"YA!" "Middle grade!" "YA!" "Middle grade!"
Wank of the SF book reviewing variety- which pretty much automatically means, "Pretentious genre debate and flashing-credentials variety."

Paul Kincaid, a British SF reviewer, writes a review of the non-SF novel The Wild Girls for the SFSite. The review is pretty tepid, and was essentially only done because the author, Pat Murphy, has also written SF novels.

Literaticat, an American on LJ, disagrees.



Her main bone of contention? "It isn't a YA novel. It is very clearly a middle grade novel. And yes, there's a difference. Consider how prickly many in the SF/F community get about people who are ignorant and dismissive about SF/F. Well, that's how children's book people feel when people are idiots about children's books. GRR. I don't understand why you would want to review a mainstream children's book when that is so clearly NOT your forte, or why you would post it on an SF site... But moving on.



The SF Blog Torque Control reports on both the review and the response, and the blog editor gives his own opinion, which falls solidly on Kincaid's side. This inspires a comment thread in which people from both sides show up to argue about what "middle grade" (a US book categorization that does not exist in the UK) should mean, and whether a UK reviewer is obligated to be familiar with the US book market's labels before he reviews a book.

Kincaid then responds with a quiet but decisive takedown of Literaticat's opinion:



What gets me is that I am being castigated for using the term "Young Adult" rather than "middle grade" in describing the book, a solecism that is apparently sufficient to deny me the right ever to review a children's novel. This is patent balderdash. For a start, if "middle grade" is a commonly used literary term it is only among a select circle in the US. The term does not appear on the book. The term does not appear on any of the publicity associated with the book that I have received. The term is not used by the author, who refers to it simply as a children's book. And the term is meaningless to any readership outside the US (here in Britain, for instance) where "middle grade" does not exist within the school system. Writing on SF Site, for an audience that is presumably mostly adult and presumably mostly interested in science fiction, who might, therefore, pick up on the book because they know Pat Murphy as an adult sf author, the simplest and most effective way of alerting the readership seemed to me to refer to it as YA.



Will there be further developments in the exciting saga of what we should call this marketing category? Stay tuned!