The Thing(s) About YA Titles

This Week at Book Riot What To Do With Books By Authors Accu...

The Thing(s) About YA Titles

We’ve talked about the trend of “Girl” in the title of YA books. We’ve talked about the trend of “Edge” in the title of YA books.

We now present the trend of even less specificity: “Thing” or “Things” in the YA title.

Note that the titles on this list are only for YA books published in 2017 and in 2018. The list really is this long, and it excludes titles which have the word “everything” or “nothing” in them — which would have added another significant number of titles to this list.

What does “Thing” in the title imply when it comes to a trend? Perhaps nothing. But as a reader and as someone who talks about a lot of book titles, as well as someone who regularly thinks about serving readers great book recommendations, I can say easily all of these titles blend and blur together far too easily.

It’s almost as if “Thing” in the title is as unmemorable as the word itself.

Can you think of others from the last year or so that would fit on the list? I’d love to see them, if for no reason other than to continue becoming confused among all of the titles which have a hard time standing apart from one another. I’ve purposefully left the authors of the books off the list, in part because authors often don’t come up with the titles of their books and in part to showcase how indistinguishable the titles can be from one another without that context.

I have, of course, put together a nifty graphic of some of the covers because there is power in seeing an image, too.