern to the most successful crossover titles, it’s that none were officially anointed as such. MacDonald says publishers are loath to release a title for two audiences simultaneously. "It might sound like a great opportunity to sell it both ways, but instead, [publishers] worry that it will fall through the cracks. They worry that if they market it both ways, neither one will work and the book will just disappear."

The best strategy remains word of mouth. This past Christmas, Bruce Walsh at McClelland and Stewart gave his two nieces, aged 15 and 17, copies of Kristen den Hartog’s Origin of Haloes. Why? For one, his company published it. But more important, he felt it might ignite a teenage mind.

"They didn’t just like it, they loved it," Walsh reports. "They loved it because it has great characters, great stories. And they were themes they could relate to: falling in love with a teacher, you’re not allowed to do that, you get pregnant, you want to cover up your past mistakes. … These things really appeal to young audiences." The result of Walsh’s reconnaissance is that Origins of Haloes is being added to Tundra’s children’s catalogue.

As any parent will tell you, trying to divine what will appeal to a teen is a futile game.

Says Walsh, "It’s the person themselves who makes the decision: 'Am I a reader of young adult fiction or am I young reader of adult fiction?'"

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.