What are your teens reading these days? You really should find out. Especially if they’re into the newest trend in young adult fiction. For the first decade or so of the 21st century, the hottest trend in young adult fiction was dystopian novels. Book series like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent sold tens of millions of copies, were turned into successful film franchises and spawned so many imitators that the genre became, as Vox.com put it, a cliché.
While there are still plenty of young adult dystopians being written, a new genre seems to be emerging—one that will make us look back on the young adult dystopia boom as the “good old days.” That genre is teen suicide. In a recent article in Vox, Constance Grady pointed out that young adult dystopias have been “a license to print money” for publishers. Though there are many theories about why the genre exploded, virtually everyone agrees that the popularity of the books, like pop culture in general, reflects the readers’ concerns and moods. READ MORE
