Why YA, Eh?

A couple of years ago, I’d given a White Stripes CD to a 14-year-old and her cousin, also 14, because the music didn’t really work for me. In return, they offered one of two books they’d selected for reading, my choice. There was Nobody Knows My Name by, of course, James Baldwin, and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I picked that one because I’d read the Baldwin, years before, but had never heard of Markus Zusak.
The Book Thief is a fabulous novel, as a tribute to reading, and as a piece of wondrous imagination and hope. I wondered why it was labeled YA and when I saw that Zusak had written other books in that category, assumed that once you’re YA you stay YA.
I noticed that The Book Thief was published by a Random House company, the estimable Knopf in New York, without which Knopf Canada, the company I try to keep in the black, would not exist. But they are bigger, with a bigger list in a bigger country. Why did they publish The Book Thief as young adult fiction? My kids are too old now for books published as YA and I don’t publish them, so I may have missed The Book Thief entirely if not for the teenagers I know.
There are books with the YA label that I feel have enriched my life immeasurably as an adult. There is Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt and Holes by Louis Sachar – just two of many books I would not have discovered had I not become a parent.
I do feel the ‘Y’ should be struck from its place in the ‘YA’ acronym. Maybe the categories could be ‘children’s literature,’ 'teen literature' (Gossip Girl, etc.), and 'literature'.
We adults may be missing out just because the protagonist in a novel is a teenager. I’m grateful that in Canada at least, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, was not labeled YA – it was pitched as a great read for everyone. My son, then 15 years old and Harry Pottered up the wazoo, loved it.