I agree that YA novels are too soft, but I blame the conservative pearlclutchers. I mean, have you seen what’s happening in Texas and Florida? Every time I pick up a queer YA book its full of bad jokes and I feel like I’m being preached at. Everyone wants to make sure the childrens’ feelings are never hurt, so they write about an imaginary rainbow fantasyland where nothing ever really goes wrong. And the MCs never struggle for longer than a nanosecond before everything is magically fixed.