Has anyone else noticed how, when you're younger the books are really brightly coloured and lovely but that as your grow older, especially the YA books, they become more dark and depressing in their spinal choices only to balance out when they become adult reading?
I recently reorganized my bookshelves and while my BSC books and Sweet Valley books were all pastels and colourful, almost all my other ones were dark and depressing.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my YA books, but if you take out books like the Pretty Little Liars series and a few others, almost all the remaining books have dark and ominous bindings and they all tend to blend together on the shelf.
Now, is this something that’s relatively new to the scene? I don’t remember books being this dark before, so are cover designers changing with the times and appealing their products to those who have a vampire/dark and dreary fetish? Or is this generation of readers just more into the dark and less into the pastels of the ‘80s and ‘90s?
Let me know what you think.
3 comments:
I've noticed this too - it's really hard to find books that don't look like you're going to need an upper after reading them. That's not to say they're actually depressing, but the color schemes certainly are.
Another new trend is making books way bigger than they need to be. The size difference between the original Vampire Diaries series and the re-release bind-ups is unbelievable. It feels like publishers want to make kids feel good about how much they're reading, but instead of giving them longer books, they're just double-spacing everything and putting it into large print.
Oh, how YA has changed!
I had noticed too but I thought it was mainly because the YA stories do tend to be dark and dangerous
I wasn't thinking of the covers so much that had changed but but the length. Looking back at my older books they just seem so much smaller and thinner.
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