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Originally Posted by tompe
Sure. My point was kind of empirical. If we are talking of a kind of book that have X that you are looking for to read it seems to me that if you look in the non-YA section you will find book with more of X than if you look in the YA section (especially if you randomly select a book). But I also think that YA introduces restrictions and more restrictions ought to lead to there being less of X (unless X is something that is characteristic for YA).
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Every genre has its expected conventions and therefore restrictions, cf. Romance. Or murder mysteries. Some books work very well within those conventions, other books work very well by ignoring or transcending those conventions. Those limitations, such as they are, are no more confined to or representative of any one genre than any other.
Aside from hardcore sexual erotica*, there's actually very little content that would be specifically restricted by appearing/not-appearing in a YA story, although some subject matter just might not be very common. But there's nothing preventing it from being explored in the same depth as in an "adult" version.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
If we are talking about really good book than of course there are specific example of authors that can be considered to write for YA like Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones that just writes or wrote very good books on any scale.
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Personally, I don't see how Diana Wynne Jones could be merely "considered to write for YA" when she built her entire career specifically on writing fantasies for children and teens and only rather late into it branched into writing a handful of "grown-up" fantasy books.
But quality books with wider-than-usual appeal can be found in any subgenre, and the notion that YA books are inherently worse at that than any other subgenres and that the good books are somehow exceptions that the good any-scale authors just happened to write in a YA fashion kind of smacks of the sci-fi ghetto of looking down on stuff for no good reason.
* Which doesn't appear in most grown-up books, anyway, so it's not exactly a pure age-restricted omission.