Every book falls into one of several predetermined age categories, intended to signal to potential readers the maturity levels of any given story.
Or at the least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. In reality, age ranges have basically become tools for publishers to slot their wares in front of potential target audiences.
A book is for whatever age range would be the best for marketing, not labeled according to its actual content. The current categories have become muddled and mixed, relying increasingly on reader research and discretion to figure out just exactly who a book is meant for.
Book ratings should be reorganized, better defined, and used more as tools for readers than a marketing apparatus.
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First off, we need to cover the four elements writers and readers tend to consider when ranking maturity:
1) Violence/gore
2) Sexual content
3) Thematic content
4) Complexity of the plot
Violence/gore
Violence can be anything from a light punch to a full-on battle scene. The more harm is done, the more intense the violence is considered—such as an adolescent after-school brawl versus an invading army’s general cutting off the enemy’s head.
Gore is the graphic rendering of violent and/or disturbing material. While gore most often occurs during violent scenes, it can also appear at others—such as descriptions of internal body parts in a lab, or when a dead body is discovered in a murder mystery. The more descriptive it is, the more intense the gore is considered.
Sexual content
Some consider sexual content to begin with any physically romantic gesture, such as hand-holding or any sort of kiss, on the lips or otherwise. Others believe it begins when the physical actions between the characters are intended to be sexual. (And some narrow-minded walnuts even think it includes the existence of any sort of queerness.)
For the sake of this article, we’re going to consider sexual content kissing on the lips and above—any physical action that’s exclusively assumed to be in a romantic and/or sexual context.
Thematic content
This is the mention and/or discussion of potentially triggering topics that require knowledge and sensitivity—such as self-harm, drug abuse, assault, trauma, difficult family dynamics, etc.
Complexity of the plot
This one’s pretty self-explanatory; but it’s how complicated your plot gets, and how easily it’s laid out. How much do your readers have to infer versus what they’re told? Are there any or many subplots? Are the twists spelled out in the moment, or do they require the readers to process what they’ve learned in order to understand what’s just happened?
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The common industry standard for age ratings is as follows: middle grade, young adult, new adult, and adult. (I’ll be discussing from middle grade up here, since children’s and under don’t contain the kind of material we’re talking about.)
Middle grade is considered to be 8-11 years old, and YA 12-18. NA doesn’t have an agreed-upon age range (though the consensus seems to be the upper edge of YA into the early twenties), and adult is more or less for those over eighteen.
Middle grade tends to contain minimal violence, no gore, light sexual content (usually no more than kissing, if it even gets that far), vague mentions of certain thematic elements, and straightforward plots that require little extrapolation, or eventually spell out the plot developments in case the reader inference was missed. Thematic content is usually restricted to what kids might be dealing with within their own lives—the illness of a friend or a family member, the grief of loss, or the friction between generations.
Young adult once had a proper definition, but thanks to publishers shoehorning inappropriate titles into the space, the actual maturity level of this category has become muddled.
The publishers’ reasons are usually twofold:
1) Tween/teen books are more appealing from a marketing standpoint. Overzealous adolescents have long been a major factor in a franchise’s popularity. Just think of how many popular books, movies, TV shows, and musical groups appeal to that age range.
2) Many publishers don’t believe female and/or queer authors could compete in the traditional fantasy and sci-fi spaces (for, obviously, bigoted reasons). So gritty, graphically sexual tales, regardless of how complex they might get (think Sarah J. Maas’s works), are slapped with teeny bopper labels and shunted into the hands of unsuspecting kids.
What threshold is YA supposed to stay within? To be honest, that’s not an easy question to answer nowadays. You can find everything from tales of non-graphic violence and sex-free romance, to gory depictions of combat with open-door “spice.” There’s technically no agreed-upon standard; just whatever the publishers have dumped into that category.
New adult is an attempt in recent years at creating a category that bridges young adult and adult, creating (in theory) the room to correctly reclassify where mature content should go. It could also be seen as a weak attempt to put the aforementioned female and/or queer authors in a slightly more appropriate space, while still keeping a foot in the teen arena. (Though if someone’s still writing full-on adult fantasy or sci-fi, then they really should be allowed to go into the correct category.)
NA has taken off in one sense, considering how many authors and publishers have been using it to market titles. But in another, it hasn’t really done much. Bookstores don’t bother with a “new adult” section, and publishers continue to shunt offerings between YA and NA as they desire, regardless of the content within.
If anything, it’s just become a way to create graphic, spicy YA tales, by aging up the MCs to just within the legal range and claiming it’s an entirely new category.
Personally, I believe YA and NA need to be reworked into a series of new categories: lower teen, upper teen, and young adult.
(I’m aware there’s currently a division between “lower YA” and “upper YA.” I hope it becomes a more standard practice for categorizing books, and we eventually see as much reflected in shelving and the official categorization on bookseller and publisher websites. But even then, there’s still a lot of confusion over the actual guidelines for where these categories begin and end; as well as the shameless mingling of mature NA content within the YA space in general.)
Lower teen would be for about 12-15-year-olds. Violence would shy away from becoming full-on gore, and sexual content would remain closed door, if sex was even included. Thematic content would remain relevant to whatever teens in that range could be exposed to (which I understand could vary greatly, depending on life experiences). But it would always be handled in a way teens could comprehend and relate to. Plotlines would get more complicated than in middle grade; but not so winding or bloated that an adolescent’s attention would be tested.
Many of Rick Riordan’s books fall pretty neatly into these parameters. I know Percy Jackson was his first middle-grade/teen foray, and it was for a slightly younger audience; but his later series have aged up in response to his fan base.
Elizabeth Lim also writes some excellent tamer YA. While she’ll deal with intense topics, her stories remain digestible for teen audiences, and spare excessively violent or graphically sexual details.
Older teen would be for about 16-20-year-olds. The main differences would be the slight intensification of the violence, how sexual content would start to get somewhat more explicit (though not to the “soft porn” levels of something like Game of Thrones), the deepening of the thematic content, and the more intricate winding of the plots.
The Hunger Games is the perfect example of an upper teen book. It deals with the intensely disturbing idea of children hunting each other in competition, and the violence associated with such a notion (though, surprisingly, it’s one of the least gory books I’ve ever read). It’s psychologically taxing, if not as intense on the graphic details. It’s something my 16-year-old self and her peers found compelling enough to tear through; though not something a 12- or 13-year-old would have the wherewithal to properly comprehend. (Nor not to be traumatized by.)
Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels are also neat candidates for this category. The violence within them tends to be commonplace, and while a description here or there might get a bit intense, it’s all plot-relevant and doesn’t lapse into full-on gore. And if sex happens, it’s not very explicit. Bardugo deals with intense themes (I’ll still never recover from Kaz Brekker’s backstory), and the age-relevant ways they affect her teenage and young adult MCs.
Young adult would be what NA is attempting to be—the bridge between teenagerhood and actual adulthood, for people in their early to middle twenties. The main difference between this category and adult would be the lower intensity of violence, sexual content, and thematic content than the adult category, the younger ages of the MCs, and how their feelings and experiences would relate to the struggles of that time period.
Adult would then remain reserved for the most intense of materials.
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Having a clearly delineated system is step one for a better way to categorize books. But the next would be to actually rate said books accurately.
Even if we were to create a better system, if publishers still wanted to capitalize on the frenzy of teenagers, then they’d continue to shunt more mature offerings into upper and lower YA to get them into the hands of their target demographic.
Content warnings would also be a helpful way to give readers the information they needed. Some authors provide them voluntarily, and reviewers on sites like Goodreads will often try to scrape them up as well; but they’re nowhere near a standard in the industry.
Some might argue that mandatory content warnings might inhibit who ends up reading certain books. But let’s be real here—there’s never been an “explicit content” warning that’s turned off someone looking for exactly that type of story.
And in another sense, yes, it might turn people off—people who wish to avoid the very thing that story claims to contain. Content warnings wouldn’t be to brand a book as “scandalous” or “inappropriate”—just to inform audiences of what they could be facing, like how we use it for films. They wouldn’t have to be on the book covers; if anything, maybe just somewhere within the first few pages. At the least, they could be included on publisher sites and book hubs like Goodreads.
Because there’s another element to age rankings. Just because a book is branded for a particular age range doesn’t mean everyone within that group is going to agree on what they’re comfortable seeing.
For example, I love fantasy and sci-fi. Realistic fiction can be cute from time to time; but I love me a good adventure.
I also hate gore. I have ways to handle the reactions that come along with unintentionally seeing or reading it, but I don’t seek it out consciously.
I’m also in my thirties, and I want to read stories that are complex enough for me to appreciate.
But trying to find an adult fantasy or sci-fi adventure without gore is like trying to find a Star Wars movie that doesn’t involve space travel.
I know it’s up to me to seek out the books I want to read—but it would be easier for me and countless other readers to better gauge the content of a book if it were evaluated appropriately. An accurate age range would help to set expectations about thematic content and plot complexity; and content warnings would give more specific information on how much violence, gore, and sexual content to expect.
After all, both Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are considered adult fantasy—but we all know they’re about as far apart in the genre as you could get.
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