The Coming of Age Novel

[bcomet]

I've recently been reading a lot of YA and Coming of Age books. Then, today, I ran across this article:

Why are American writers so good at coming-of-age novels?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksbl ... age-novels

which is fascinating on through the comments, which discuss the topic of American and Coming of Age from a mostly British readership.

YA is wildly the most popular expanding area in book sales (of novels) currently, (or so I've been led to believe).
And now John Green's Looking For Alaska is hitting the high school reading lists.

What do you think?

[steve]

What a lazy article; pretty shameful, as the Guardian is usually better than this.

As some of the people who commented say, BLACK SWAN GREEN by David Mitchell is great, better than any American bildungsroman published in the past decade.

[bcomet]

The article was light but the topic interesting. What is it about all these American YA writers! So many excellent writers.
In some way, the Coming of Age novel is universal. In other ways, it may reflect more on the culture it comes from.
I especially enjoyed the comments from Brits. and the lists of beloved CoA novels from everywhere.