When I fit into the Young Adult demographic, which I assume to be from late pre-teen to mid- to late-teens, I doubt if I ever read anything that was considered written for that age group. The closest I came would have been the obligatory books that were foisted on me in high school: Salinger's Catcher In The Rye and Golding's Lord Of The Flies. Of course I don't really think those books are what you would call your normal Young Adult reading – they were just what was on offer in grade nine thirty very odd years ago.

The main problem I had with fiction that was geared for my age range was that none of it, no matter what the genre, had characters in it that I could either identify with or recognize as being human. Part of the problem were the times, and back in the mid 1970s the majority of youth-oriented fiction had not stayed abreast of things as far as I could see. None of the books I came across that proclaimed its authenticity ever had a character that smoked drugs who wasn't "bad news".

Now how was that supposed to make me feel, when everybody I knew (including myself) and was friends with had more then a passing acquaintance with smoking dope? It wasn't just the lack of dope-smoking characters that made these books and stories such a waste of time, there was also the fact that pretty much everything about them was clichéd or formula. Anyway, I was too busy reading real books to want to waste my time with stuff like that. How could they compare with Hemmingway, Joyce, Tolstoy, and the legions of books that were waiting to be devoured on the regular fiction shelves?

Well, times certainly have changed and it's now possible to have characters in young adult stories know about drugs without being evil. In fact, one of the wonderful things about the stories contained in a the new anthology Firebirds Rising from Firebird Press (distributed by Penguin Canada), is the fact that there are no clear-cut lines that separate the good from the bad.

The Firebird imprint of Penguin books was established to resurrect titles in the fantasy and science fiction genres that might have otherwise been lost forever. Although its primary focus is on titles that were originally written for a younger audience, the works that I have come across to this point have been of equal value to adults as to adolescents. A quick examination of the list of contributors to Firebirds Rising, who represent a cross-section of the authors published by the Firebird Press, is enough to explain why the quality of their books is so high.

Charles de Lint, Tanith Lee, Patricia McKillip, and Allen Dean Foster are all well-established fantasy and science fiction writers with successful careers and if they are the types of people writing for young audiences today it's no wonder the quality has improved. Of course fantasy and science fiction have always been a cut above its competitors when writing for a younger audience — dating back to the days of Jules Verne and his novels The Mysterious Island, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, and Journey To The Centre Of The World, to name just a few.