Children's and Young Adult Literature

Genres are writing styles or categories that distinguish a particular type of book from another. These style choices could be similar atmosphere, character types, tropes, storytelling devices, and/or themes that are consist among that type of story or book. Genres are typically used to describe fiction, but there are plenty of nonfiction genres as well. Wikipedia has an excellent breakdown of these genres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_genres

Examples of well-known fiction genres are:

• Action and adventure
• Comedy
• Mystery
• Fantasy
• Horror
• Science Fiction
• Crime
• Romance
• Literary fiction

Nonfiction include genres like Biography, Cookbooks, Personal Narrative, Poetry, Self Help, Travel, and True Crime

A trope in literature is a little bit different than the typical use of the word trope above. In books, a trope is a recurring (sometimes overused) literary or rhetorical device, cliche, or feature of a particular type of genre. Tropes differ from genre conventions in that they CAN be overused, whereas a genre convention is essential to be considered a part of the genre at all.

Example:

Magic or supernatural elements in fantasy is a genre convention. ESSENTIAL

"Good vs evil" theme in fantasy stories with a central "dark lord" character is a trope. NONESSENTIAL

While this website is a for-profit author marketing website, this webpage contains a fairly solid list of tropes that occur within the different genre: https://kindlepreneur.com/book-tropes/

NoveList, owned and hosted by EBSCO, is an interactive literature databases that attempts to categorize books in a unique way that helps readers, teachers, and librarians find books through specific sets of criteria, including genre, pacing, descriptors, intended age groups, even Lexile levels!

They have created a series of open-source webinars that gives the viewer a "crash course" introduction to specific genres. Mot of these are free with a NoveList login. These webinars detail the specific characteristics of the genre as well as introducing the learner to key books in that genre. They also have a blog that keeps readers informed of new trends and topics about genre fiction: https://www.ebsco.com/blogs/novelist/tag/genres

These Crash Courses primarily concern Adult Fiction, but most of the information can be directly applied to Children's and Young Adult Fiction as well!