YA vs. Adult fantasy

[Skaedi]

Harry Potter has made Young Adult fantasy a big deal these days, and you can't throw a stone without hitting a new YA book or author. I've even heard YA fantasy touted as 'better' than adult fiction because it has to be be better written.

*looks at Eragon and raises an eyebrow*

Adult fantasy more often deals more explicitly with themes of sexuality, violence, politicals, and ethical and moral dilemmas than young adult fantasy. That's one big difference I see. Do you perceive a difference between the two categories?  

[NightIntent]

Personally, the only difference I see between good young adult and adult fantasy books is just the explicitness. Young adult books either stay away from sex, or merely hint at it while adult books tend to be a lot more explicit. Some of the young adult books I've read tend to have shallower characters and plots, too. I guess it's so that the younger readers can follow them? Not really sure.  

[Ignorance Xx is xX Bliss]

NightIntent

Personally, the only difference I see between good young adult and adult fantasy books is just the explicitness. Young adult books either stay away from sex, or merely hint at it while adult books tend to be a lot more explicit. Some of the young adult books I've read tend to have shallower characters and plots, too. I guess it's so that the younger readers can follow them? Not really sure.

I agree. The only major difference I see is the explicities. I prefer Adult fantasy though. It really seems to get more in depth with the characters. That may just be me though...  

[Skaedi]

Interesting! I've read some old adult fantasy that didn't have explicit sex, but the themes were very disturbing. For example, Tanith Lee's Death's Master and The Birthgrave trilogy. The former had a woman having sex with a dead man in order to get pregnant, as well as several examples of religious mockery that would have conservative readers up in arms if these books showed up on the YA shelves. The latter had multiple rapes, torture and mother-son incest. In all of these, none of the rapes, torture, incest, etc. were graphicly described.  

[Angleic Shadow]

Well, truthfully I haven't read too much young adult, but I think the characters usually tend to be kids or teenagers. They can still be quite well written tho, for example Ender's Game, which has some pretty dark themes as well. I have noticed that sometimes they have a tendency to be rather short, like the Cirque du Freak series by Darren Shan, who contains a total of 12 books, all of which were probably less than 200 pages. If you ask me it would have been better if he had made the series 6 books 300 pages each.  

[Minerva the Bookwyrm]

Children's books have children as main characters, young adult books have teenagers, and adult books have adults about 98% of the time. People tend to read about characters that they can relate to.

Adult books also almost always sex. It might not be graphic at all, like a detective story that just mentions the victim of a murder had been having an affair, but the concept of sex is still present.  

[witchhunterrobin80]

I have read lots of both and I do not think that adult fantasy necessarily has sexual content. I enjoy reading both and I am well past childhood. I just recently read the Artimus Fowl series and that is most decidedly children oriented but I thin it has deeper meaning that you can see at all age levels. I don't believe Ender's Game is really a young adult book, it leads right into the rest of the series which is definitely adult oriented with theories of evolution and genocide..