The magical spell J.K. Rowling cast over “kiddie lit” with Harry Potter found new blood with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga and most recently, Suzanne Collins’ fight-to-the-death The Hunger Games, creating a halo effect for the genre that doesn’t show any signs of slowing.
The stigma of adults “reading down” with children’s titles is gone, said David Levithan, editorial director of Scholastic Press, which published the Harry Potter series. And it’s not just the kids who are reading young adult books.
“Adults have no hesitation at all to buy young adult anymore, so it’s very easy to cross over,” said Levithan, who anticipates high adult readership for The Raven Boys, a mythological paranormal thriller kicking off a four-book series by Shiver trilogy author Maggie Stiefvater.
See Wednesday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for the best of the fall releases.