YA has always taken on the big theme of adolescence—change, and how one adjusts to its inevitability. The big difference is that YA now seems to handle it on a larger, more cinematic spread. In YA from the 1970s, a family would divorce, or a girl would be excluded from her friends, or a parent would lose their job, and that was shattering enough to power a book-long narrative. That’s actually closer to how life functions—you don’t need to put kids in an arena and have them kill each other when you already have school. Then again, how fun is dystopia and fantasy and metaphor? I wouldn’t want to do without it. In The Hunger Games, when someone’s a loser, it’s literally pasted across the sky, with their name and the day they lost. In life, we rarely get the acclaim along with the humiliation.