However, there's a real egalitarian spirit in the YA world. I suspect that librarians, and the reviewers and award committees that serve them, want to let teenagers know their opinions matter. Selecting a text that will be hard going for many readers as the very best book for young adults seems to violate this whole approach to reading and literature. Some think that the answer is adding another term to the mix, potential popularity . Although this concept seems to join the two sides, I think, in the end, it is a trap that exposes the flaw in the entire system of evaluating YA literature.
Quality certainly can yield popularity.
Quality, you might say, is the author's ability to go deeper, higher, further than most writers. It means a book can open up readers, show them things about themselves they didn't know were there. This doesn't mean that excellence is limited to highly interior literary fiction. Any book that does something exceptionally well expands a reader's horizons. This is the heart of my problem with the idea of judging anything by popularity.