I think the character-writing was pretty mediocre all-around, but the difference was that some of the actors were good enough that their acting transcended the otherwise-blah material (Naveen Andrews, Yunjin Kim, Daniel Dae Kim, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Henry Ian Cusick) and others were not (Evangeline Lilly, Emilie…

Yeah, I think anybody who really expected one single answer to the island's mysteriousness was suffering from a pretty bad case of unrealistic expectations. By midway through season 2, at the very least—and probably even earlier—it seemed pretty obvious that there was no way they were going to be able to wrap up all…

Yeah, and they had an especially tough job by having to introduce two separate mysteries (the murder and the rape), the setting, and the characters. And some of the characters—Lamb, Weevil—are set up so well even in a very limited amount of screen time. You can tell Rob Thomas had been working on that world for a long…

Everybody dies.

Fortunately for Hollywood, John Green has written other books which can be adapted for equally tiny budgets and draw the same audience, so there's no need for sequels . . . yet?

It's kind of deconstruction of those books. I think Green was consciously trying to write a cancer book that avoided the Lurlene McDaniel/Nicholas Sparks/Love Story tropes.

That's what bugs me most about the "Why are so many adults reading YA?" whining. Because the YA that most adults are reading (John Green, the dystopias, etc) is significantly deeper and often better written than the adult genre writing that most of these adults would be reading otherwise. There are much more…

Sadly, I think her style is a bit too quiet for the blockbuster/twee indie-heavy movie atmosphere right now. 2003 is just about the last possible time I can see her books making sense as movies. But maybe not, if they got the right writers? The Way, Way Back last summer kinda reminded me of her books, and it did…

This kinda IS that, although . . . less angry. The book was intended as a deconstruction of the typical cancer story, and while I'm guessing it loses a little bit of that in its translation to the screen, I'm hoping it at least maintains the idea that people with cancer are people rather than metaphors.

The Lovely Bones wasn't technically a YA novel; it was marketed to an adult audience. I saw a lot of librarians marketing it as a good crossover book for teens to read, though, so it doesn't surprise me that some people perceive it that way. But it also doesn't surprise me that the director chose to go in a darker…

Technically speaking, the Harry Potter books aren't YA (nor are Percy Jackson). They were marketed as middle-grade—at least the early ones, but I think even the later ones straddled the MG/YA line.

You've got your timelines reversed. Publishers stopped publishing most books aimed at a teenage male audience because, by and large, they don't buy them. Reading has a "not manly" connotation, and tween/teenage kids are especially sensitive to that kind of gender socialization, so reading tends to fall off for boys…

No. Publishers didn't even recognize YA as a specific genre/a group to market books to until several years after its publication. Some people have sort of retroactively tried to categorize it as such, but that doesn't even make sense given YA's rather inflexible requirement that its protagonists must be teenagers.

Yeah, I hate "Teenagers don't talk like that!" as a criticism every single time. No, they don't—and nobody in the entire world wants to watch a movie or read a book that accurately captures the way they do. (Sorry, teenagers.)

Yeah, it bombed. It was one of the front-runners in this whole "adapting YA books to film" and when it did badly, film companies were very hesitant to touch YA again for quite a while.

It's kinda art imitating life, though. It's borderline impossible to sell a YA novel without a romance plot/subplot these days. It's borderline impossible because that's what readers (disproportionately female) want to read. And it's what they want to read because they're taught to wrap so much of their identity up in…

Today's high-level YA is generally written with the expectation of an adult crossover audience, though. It's not the YA of 20 or 30 years ago—it's designed to cover more adult subjects and in a more adult way. If the same novels had been submitted for publication 30 years ago, many of them likely would have been…

Not terribly, which is unfortunate, because it's pretty good.

SPOILERY

Shailene Woodley's character is loosely based off a real girl with cancer who never looked particularly sick (until the very end of her life, I suppose), so her appearance doesn't seem unrealistic to me. Ansel Elgort's character is in remission and is supposed to look healthy. "They don't look sick" is probably a fair…