They are good. Others scoff but readers know what they're talking about. The Hunger Games was so fast-paced and thrilling I had to put it down at various points throughout my read just to give myself a bit of mind-space in which to think about it, because I didn't want it to end too quickly, and because a person has to stop and breathe now and again! (This happened when I recently read The Giver, too.) These books are intense. But they're also compelling: I'd set it down for just a moment, driven near immediately to pick it back up again, and ultimately finished The Hunger Games and the other two books in the series in a matter of hours, one night for each. I have a friend who has, similarly, has forced herself to take breaks between reading the books in the series so that she doesn't complete them too quickly. Y.A. books are not just kids books, they're often good books, too, or as author and book critic Lev Grossman wrote in the Times in May, "Young adult novels can be as powerful as anything out there." Possibly more so. When was the last time you stayed up all night to finish a book, and what was it? Mine were all Y.A.

Harry Potter made reading them O.K. Harry Potter. Twilight. The Hunger Games. These are the triumvirate that inspired the latest fervor in the publishing business among editors, agents, business folks, aspiring writers, and readers. Seeing these books emerge from the teen books section and appear nearly everywhere we went, including as movies—not to mention hearing them discussed by adults as often as they were by kids—made it OK to jump on that bandwagon, too. Once a lot of people got over the stigma, they found that, yes, these books are good! (See above.) But before such books were categorized as Y.A. we were reading them regardless of our age, for instance, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the Anne of Green Gables series, and Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies, each of which has been argued to be "Y.A." by some, as has Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. That just goes to show that Y.A. more a marketing concept than anything else. Age is just a number, and the books themselves, and not the label, are what's important. Dumbledore's lesson is, read what you like.

They are an escape in our complicated, fraught, neurotic adult lives. While you might not call the world of Panem or what happens at Hogwarts simple, the fact is, Y.A. novels are usually based in some basic, relatable premises. How these worlds are rendered is as creative and imaginative as any other book, but the fundamental topics addressed—death, love, survival, growing up, trials of life, and so on—are things we all understand on the most visceral of levels. At the same time that we relate we can escape in them. The writing is breezy, usually, certainly lighter and faster than that Russian novel we're toting around with us to look smart, and it's more personal and immediate, without the veneer of intellect that can make certain adult books muddy wading. The books aren't as long, as convoluted, or as heavy, either. The characters are simply yet effectively drawn. The lessons built into the books do not have to be deeply studied or carefully parsed, we usually get them implicitly. There's something to be said for the comforting proposition of such books when our world appears to be going haywire otherwise—either broadly or individually so.