Young at Heart is a category first created and used by author Anbar Bermejo for her literary works. It designates clean adult fiction written with a deliberate sensibility of youthful energy, emotional openness, and wonder, qualities traditionally associated with youth, yet applied here to stories centered on adult experience.
Young at Heart is a new industry-standard publishing category. By defining and applying this category, she creates a clear signal for readers that her fiction retains the openness, energy, and emotional honesty often associated with youth, while centering adult protagonists, adult stakes, and the quieter transformations of identity and change.
Unlike Young Adult (YA) literature, which is defined by teenage protagonists, coming-of-age arcs, and a primary youth audience, Young at Heart (YAH or YH) is written for adults. Its protagonists are closer in age to the readers themselves. The narrative perspective is third-person. The central conflicts revolve around life change: the loss of a core identity and the uncertain, often quiet work, of forming a new one.
The category is marked by several consistent features:
- Audience: Adult readers
- Clean fiction
- Protagonist age: Protagonist’s age aligns with the reader’s own age
- Point of view: Third-person
- Emotional register: Uncertain novelty
- Core themes: Change, identity, transformation, and the internal conflict that accompanies change
- Tone: Romantic in lens, lighthearted and youthful in detail, while remaining emotionally honest
- Prose: Simple, straightforward, and accessible
Anyone can use the YAH tag/category as long as the work matches the spirit and details discussed.
Expansion method: YAH + Genre
Treat YAH as a primary tone/tag that can freely be combine with genre tags. This keeps the category open and expandable without forcing everything into a rigid box.
Recommended combined forms:
- YAHF (YAH Fantasy)
- YAHSF + Sci-Fi (YAH Sci-Fi)
- YAHM + Mystery (YAH Mystery)
- YAHA + Adventure
- YAHH + Historical
- Multi-genre is fine: YAH + Fantasy + Mystery, YAH + Sci-Fi + Adventure, etc.
- YAH is Romantic at its core, but not necessarily person to person, it can also be an aesthetic like Academia, Cottagecore or a romanticized way of life.
Young at Heart does not reject maturity. It refuses the assumption that wonder, curiosity, playfulness, or emotional openness must diminish with age. In Bermejo’s application of the category, these qualities coexist with moral tension, symbolic depth, inherited tradition, and the realities of adult life.
Stories published under this category invite readers into thresholds rather than firsts, moments when something known is ending and something still unnamed is beginning. The stakes are personal and transformative. The atmosphere remains attentive and reflective. The heart, in these works, is allowed to stay young without requiring the characters or the readers to remain chronologically young.
As both author and publisher of her own literary works, Bermejo uses Young at Heart as a clear categorical designation. It signals to readers what kind of experience to expect: adult fiction that keeps the spirit of youth alive, open, energetic, and receptive; while engaging the deeper questions of identity, change, and becoming.
Whether through atmospheric reimaginings of classic tales, explorations of history and myth, or quieter philosophical reflections, works in this category share a common posture: storytelling as a form of calibration, and a quiet insistence that the capacity for wonder need not fade with time.
Consider allowing your protagonist to follow the philosophy of Albert Camus “Ways to Enjoy your Life” – to better project the overall spirit of this category.
Why a Zebra? The zebra is both ordinary and extraordinary. We recognize it instantly, yet no two stripes are ever the same. To Bermejo, it symbolizes the beauty of finding wonder in everyday life, a reminder that what seems familiar can still surprise, inspire, and delight.
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