It’s comeback season for 2000-era YA authors. How will they adapt to today’s TikTok teens?

Clare Mulroy, USA TODAYThu, May 7, 2026 at 11:02 AM UTC

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I was lucky to grow up on Cape Cod, but when I was a teen, all I wanted to do was get out of my small town. My ballet teacher used to say, “Your world starts at the Cape Cod Mall in Hyannis and ends at the Sagamore Bridge.”

Young adult books were my escape to life over the bridge. In middle school, I was swept up in dystopian worlds crafted by Veronica Roth ("Divergent") and Suzanne Collins ("Hunger Games"). I felt validated in John Green's moody teen ruminations. But most of all, I loved sweet summer romances of Sarah Dessen. With pastel covers and candy-coated character names like Macon, Ambrose and Haven, her stories seemed so far away, even if the author now tells me that her summers on the Cape largely inspired the setting.

Readers of the 2000s and 2010s YA heyday are spoiled – many of these authors are making a comeback. Green will publish his adult debut later this year. Collins gave us “Sunrise on the Reaping” last year. Roth is publishing new “Divergent” books.

Dessen’s “Change of Plans” (out now from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) is her first novel in seven years and marks 30 years in the genre. But the publishing landscape has changed drastically since her last novel in 2019. BookTok happened. Teens are more online than ever. Romantasy reigns in YA. For a while, Dessen didn’t feel like she belonged in the genre anymore.

“It was dark at times because I had had this really long career and what I felt like was a really strong foundation, but suddenly people just literally weren’t buying what I was selling,” Dessen says.

Sarah Dessen has been writing YA for 30 years. Returning with "Change of Plans," she faced a new generation of teens.Sarah Dessen reflects on the YA genre changing over three decades

Dessen didn’t set out to write YA. In fact, she “couldn't wait to get out of” high school. But when she wrote a story with a 15-year-old narrator, something clicked. Of all the stories she’d submitted, that was the one that her agent liked. When her debut, “That Summer,” published in 1996, there wasn’t even shelf space for YA. Dessen’s books sat between children’s board books.

Even a decade later, the landscape had changed. Dystopian and paranormal romance were in. Thirty years later, YA is still booming.

“I have had to wait for the pendulum to swing back multiple times. I am old enough to remember when it was like everyone was telling me to put a vampire in my book. Everyone was telling me to do a dystopian thing. Everyone was telling me to do a tragic disease,” Dessen says. “Even in this period of the seven years, we would take meetings with publishers and they'd be like, ‘We really like Sarah, but will she write a romantasy series?’”

But it’s largely a positive change, Dessen notes.

“YA was very straight and white except for a few exceptions,” Dessen says. The genre is getting more diverse, with more attention on indie and self-published authors. In fact, many authors are finding so much success with self-publishing that they’re nabbing traditional book deals.

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Don’t ask Sarah Dessen to put TikTok in her books

The last time Dessen published a book, she flew home from celebrations to make her daughter’s 5th-grade graduation. This book comes out within a month of her high school graduation.

If there was ever a time to take a step back from YA, it was this: “I couldn’t think of anything more mortifying than your mother thinking that she could write about you and your friends," she says.

Parenting a teenager – and parenting in general – has changed “everything” about the way Dessen writes. She used to think of the parent characters as strict and controlling. Now they seem pretty reasonable. Sometimes her agent has to tell her to pull back a little and keep the teen perspective in the driver’s seat. In “Change of Plans,” she at least can give the mother character some depth. The story follows a recent high school graduate who spends the summer with her absent mother and comes to know her in a different light, adult-to-adult.

But Dessen is also parenting and writing an entirely different teenage experience from her own. Dessen, 55, says the starkest contrast is in dating: “We were pairing off in middle school.” Teens are dating less, a 2024 study from the Survey Center on American Life found. Another report, from the Institute for Family Studies, called out a “dating recession.”

It's also technology. Today's teens were children when the pandemic hit. They grew up in an age of doomscrolling and TikTok. Even before social media blew up, Dessen was hesitant to date her books with references to phones or slang. She’s definitely not doing it now. In “Change of Plans,” protagonist Finely throws her phone into a lake.

“I think the worst thing I could do as a woman my age is to try to be current with the kids,” Dessen says. “I'm going to really lean into what's universal and timeless to me about the teen experience, which is the relationships with your family, the relationships with your friends, navigating romance.”

It also prevents her from alienating the readers who grew up loving her books as a teen and are eager to check them out now that they’re adults.

Connecting with readers of all ages is what most excites her about returning to authoring. Dessen seems to have a bit of a master plan she’s hinting at here. She’s always avoided writing about senior year because she didn’t know how to capture the college application process. “Change of Plans” kicks off at graduation. Will she continue to age up her characters? Could an adult book be in the works?

“I have one more book on this contract that I need to write and then I'm hoping to pivot maybe and write some contemporary fiction. We'll see,” Dessen says. “It would be fun to write something after high school.”

Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Author Sarah Dessen returns to YA fiction to a new generation teens

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