YA Pioneers: Janice Harrell
YA may have blown up over the past decade, but it used to be a small section of bookstores. In the early nineties, it consisted mostly of "teen thrillers," which mostly featured dark mysteries and serial killers, although there was some supernatural fare as well. The authors of those days were ahead of their time and built an audience in teenagers, and paved the way for the YA that is beloved by so many today. In the late-eighties to mid-nineties when teen thrillers were thriving, the internet was just getting its feet wet, so there wasn't a lot of information to be found on-line about the books coming out around this time. I didn't have a really reliable source to find out when new books were coming out from authors I enjoyed, which is a weird concept given how everything is at people's fingertips today. I asked bookshop clerks about books often, and would really just sort of rely on them to stock the books I loved on their shelves. YA Pioneers ...