[Teresa Edgerton]

But part of that experience Alia is talking about includes being a young adult -- plus (one hopes) the perspective to look back on some of the things we did and felt, and understand them much better than we did at the time. There are adults who forget what it was like to be younger but I think it's a safe bet they aren't reading very much YA literature.

Besides, in a lot of cases YA is just a marketing term, and the writer didn't write the book just for young people. In which case, there is no reason at all why the book shouldn't be analyzed on adult terms by adult readers. And really, to say that a book should be judged only on the value it has for teenage readers is dismissive and insulting to the book and the writer, because that's as much as to say that the book can have no other value.

And frankly, it's not a good arguement for the validity of the young readers viewpoint to dismiss the validity of everyone else's.

edit -- Cross-posted with Alia, who already made some of my points. Carlotta, how do you know those adults had less experience than some of the teenagers you know? People don't always tell you everything that ever happened in their lives.