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I had started flirting with the idea of revisiting some childhood faves when I recorded the latest Hey YA episode with Kelly Jensen, and we had started talking about the type of YA books we read when we were actually YA age. Once I started down that path of nostalgia, I wanted to keep going and thought of doing the grown-up versions of the books I’d read all the way back in elementary and middle school, which I still think about sometimes.
Apart from a few books, I mostly didn’t remember titles, only vague descriptions—like relative time period and covers—but once I finally found each title and reread blurbs, I relived reading these books in cute little bursts of nostalgia.
These books shook up my little soul in the best way.
I’m starting off strong with Goddess of the Night by Lynne Ewing. I say strong because I still remember reading these Daughters of the Moon books on the bus ride home from school when I was in middle school. They’re a YA urban fantasy/romance series with teenagers on the cover who have thee most 2000s style ever. And listen, you couldn’t tell me nothin’ when I was reading these, I felt so grown. Apart from the fantasy aspect, I really thought the high school experience would be like what was depicted in these books, and of course it wasn’t, but they made me feel privy to a whole new world.
The grown-up version is A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur and illustrated by Kim Sanho. Since the girls in the Daughters of the Moon books are essentially magical girls (without the cutesy wardrobe change animation sequences) experiencing real life, I feel like the 29-year-old protagonist is scouted to be a magical girl. But life really lifes in this one. Turns out, magical girls have credit card debt, have to join trade unions, and even attend classes.
(TW: self-harm attempt)
I want to say that the Animorphs books had us all in a chokehold in the early aughts, but it might have very well just been me. And my mom, since I got her into reading them, and soon enough, she’d read basically the entire series while I was still on book #2.
I think the grown-up version of this series is Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler, the second in her Xenogenesis series, because of its look at how an alien species interacts—and combines—with humans after they reach Earth. It also has coming-of-age elements, adventure, and a little philosophizing to balance things out.
*All-Access Members Can Read on for More Grown-Up Versions of ’90s/’00s Books*
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