Maturing McCafferty

A hot topic at this year’s Day of Dialog was YA-adult crossover, and today many are flying on the wings of the monster-crossover Harry Potter. In the August issue, novelist Megan McCafferty‘s latest, Fourth Comings, the fourth title in a series, made it into LJ‘s pages of reviews of books for adults. A friend found the series from an Amazon recommendation of the first book, Sloppy Firsts, pegging it as similar to the “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” series. But on a search for the third book of the series, the Teen section of the bookstore, where McCafferty’s previous titles were housed, proved fruitless—the series was moved to Fiction.

 The protagonist, Jessica Darling, has matured from a teenager feeling lost in high school to a woman facing post-college life in a Brooklyn sublet and a marriage proposal. Impressively (though maybe coincidentally), the series seems timed to keep its audience. Readers who met 16-year-old Jessica in the first book at age 13 in 2001 (because, hey, What girl isn’t reading Seventeen magazine at 12 or 13 and moving on three years later?) may now be following her into adulthood at 19. But what of the tween readers who come upon the series today, voraciously running through the books? Perhaps Harry and his clan (meeting their readers earlier and retaining a dose of innocence and kid-appeal longer) are at an advantage.