Picture it, kiddos: You're a costumer in a bookstore looking for a dark fantasy novel. You look around and see signs for ADULTS, TEENS, and CHILDREN. You're looking for a young adult novel, so you head for TEENS. Once you're there, you see more signs for SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, and ROMANCE so you head for the FANTASY shelves. Then you ignore the EPIC FANTASY, and the *NEO-FAIRYTALES, and you finally find the DARK FANTASY book of your dreams. Huzzah, right?

Categories, genres, and subgenres. That's what it's all about. YA is a category. All it does is tell you what part of the store you're in. It doesn't tell you what type of book you're getting. Genre tells you that. Genre lets you know that you're reading a romance and not a mystery, and the subgenre tells you whether the romance is contemporary, historical, or paranormal. See? YA is not a genre. Say it with me so that you will believe it: YA is NOT a genre. Thank you.

*I just made that subgenre up. But what *do* you call all those books about modern fairies or those modern retellings of Cinderella and whatnot?