"The Next Big Thing"
USA Today recently ran an piece titled, "What will be the next big YA subgenre?" which first ran on www.bookish.com. The editorial gave predictions about which book, or types of books, will be the NEXT BIG THING in YA.
I love playing the prediction game, and I am quite good at it. I always like to check out new releases, and I am a kid on Christmas morning when it comes to receiving my many bags of ARCs at the yearly NCTE / ALAN conferences. I must say I am pretty good at predicting whether or not these newbies will have mass appeal. After hearing John Green read an excerpt from The Fault in Our Stars, I knew it would be big. I received an ARC of Jennifer Nielson's The False Prince and I was pretty sure that one would harbor much deserved success; and it did. This past November in Boston at the NCTE conference I was introduced to Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park. Ding, ding, ding!!! Once again, I predicted another hit for the young adult reading community.
So when I read this op-ed piece, which predicted one of the new subgenre's to be the fractured fairy tale, I wondered a bit. I think a lot of readers are tired of the massive amounts of dystopian books being churned out at rapid pace. Okay we get it! "Big Brother" is watching, and an apocolypse is impending the next catastrope until the simple, yet beautiful, heroine saves the day. Don't get me wrong, dystopian literature is a strong force in my own YA collection, but I think I can speak for many readers of the YA category that we are a bit tired of it. Let's move on to something else already! We have done the whole sorcerer / vampire / werewolf thing along with said dystopias, but are fairy tale re-tellings really going to take off the way Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games did?
I think the fractured fairy tale is definitely an interesting concept, but I don't know if I would bank on this genre blowing up the way recent genres have. Besides, this isn't really a new thing. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Macquire was released almost a decade ago. Marissa Meyer's Cinder has been popular with YA readers, and the same can be said about Beastly by Alex Flinn.
If the fractured fairy tale does become the "next big thing" I just wonder how many more books of this genre will be churned out? My fear is having to sort through the ones that read like fan-fiction at best to find the true literary gems. I must confess I am somewhat interested in reading Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige. I am kind of excited for this one as it does look promising. I am keeping my hopes high until I can get my hands on it.
