Reviewing books that aren’t for your age-range.

Howdy. Today I come to you with a little discussion post regarding “books that aren’t for your age-range”. I want to share just some thoughts that have been on my mind lately and see what other people think!

I feel like there’s two sides to the YA coin: young-Young Adult and mature-Young Adult. You can spot the difference between these two with the writing style, the actual age of the characters and the plot-points and topics discussed in the text.

That’s not to say that books with younger characters can’t fit into the mature-Young Adult category, or that young-Young Adult can’t still discuss important matters. I feel like most people are going to understand what I’m trying to say so I’m not going to over-explain myself. (please say you know what I mean🤞)

As someone who is approaching 20 *gasp horror* I’m starting to grow out of a large section of this genre that I still do really love. And that’s okay. It’s the circle of life. But sometimes I don’t realise that until I start reading.

For example, one of the first books I picked up this year was I Think I Love You by Aurianne Desombre and as soon as I started reading I realised the characters where younger then I was expecting and it read a lot younger too.

Ultimately I ended up enjoying it. I thought the age of the characters worked with the story being told and I found it cute, but before getting to that point I did have to think “how am I going to rate and review this?” Personally I didn’t like it but is it fair to drag down a books rating when logically I can see that it was meant for a younger audience?

My plan if I got to the end of the book and still thought “It read young. I didn’t enjoy that” was to simply not give it a star rating. Sure maybe I would have shared a review but in that review I would have prefaced it with why I wasn’t a huge fan. I think a lot of people check the overall star rating of a book before picking it up and to me it didn’t seem fair to drag it down.

I feel like I’ve come to terms now that I’m growing out of this genre. The older I get the less relatable books set in high-school are going to be. There’s gonna come a point where I don’t understand the slang, the pop-culture references, or the social-media the characters use and trust me it’s heartbreaking to even think about.

I’m already at the point where I’m shaking my head at a characters actions before taking a step back and thinking “are they actually being ridiculous, or are they just acting like a teenager with a lot of problems, hormones and an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex?”

With that being said, I do see a lot of one or two star reviews where the person expresses being “too old” as a reason for not liking a book and I guess I just wanted to see what other people had to say about this.

Thanks for reading. This was a little something different to my usual content but it’s been on my mind. I really do want to know what you think about this whole thing, please share your opinion in the comments, I’m super interested!!

Elli xx