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The Thing(s) About YA Titles

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Written by: Kelly on February 12, 2018.

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.

 

 

10 Things I Can See From Here

Airports, Exes, and Other Things I’m Over

All The Forever Things

All Things New

Broken Things

I Believe In A Thing Called Love

Dare Mighty Things

Definitions of Indefinable Things

The Geography of Lost Things

That Inevitable Victorian Thing

Kale, My Ex, and Other Things To Toss In A Blender

The Last Thing You Said

The Most Dangerous Thing

Never-Contented Things

One Small Thing

Sasquatch, Love, and Other Imaginary Things

These Things I’ve Done

That Thing We Call A Heart

The Thing With Feathers

Things I Should Have Known

Things I’m Seeing Without You

Things Jolie Needs To Do Before She Bites It

The Things We Promise

Unearthly Things

A Very, Very Bad Thing

The Whole Thing Together

Comments

  1. I thought I was crazy for picking up on this trend. And I agree 100%: I can understand “thing” trying to catch something nebulous, something that can’t quite be defined, and that’s just fine. But I don’t know if the title is the right place to broadcast that nebulous nature.

    and so many of these are contemporary, which isn’t that surprising, I suppose. But still.

    —
    Actually, this was nagging at me, so I went away to google. And now I’m convinced we’re trying to Proust up the joint — “À la recherche du temps perdu” — REMEMBRANCE of Things Past.