Crossed

Increased high school attendance, economic prosperity, and the invention of the car all contributed to the creation of the “teenager”—a new age-social group between children and adults in midcentury America. As such, a new genre was created to cater to teenage tastes in movies, music, and literature. Many trace the beginning of the young adult genre to the 1940s, with the publication of Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly (1942). The book follows 17-year-old Angie as she falls in love for the first time, goes on dates, and navigates her local social scene. It was among the first books to be written and published for a teenage audience.

The Young Adult Library Services Association was established in 1957. They coined the term “young adult” in the 1960s to “represent the 12-18 age range” in literature (Strickland, Ashley. “A Brief History of Young Adult Literature.” CNN, 15 April 2015). Authors in the genre began to explore more realistic, often darker content in the 1960s and 1970s with books like The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath, The Outsiders (1967) by S. E. Hinton, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) by Judy Blume, and The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros.

The 1992 baby boom expanded the young adult market, bringing about another surge in the 2000s. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997) by J. K. Rowling solidified young adult fantasy as a distinct, lucrative subgenre, while Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2008) series popularized the love triangle trope.

Suzanne Collins’s wildly popular series, The Hunger Games (2008), heavily influenced young adult fiction in the 2010s. Crossed is representative of 2010s young adult literature in a few ways: It takes place in a dystopian setting shaped by a postapocalyptic future; the main characters rebel against power, wrestling with the cost of freedom and personal choice; and the characters navigate a complicated love triangle in which the female protagonist must choose between two male suitors.