Grown-Up Versions of My Favorite Books From the ‘90s and Early ‘00s
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.
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I’ve gone through a few Goosebump books in my time—and the show terrified me—but the first one I read was The Curse of Camp Cold Lake. I have, since, not been a big spooky reader, so maybe R.L. did a number on me with this one. For similarly spooky, campy vibes, there’s Camp Damascus by the iconic Chuck Tingle. In it, an autistic teen in a religious cult goes to a gay conversion camp that has some rather unholy things going on.
I didn’t know it when I first read it, but East by Edith Patou is a retelling of the Norwegian folktale East of the Sun and West of the Moon, with elements of Beauty and the Beast, and let me tell you, it changed my little brain chemistry. For real. It had to be the first book I’d read at the time that blended romance, fantasy, and adventure in the perfect way that I still love to this day.
There are other books I love that fit the romance+adventure+mythology retelling template like East does—like Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim and Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan—but keeping things adult, The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden is a perfectly mature version of East. It weaves Russian fairytales throughout its story of a girl living in Russia as Christianity takes over her country and the old ways are forgotten. I marathon-read this trilogy bundled up in the winter, and it was a 10/10 experience. There was also a really creepy scene that lives rent-free in my head.
I remember reading A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly and feeling like I was watching a movie. One that was kind of grown up and mature, but was about people closer to my age, since it dealt with a teen who worked at a hotel, and who inadvertently gets involved with a hotel guest’s murder in 1906.
The more adult version of this book—How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin—takes place in both 1965 and the present day, and I just finished it a few weeks ago. Apart from the historical mystery aspect, Perrin’s new book has the main character looking at writing (a diary in the case of How to Solve Your Own Murder instead of the letters of A Northern Light) to solve a murder.
A thing I noticed when I moved to the North East is that a lot of people try to play the South. By that, I mean that a lot of people automatically assume that the South doesn’t teach adequately on a lot of things, like the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent harsh treatment of Black people after Emancipation. Now, this is true in many parts of the South and may have even gotten worse with all of the censorship that’s been running rampant, but when I was growing up, my teachers did an excellent job of teaching us about the horrors of slavery. They did so well that I realized the friends I made in the Northeast as a young adult had never heard of a lot of American history that I’d learned in middle school.
I say all that to say that, by the time I’d read Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by a Mildred D. Taylor for school, I’d already known a lot about what Black folks had to go through historically in this country. Still, I learned a lot from this book, and there are scenes from it that I remember to this day. For more day-to-day stories of Black life during Jim Crow, there’s the posthumously released short story collection Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver.
There were other Laurence Yep books I read that left a really big impression on me, but I count Lady of Ch’iao Kuo: Red Bird of the South, Southern China, A.D. 531 as being one of the books that really started my love of historical fiction that centered strong female protagonists. She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan is the fantastical, adult, and queer version of Yep’s that reimagines the Ming Dynasty’s founding emperor.
Trying to remember and track down books I read in my childhood, the titles of which I had only vague memories of, has been such an interesting experience. It’s made me both relive reading these books for the first time, and helped me to remember where my love for certain things started.
I recommend everyone do it at least once, and make sure to let me know in the comments which books from your childhood made a lasting impression on you.
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