Lucy vs. YA Fiction
It is said that Lucy was never written with the intention of being a young adult book, but when published it was placed in the YA section and labeled thus so. I would never claim to be an expert on YA fiction, but as someone who has consumed a wide range of YA books I can tell the difference between a book written for a teenage audience and a book that merely has a teenage protagonist. While Lucy contains a teenage protagonist and written at a level that can be read and understood by teenage readers, it is not a YA novel.
Finding a book that would be an accurate comparison to Lucy in terms of story arc, character archtypes, and exact genre is incredibly difficult; one of the positives of the book is that the story is interesting…show more content… As the plot escalates, Hayley flies through a rainbow of moods and reactions as she balances high school with taking care of her father. Random drug dealers in her house? She drives them out by taking pictures of their license plates and calling the cops, but has a panic attack at the cops coming and ends up calling in for help to clean up her house. Hayley is ruled by her emotions and reacts in an emotional way, without really pausing to consider the ramifications or consequences of her current…show more content… Both know that they’re different from their peers, and feel some amount of shame for this divide, but while Lucy finds a way to make her differences advantageous, Hayley can feel nothing but shame and fear for her difference. None of the other kids have to be a parent to their own parent. None of the other kids have to clean up puke from their father being sick, or worry about said parent having a flashback and attacking them. She is, for all intents and purposes, a regular human teenager, and does not have the ability to fight back against someone who is bigger, stronger, and more trained than she is – whereas Lucy often finds herself winning against larger aggressors, unless the plot deems it necessary that she loses.
Once again, the main difference between these main characters and these writing styles is that while (author) has Lucy handling everything with grace, and in doing so makes her unrelatable to the teenage audience, Anderson has written Hayley fumbling around and make rash decisions that we all remember making when we were seventeen, which makes it easier for teenage/young adult audiences to relate to