And yeah, I meant opening the door to historicals in general (although I didn’t actually realize that The Luxe wasn’t a Regency – totally my bad). When I was bookselling, though, the same girls were reading The Luxe/La Petite Four/Sorcery and Cecelia/AGATB.

YA was the perfect place for those authors who are NOT regency-set romance writers (i.e., they prefer shorter, “sweeter” stories) to go. Almost all of these authors now publishing regency YA were formerly regency romance writers.

Add that to the fact that the Keira Knightley-driven Pride & Prejudice was a huge hit, and KK is big in the teen crowd thanks to her Pirates franchise. And sweet is also in, thanks to Twilight. So it’s pretty much a perfect storm on that front.

I don’t know if The Luxe (Gilded Age) or AGATB (Victorian) were doing much to push this trend, since neither of them are sweet OR regency-set, unless you mean it was opening the door to historicals in general. But regency does seem to be out there a lot. I think the heir to AGATB, a Victorian fantasy, is going to be Cassandra Clare’s upcoming Victorian demon-hunter novels.

I don’t think the traditional ones are much different from the teen books, frankly, but I guess the publishers aren’t just going to repackage. Although that’d be a really good idea (and save them some money). All the protagonists in the current books are about 17, yeah. One big reason I like these books because I can (well, could, in my former life as a bookseller) hand them to any girl without fear of content, and there are a lot of tweens reading YA these days.

Alex doesn’t want to marry because she’s only 17 and she thinks A. she’s too young and B. marriage is oppressive. She is p.o.’ed that her brothers are older and still unmarried and her mother doesn’t hector them nearly as much as she hectors Alex, and she hates the double standard. She speaks loftily of never getting married but you figure out that she’s full of garbage pretty much as soon as Gavin appears on the scene.

I’ve also noticed this YA regency trend, which kind of puzzles me. I agree that their appeal to teens is less the period than other factors; it’s us adult readers who sit up and say, “Ooh, a teen Regency.” At the same time, though, what with the stereotype of traditional Regencies as no sex/behind closed doors, a big part of me feels like I’d rather just give the teens the old trads instead of the YA books that have been published so far, even though I know no one’s publishing traditional Regencies anymore (as print-first books, I mean, not via e-pubs). Not all those books with widows or spinsters, but the ones featuring younger female protagonists (and hopefully not some guy twice her age). Because how different are some of the trads from the new YA Regencies? In the books you listed, aren’t all the protagonists around 17, 18? And I know there are trads with female protagonists that young, like Joan Wolf’s A London Season.

I will definitely give The Season a try because of your review, but I’m curious. Why doesn’t Alex want to marry?