With just two young adult books, “Feeling Sorry for Celia” and “The Year of Secret Assignments,” Moriarty had already established herself here and at home as a complex humorist with a taste for experimentation, both books employing a found-letters format (e-mail, instant messages, faxes, etc.) with wit and authority. “The Spell Book of Listen Taylor” in fact used to be an adult book, “I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes” - it was heralded as Jaclyn Moriarty’s first adult novel when it was published in her native Australia in 2004. What’s new is how ambitious, complicated and, well, adult young adult books have been getting. Levels of sexual activity in fiction tend to rise and fall in their own cycles, and, brazen adventuresses like gossip girls aside, we’ve been in a fairly prudish period. This has less to do with sex than you might think. “Twelve and up” used to be the standard reading-level designation for young adult novels now “14 and up” or even “16 and up” have become common. It’s not that it is getting better (although in a lot of ways it is) but rather that more and more of it is being aimed at older teenagers. Young adult literature has been doing some growing up.
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