Battling the Genre

From Margot Rabb's interview with Mark Zusak:

Do you think part of The Book Thief’s success was that it appeals to such a broad audience of both teens and adults?

The Book Thief’s success is still a mystery to me. I actually thought it wouldn’t get an audience at all. I thought, A 580 page book set in Nazi Germany, narrated by death…Who wants to read that? Maybe its success is in the very thing that people warn authors against - to risk being trapped in a kind of wasteland between YA and adult fiction. Maybe it’s actually a good place to be. If people are arguing over the right category for the book, they are at least discussing it. It might even lead to a discussion about whether the book is simply a good book, and that’s a positive thing too. After all, when someone loves a book, they never say that they loved that Young Adult Sci-Fi Comedy or that Adult Crime Thriller. They just say ‘I loved that book,’ and that, really, is my goal as a writer.

Zusak tells it like it is. There's that special section for YA novels in most bookstores; in places like Barnes and Noble, it's near the children's section but outside it. I can understand the desire to give teen readers their "own" section, but when are teens afraid to swing by the normal fiction section? I think the more cross-age books that are available, the more people will see YA lit not as its own genre with its own particulars. (Also, read The Book Thief.)