"I Won't Grow up"—Yet: Teen Formula Romance

The boom in teen romances that was set off by Scholastic Books and its Wildfire series in 1980 has not abated. Scholastic's goldmine in Wildfire—a total of 4.6 million copies sold from 1979 to 1982 (Rather 24)—led the publisher to come out with other series (not all of them successful). Wishing Star, featuring stories with a somewhat more serious and realistic accent, debuted in 1981; Windswept teen gothics came in 1982; and more recently Surefire (historical romances), Cheerleaders, a series whose title speaks for itself, and Point (replacing Wishing Star and Windswept) have appeared.

Other publishers have followed suit. Ace Tempo has Caprice Romances and Signet, Signet Vista, while Pocket Books has the Follow Your Heart series. Bantam has the successful Sweet Dreams series, modeled after the Wildfire books, as well as the continuing story of high school twins in the Sweet Valley High series, and the occult Dark Forces series. Dell has moved into the continuing story market with Roots of Love, a series that follows the fortunes of two prominent and embattled California families. Archway has begun the Dawn of Love series, featuring historical romances, as well as the new Moonstone mystery series.

The teen popular fiction market seems in the throes of further refinement of its research and marketing techniques, defining more and more precisely potential audiences and devising products to suit them. The most popular romantic series appear to be those of two imitators of the Wildfire books, the Sweet Dreams series and the Silhouette First Love series. In 1985, Publishers Weekly reported that Bantam's Spring list included thirteen new Sweet Dreams titles ("Children's Books" 112) and that Silhouette planned twenty-four new First Love titles (133), against only five new Wildfire titles and nine Point titles from Scholastic (132). Other series, such as Caprice and Follow Your Heart, listed only two to five new titles. Silhouette First Love and Sweet Dreams books are certainly the most heavily promoted and the most visible in bookstores and discount department stores¹. Publishers of the specific kind of teen romance found in these series are obviously providing a popular product. The question is why the product is so popular. What do these books provide for their adolescent female readers?

Although some have wondered if the success of these novels arises from some sudden new yearning or insecurity among young female readers, that there is a link between these reassuring novels and the so-called breakdown of the American family, I don't believe that this is so. Certainly families—idealized families—are important to this genre, but they were equally important in the teen fiction of the forties, fifties and sixties. Contemporary teen romantic fiction is the daughter of Maureen Daly's Seventeenth Summer (which has been in print since 1942) and the fiction of such earlier writers as Betty Cavanna and Rosamund du Jardin. The series novels of the eighties may seem to be a new phenomenon, but they are not.

What is new is the packaging of these books as a series, their marketing, and their easy availability. Books that once existed in small numbers and that in many locales could be bought only through school clubs and only at specified times (once a month or so) were suddenly available in large numbers, with bright photographic covers of attractive but ordinary girls, in that paradise where contemporary teens spend so much time, the shopping mall. The shopping mall and, more important, the bookstore it is likely to contain, are familiar settings to teens, and a Walden or B. Dalton bookstore is not as intimidating as a library or a traditional bookstore. It is bright, informal, and organized more like a supermarket than anything else. Teen romances are easy to find, in a section labelled "Young Adult" rather than "Children," in bright dumpsters or revolving racks like those used to display earrings at the J. C. Penney next door.

The greater accessibility of teen romance, combined with its lack of school associations, partly accounts for its popularity. Had chain bookstores and computerized marketing techniques been available in the...