[BruceIV]

There's some really good YA genre fiction out there, but I think one of the defining aspects of the genre is it's written about teenage protagonists with a number of very teenage problems, which I find increasingly tedious the further I get into my twenties.

That said, Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles (to pick a somewhat less known example) are pretty excellent sci-fi, if you can get past the annoying teenage romances of the protagonists.

[JoshTriplett]

Fair enough. I do very quickly skip stories that seem like a sitcom with fantasy elements thrown in. Then again, there are a lot of non-YA fantasy novels about broken people (teenage or adult) with highly non-fantastic problems; that seems to be a defining element of bad fiction for all ages, that it can't manage to escape the mundane. I have zero interest in reading about the everyday problems and situations of twentysomethings or thirtysomethings either.

Another good example of YA fantasy I've enjoyed that manages to dodge the trope: Diane Duane's Wizards series ("So you want to be a Wizard", "Deep Wizardry", "High Wizardry"), which seems to mostly stay away from typical teenager problems. The premise is not that novel, but in this case I found the execution quite satisfying, particularly in the second and third books. Without providing spoilers, I would note that the second book manages to avert one of the single most common tropes of YA fantasy novels (and of other series that avert it, most do so far later in a series). I'm also a big fan of "sufficiently descriptive language as magic" and "sufficiently analyzed magic", both of which these have quite a lot of.

(Note that I have not read the "updated" editions of these books that attempt to make some of the technology references less dated.)