Follow Friday (1)

Q. How has your reading habits changed since you were a teen? or If you are still a teen what new genres are you in love with currently?

I read a lot of Young Adult in high school. The Sweet Valley High series, a ton of Ann Rinaldi, The Babysitter's Club series, and more others than I can remember. Slowly I began to see how juvenile these books were, even though I loved the age group. As I became an adult, my focus started shifting onto what I thought were more "adult" novels.

I forced myself to read Anne Rice because my friends were. Or Mary Higgins Clark and Stephen King. It seemed the bigger the book, the more adult it simply had to be. I found I disliked the strong language and found the raunchy sex scenes, well, raunchy and distasteful. I switched to Christian fiction (no language and no sex, but some awesome romance). There I fell in love with Tracie Peterson, Lori Wick, Dee Henderson, and Terri Blackstock amongst many others. I read Christian fiction (and still do, to a degree) for years until I was looking around a local B&N and spied the cover of Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles.

It literally gave me pause seeing that racy cover on (what the sign above claimed to be) a young adult novel. I remembered the strict PG rating that had been slapped on YA novels when I was a teen, and bought the book on a whim and was hooked on the genre all over. That was three years ago, and I never looked back.