Young adults are reading more because they’re reading books that are easy to love.
V iolet Sorrengail thought she would be a scribe. The bookish 20-year-old was trained by her father to transcribe the empire of Navarre’s archives — but when Violet’s father dies, and her ruthless commanding general of a mother demands that she become an elite warrior known as a “dragon rider,” Violet must accept. Violet’s arrival at Basgiath War College is complicated by her weak bones, terrible fighting technique, and a boy: the dreamy son of a revolutionary whom Violet’s mother killed years earlier. So begins Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing, the first book in her Empyrean series. The third novel in the series, Onyx Storm, was released in January. After selling nearly 3 million copies in its first week, the book became the fastest-selling adult title in at least 20 years. Yarros’s novels have taken the fantasy/romance scene (romantasy, they call it) by storm.
Thriller and fantasy novels are making young adults love to read again and are particularly appealing to a generation of readers who grew up with Artemis Fowl, Harry Potter, the Percy Jackson series and spin-offs, The Hunger Games, Twilight, City of Bones, and more. Most of these series for teenagers were consuming. We were swept up in fantasy worlds until we aged out of them.
Yarros’s novels, which came out in 2023, and Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, which came out in 2015, brought back the cultish fandoms that series like Harry Potter created. Young adult book sales are increasing rapidly. Fiction book sales lead market growth; thrillers, fantasy, and romance novels, mostly. Part of it is due to “BookTok,” what a Circana BookScan report released last year called “a significant source of discovery for all fiction, adult and YA alike.” BookTok is a popular community on TikTok, through which, for the past few years, content creators have shared book reviews of contemporary fiction.
Readers were worried that the digital age would kill the book scene in more ways than one. It partially has for children. Readers aged nine to twelve (the same age my generation lost itself in Harry Potter and Percy Jackson) saw the sharpest declines and “contributed to nearly half (47 percent) of children’s book segment declines” in the U.S., according to the Circana report. Attention spans are shorter due to addictive devices. Many would rather scroll or watch and listen than read. Fewer children read for fun.
Book lovers hoped that the physical experience of book buying or reading would be enough to counteract the digital age. That was certainly optimistic. Amazon is convenient, and the Kindle or comparable devices let readers access dozens of books on one screen. There was no reason, other than pure romanticism, really, to hope that brick-and-mortar bookstores would make a comeback and that people would flip through real pages again.
Readers are romantics, it turns out, and the emotional connections they feel to books matter as much as the physical.
Barnes & Noble opened 57 stores in 2024 and plans to open an additional 60 in 2025. Powell’s Books returned to the Portland International Airport with a seven-year lease in 2024. The American Booksellers Association reported its highest membership levels in more than two decades in 2023. Independently owned bookstores are growing, and corporate booksellers are reopening stores.
One new Barnes & Noble is a flagship store in the heart of Georgetown, which the company reopened in November 2024, after having shuttered the location for 13 years. Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt (the genius who owns Daunt Books and turned around Waterstones in the U.K.) admitted that the store “is the most ambitious of all the new bookstores we, or anyone else, has opened in 15 years. The return to this historic building is a dramatic example of the ongoing revival of brick-and-mortar bookstores.” It’s three stories and is in the same 30,000-square-foot historic building occupied by Georgetown’s original Barnes & Noble from 1995 to 2011. It’s also been packed with customers since it opened.
Elliott Management Corp. acquired Waterstones in 2018 and Barnes & Noble in 2019, trusting Daunt with both. Investors seem confident that brick-and-mortar stores are making, and will achieve, a comeback. Now, Barnes & Noble will adopt a model that Daunt applied to Waterstones: less corporate management, internal hiring practices that will ensure store staffers are knowledgeable and able to deliver personal recommendations, and greater curation.
The bookstore boom is surely driven by a range of factors, but young women are contributing to the market’s fortunes looking better. Some of the popular recent novelists — Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry, Kristin Hannah, Dolly Alderton, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Abby Jimenez, Maas, and Yarros, to name a few — all write for this audience. Whether fueled by social media, accessible bookstores, or word of mouth, there does seem to be a revolution of sorts happening in the book world. None of these novels are necessarily good literature. But their audience doesn’t need them to be.
I devoured the first novel in Yarros’s series (be warned, there are a couple of spicy scenes). I rushed to Barnes & Noble to get the second, then third, because Amazon wouldn’t deliver them fast enough, and I had to read more.
Part of the reason that there’s been such a sharp decline in middle-grade readers has something to do with screens and the pandemic, but it also has something to do with the way books are taught, Katherine Marsh wrote in an Atlantic piece in 2023: “Reading a book [now] means analyzing it within an inch of its life. . . . Young people should experience the intrinsic pleasure of . . . wondering what will happen next — then finding out. This is the spell that reading casts. And, like with any magician’s trick, picking a story apart and learning how it’s done before you have experienced its wonder risks destroying the magic.”
Young adults are reading more because they’re reading books that are easy to love. Middle-age children are reading less, because they have less experience falling in love with books. As bookstores come back, and as reading is branded “cool” again, that could change.