IP Picks🔎: 'Legally Blonde' in the Jury Box
➕ A true crime drama in wine country and an academic secret society thriller at Oxford
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
Let’s start today by flagging the announcement of a new award, not so much because of who's giving it (The Bookseller, a British publishing magazine) or because I think it'll turn out to be especially prestigious, but for the category it is honoring: New Adult fiction. I’ve been thinking a lot about this category this week; paid subscribers will see two picks below that are part of this resurgent subgenre.
New Adult is aimed at readers who feel too grown up for YA but don't believe general adult fiction speaks to them. As Katie Fraser, chair of The Bookseller's New Adult Book Prize committee, said, these are "stories that recognize the difficulty, turbulence and wonder of early adulthood." They often feature coming-of-age plots that’d be familiar to YA readers but with characters aged up into their 20s and dealing with issues relevant to their lives at the moment. Think of New Adult as the quarter-life crisis corner of publishing.
New Adult has been around since 2009 when St. Martin's Press coined the term as part of a contest, but it has gained renewed momentum in the last couple of years with the success of such authors as Colleen Hoover, Sarah J. Maas and Casey McQuiston. Still, the term hasn't totally caught on with the public. Part of the reason is that we don't have a catchy moniker like YA that captures the twentysomething years. The problem is compounded because New Adult is elastic enough to sweep up a lot of other genres in its wake, from romance to romantasy to dark academia. I think it has also suffered from snobbery because it has been a category that has seen a lot of self-publishing success and authors crossing over to traditional publishers.
Yet New Adult addresses a problem that both publishers and studios are trying to solve: How to attract a young audience.
And it's already had an impact on Hollywood. It Ends With Us is really a New Adult novel whose characters were aged up for the film adaptation. As Hoover told E! News last year, "Eight years ago, when I wrote the book, new adult was huge and everyone was wanting to read characters in their very early 20s.” But she added: “This is such a tough subject matter that putting young, young characters on screen just didn't feel right to us.”
Over at Amazon Prime, the adaptation of McQuiston's 2019 hit Red, White & Royal Blue, about the queer romance between the son of the president and a British Prince, was one of the streamer's best performing romcoms of 2023. Hulu's hit series Tell Me Lies, based on Carola Lovering's 2018 novel, could also be classified as New Adult. For the moment, the much-anticipated series adaptation of Maas' A Court of Thorn and Roses is dead at Hulu, but given the book's popularity, it may not stay that way.
It's not like movies and TV shows about twentysomethings are new (umm, Friends), but I think using New Adult as a lens can be a useful tool. It links back to the coming-of-age themes that are popular in YA but in a way that emphasizes young adulthood as a distinct phase of life and centers this generation's concerns. It's also a reminder to foreground themes about love, relationships and identity across different genres like romantasy and dark academia.
I don't think anyone ever really outgrows a coming-of-age story. From Huck Finn to Catcher in the Rye to '80s teen movies to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's been perhaps the most durable genre in American pop culture. New Adult preserves that in stories that don't necessarily have to take place during adolescence, which is what, to my mind, makes it such a powerful category. Of course, it still needs that catchier name to be an effective marketing hook . . .
On to this week’s picks, which include the pair of New Adult novels hinted at above, a romcom and a drama both in courtroom settings and a non-stop action thriller. The full lineup:
A courtroom drama about a woman on trial for murder narrated Rashomon-style by five men (husband, lover, lawyer, friend, journalist) in her life.
A romcom pitched as Legally Blonde meets Jury Duty
An action-thriller with John Wick and The Raid vibes and a non-traditional hero
A twisty, dark academic psychological thriller set at Oxford
A 1980s true crime mystery involving fraud, deception and murder in the wine business
