Eat. Dance. Fight.: A Review of Daughters of Oduma, by Moses Ose Utomi

            Young adult fiction is one of the cornerstones of the literary world and, too often, gets a bit of a bad rap.  At one time, YA fiction dominated the market.  Books turned into series, which turned into best-sellers, which turned into the sale of movie rights and the establishment of franchises.  But then, something happened.  The established authors lost their footing, and cast a black mark which affected new authors as well.  At its core, YA fiction simply means books that are aimed at readers between the ages of 12 and 18.  However, there have come certain tropes and plot points that readers now associate with this broad category, which can contain every genre in existence, for it is not a genre in itself: it is a target audience.  To truly succeed in this area, the story needs to be something different than what came before.  It needs to take risks, to break from the established formula, and, above all, it needs to treat its target readers like actual people rather than the bundle of stereotypes some YA stories saw them as.