At the end of the 1980s some of the biggest hitters among teens were texts intended for adults but appropriated by children, such as the work of Stephen King, Anne Rice, David Eddings, V. C. Andrews and Terry Brooks, whose power was such that they sold across the market barriers which have shaped this narrative. However, the teen market itself was changing. By the late 1980s not only were most teens still in school, but middle-class US teens were expecting to spend another four years in college. By the end of the 1990s, there was an increasing chance that another two years would be added on to that. Although we have no figures, it is a fair guess that the more likely a teen was to be a reader, the more chance they would be facing this extended delay of full adulthood. Meanwhile, other aspects of adolescent life were changing. The teens who were the targets of the Young Adult movement in the 1970s lived in what to many contemporary Americans would now seem to be a startlingly liberal world: those teens could legally both drink and smoke. By the 1990s, almost every US state had drinking laws which ensured young adults could not drink legally and smoking was gradually becoming socially unacceptable in middle-class circles. While the UK did not experience this particular social change, by 2014 all UK children had to stay in full-time education until they were eighteen.

Growing to adulthood

In most of the fantasies written for children prior to the 1960s, young people were hardly ever shown growing to adulthood. Even during the 1970s this was uncommon; Lloyd Alexander's work is a rarity, and while Diana Wynne Jones's children sometimes grew up, as in Fire and Hemlock or The Time of the Ghost (both of which are actually flashback novels), their stories ended, as in Margaret Mahy's The Changeover, on the cusp of adolescence. The new teen market demanded that fantasy novels consider growing up as part of the development of character, and increasingly editors and librarians were arguing that readers should be able to find themselves inside the books they read.