What's up with this trend in YA titles?

I'm sure it's just marketing, a way of signalling to the reader that if they liked a book with a similar sounding title, then this will be their kind of thing. There must be evidence that it works in encouraging people to pick the book off the shelf/website, or I doubt they'd do it. Personally I'm not a fan, and books often blur into one for me, but I'm not a young adult either so I'm not their target audience. That said, I think it happens in the adult market too, there was recentish controversy around a book with a title similar to Girl on the Train, but I can't remember the other book now. And I noticed lots of books with the word liars after We Were Liars did so well.

Yeah, I noticed that too with other titles, can't think of them off hand, but there's a lot of "you" and "us" and "we" Like One of Us is Lying, The Silence Between Us. There's a lot more if you really think about it. I think they're trying to give it a personal feeling.

Yeah, it's imho an annoying trend. This type of titles has become so stale and they all resemble each other.

Another trend in YA novels as well as movies seems to be:

Before + I/We/You + Fall/Go/Wake/Sleep/Come Up With A Better Title...

Hella not just YA novels.

Kjbartolotta said:

Hella not just YA novels.

Click to expand...

Ayup.

*stares pointedly at The Girl in the X / The Girl on the Y / The Girl with the Z*

There's even a name generator.

Mine is Throne of Shadow and Glass.

Patty said:

There's even a name generator.

Mine is Throne of Shadow and Glass.

Click to expand...

Song of Nightmares and Storms, huh?

Suddenly this writing business is sliding into focus for me.

Remember when it was all about "The *craftsman's* Wife" and "The *craftsman's* Daughter" and various iterations of same?

mccardey said:

Remember when it was all about "The *craftsman's* Wife" and "The *craftsman's* Daughter" and various iterations of same?

Click to expand...

I'm still waiting to see, say, "The Midwife's Husband" or "The Charwoman's Son" or something like that.

Patty said:

There's even a name generator.

Mine is Throne of Shadow and Glass.

Click to expand...

The Queen of Nightmares and Stars

Apparently I should write, "The court of nightmares and night"
Rather dark and ominous!

Marissa D said:

I'm still waiting to see, say, "The Midwife's Husband" or "The Charwoman's Son" or something like that.

Click to expand...

THIS. Those "Daughter" and "Wife" titles come off as so sexist to me. They say NOTHING about the books' heroines and EVERYTHING about the men who "own" them.

*starts writing Daughter of Cake and Also More Cake*

Children Of Mother And Father.
Files Of Windows And Mac.
Rides In Bikes And Cars.
Yeah, so many unexplored names. Gotta catch 'em all.

Lone Wolf said:

Apparently I should write, "The court of nightmares and night"
Rather dark and ominous!

Click to expand...

Mine is, "The Book of Nightmares and Night." LOL! Wanna co-write a dark fantasy?

I agree that some of these titles get rather boring after you've seen the same layout "The X's Daughter". But what if "X's" was something unique like the (just making this up on the spot) "The Asteroid Thief's Daughter?" (Wow. That make-up-on-the-spot title actually sounds pretty cool.) Or is that still boring and says nothing about the MC?

Marissa D said:

I'm still waiting to see, say, "The Midwife's Husband" or "The Charwoman's Son" or something like that.

Click to expand...

"The Charwoman's Son" has potential, though. Although not as a YA title. It would be the story of a man whose whole life is shaped by being the son of a struggling single mother. He starts out willing to do anything for a steady, secure life, then greed gets the better of him. In the end he has to really think about what's important to him, and what he's become.

As for the "Midwife's Husband" - a story about a man who's wife is a midwife, and she's always delivering other people's babies, but doesn't seem to want to have one of their own.

Are titles meant to tell you something about a character, or more to give you a sense of the kind of story you're getting into?
From straight-up 'Murder' or 'Death' to something more atmospheric, like 'Shadows on the Bayou', or 'A Spiral of Pixies', isn't the title just a way of luring you in?

Sage said:

I think the complaint isn't so much about the ability of those kind of titles to sell--obviously they do--but that they seem to be about a character, but in fact are not. So often it's a daughter where the descriptor is about the father. Particularly, in YA, where the story has to be a teen, why focus on the teen's father? Why start out suggesting that the MC is only as interesting as their parents?

Click to expand...

That. It's just plain sexist to me. Why do all these books about female main characters mention a man in the title when the story isn't about him? In historical and women's fiction those titles are everywhere.

Yeah, those titles seem to imply that the most interesting thing about a woman is the man she’s married/related to. Granted, if it’s a book about the 19th century, that could be taken as a commentary on an era when very few women in the middle class and up had professions. But I don’t like it for contemporary novels.

Ironically, though, I can’t think of any titles of actual 18th- or 19th-century books that follow this pattern. Some must exist, but back then it was way more common to name a book after its heroine (Moll Flanders, Clarissa, Jane Eyre) or its setting (The Mill on the Floss, Wuthering Heights). Guess that’s out of fashion now.

I was trying to come up with some good (i.e. legitimate, workable) ideas for this pattern last night while watching Supernatural season 11 (Wherein Chuck and Lucifer are having a heart to heart). "The son of God" popped into my head. Can't quite connect the dots on this one, but it does seem like a related linguistic thing.

God is definitely the power broker in that construction. Son of God (spoiler: Jesus, not Lucifer)--Whoa. This 'son' guy has gotta be an interesting dude to watch. Is he God? No, not quite, but he might have a few god-like traits. And then, big twist, he becomes the lamb of God. What?? Now that's just weird.

I wonder if there's some psychological association between titles like Daughter of the Iron King (FREX) and Son of God/Lamb of God. Like, the titles work for the same reason. It's a way to say there's something powerful here, but you don't know what, exactly, it is.