psocoptera

A key thing you might want to know, which I didn't, is that Wayward Son isn't exactly a sequel to Rainbow Rowell's Carry On (which I talked about here), it's the second book of a trilogy of which Carry On is now retroactively the first book. The third book, Any Way the Wind Blows, doesn't have a date announced yet, but is supposed to be "soon", but I think she's still writing it, so, we'll see. Anyways, as you might infer from my emphasis of its middle-book status, Wayward Son stirs up various issues and then ends without resolving anything but the very most immediate situations. As you might also have guessed, I found it a lot less fun than Carry On. Rowell is working with some really interesting themes that I would claim are things I'm deeply interested in - what happens Afterwards, how do you go on and create a new life and new identity for yourself after something happens that makes you lose or give up the way you identified yourself previously - and maybe in the next book it will turn out she has something satisfying to say about all that, having set it up in this one. This book, sort of paradoxically, felt like it had too much going on and yet nothing really happened? The emotional beats didn't quite connect and line up, it was just a little too all over the place. (And one key bit of how the end worked out didn't make sense to me at all.)

I do think it's interesting as what I would describe as very clearly a New Adult work rather than Young Adult, although I think New Adult really only caught on as a term in romance novels. They're 20, they're living and traveling independently, etc. There are a couple of things I like about New Adult as a category - I've seen concerns that the older end of YA is crowding out the younger end of YA, and I don't think that's entirely wrong, and I also like the idea of having a handy label for "college age stories" for people looking for those. I guess if I believe in this label I can start using it myself... and yet I'm probably still going to tag this YA too... hm.