I love what Cynthia Crossen, who writes the Dear Book Lover column for the Wall Street Journal, wrote about YA literature in a recent column:

"Good YA is not dumbed-down adult fare; it’s literature that doesn’t waste a breath. It doesn’t linger over grandiloquent descriptions of clouds or fields, and it doesn’t introduce irrelevant minor characters in the hope (too often gratified) that the book will be called Dickensian."