When Did Our Favorite Literary Heroines Get So Grown-Up?

What happens to an American Girl when she’s no longer a girl? Would a middle-aged Blair Waldorf still rule the Upper East Side? How might Nancy Drew navigate Brooklyn as a mom and divorcée? These are the sort of questions that, apparently, publishers want their millennial fans to ask—the same fans who first encountered these characters as kids and teens and have since become adults, some with children of their own. And if one of the book industry’s biggest trends is any indication, readers are keen to see these beloved characters grow up with them.

A handful of formerly young-adult heroines, including Blair and Nancy, are in the midst of receiving an aged-up treatment. In 2026 alone, publishers have announced multiple upcoming novels featuring nostalgic protagonists popular in the ’90s and 2000s, each of them supplanted from adolescence to adulthood. In October, American Girl will publish Fiona Davis’s Samantha: The Next Chapter, following the American Girl known as Samantha as a 25-year-old in New York City; Cecily von Ziegesar’s Blair, introducing a Queen B in her 40s, is set to drop in summer 2027; and authors E. Lockhart and Sarah Mlynowski will publish Nancy—about a divorced 40-something Nancy Drew—under a pseudonym, with an as-yet-unannounced release date.

Social media is, in part, to thank for this micro-phenomenon. When millennial fans nostalgic for their childhood heroines started posting about what their American Girl dolls might be up to as adult women, American Girl’s parent company, Mattel, took notice. “We saw lots of different memes and posts about what happens to the American Girl dolls,” Jamie Cygielman, Mattel’s global head of dolls, says. “‘Where are they today? Where do they live? Did they get married? What do they do for their careers?’ There started to be a lot of these fan theories around what would happen, or fan stories that were being told, and we thought, ‘Well, why don’t we tell them?’”

The result is Davis’s upcoming historical fiction novel, about an adult Samantha who fights for women’s suffrage during the Roaring Twenties; has her inheritance stolen; and works to recover it (even if that requires tangling with some “notorious criminals”) while adjusting to life as a shop girl in a boarding house. Samantha: The Next Chapter plans to play with the format of American Girl’s original Samantha books, which featured specific beats, like Samantha Learns a Lesson and Happy Birthday, Samantha! Should the novel do well, it might well pave the way for additional American Girl adult book adaptations, Cygielman says.

The move into adult literature is also a pathway for the company to expand its offerings to other age groups beyond kids and teens—namely, adult women with disposable income. Cygielman mentioned that the American Girl cafés in New York City and Chicago have become a destination for women of all ages to celebrate milestones, such as birthdays and bridal showers, and that American Girl’s recent collaborations with retail brands such as Stoney Clover Lane lean into Gen Z women’s penchant for collecting, in particular. American Girl is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and some of the company’s original fans have become parents themselves, hoping to pass down the American Girl tradition to their children.

But while American Girl might have loomed large over the childhoods of girls in the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond, Gossip Girl—both the books and the CW TV adaptation—might as easily have dominated their teenage years in the 2000s and 2010s. Now, Gossip Girl series author von Ziegesar is in the process of writing the story’s resurrection (after a disappointing TV reboot failed to capture the magic of the original series).

“I feel like [series protagonist] Blair is my masterpiece, really,” von Ziegesar says. “She’s still my favorite character that I’ve ever created. The books came out in the early 2000s, and [Blair] graduated from high school in 2007. It’s been 20 years now, so it just seemed like a logical place to land and have her dealing with what one would be dealing with in their early 40s.”

The new book, aptly titled Blair, follows the former Queen B as she re-enters New York society and claws her way back to prominence. Alloy Entertainment has already bought the rights for a Hollywood adaptation. (Hopefully Gossip Girl actress Leighton Meester has already cleared her schedule.)

In preparation, von Ziegesar is revisiting her Gossip Girl series for the first time as a reader, noting that what she finds the most surprising is that the books are funny; she’s using them as a source to mine memories for an older Blair to look back on. “It’s like meeting up with an old friend,” the author says of revisiting her beloved character. “I haven’t heard from her in so long, and now I can’t wait to see what she’s doing—and what she’s wearing.”

This sentiment—yearning to connect with an old friend, even if she’s fictional—is shared by numerous adult readers in search of nostalgia. As many as 71 percent of readers who go back and reread their favorite books are doing so to feel wistful, familiar, and sentimental, according to a recent study by Talker Research in conjunction with ThriftBooks. Readers are seeking comfort in a fast-changing, volatile era, with 45 percent of respondents saying that they struggle to keep up with how fast the world is changing. Although Blair will follow its titular protagonist at a new age, the adult novel will feature the same setting, the same author, and the same Blair, giving the reader instant familiarity.

The nostalgia factor is also a key element to how Amy Einhorn, senior vice president and publisher of fiction at Crown Publishing Group, and her team are approaching the new Nancy Drew book, also bearing the mononym Nancy. Between Blair and Samantha: The Next Chapter, Nancy seems to take the biggest departure from its original source material: In the adult novel, our fearless detective is no longer a detective at all. Nancy is now a divorced Brooklyn mom whose sleuthing days are long behind her, but circumstances force her to reconcile with an ex-childhood best friend to solve a case.

“Nancy Drew was and is such an iconic force for so many readers growing up—who wouldn’t want to reconnect with one of their oldest friends, who, just like us, has had her share of challenges?” Einhorn says. “I think we all are craving some nostalgia right now, and yet at the same time also want something new and exciting.”

With the rise of AI, a chaotic job market, a relentless news cycle, and constant digital connectivity, adults are seeking deeper connection—and nostalgia is a powerful unifying force. According to a recent study conducted by the American Psychological Association, 54 percent of adults feel isolated often or some of the time in a society that feels increasingly fractured. The monoculture, in which it once seemed everyone was watching Gossip Girl or Game of Thrones, has largely faded, though publishers seem keen to try to recapture its remains.

Not that the race to cash in on nostalgic IP is anything new. The Hollywood reboot machine is so prolific as to have become the norm. In 2026, reboots and IP extensions are everywhere: A new version of Scrubs returned to ABC; Warner Bros. and HBO will premiere their new Harry Potter series in December; sequels to The Devil Wears Prada, Practical Magic, Meet the Parents, The Hunger Games, The Social Network, Toy Story, Spider-Man, and more are all already out or expected later this year. But the particular trend to age-up young protagonists for a new reader demographic is a relatively new phenomenon within the publishing industry. Y2K nostalgia has proven out financially in other mediums. Why not with books?

This logic drove the recent reboot of another adored book series, one that argues you can resurrect a YA world for an adult audience without bringing your old characters along for the ride. Author Lauren Kate’s Fallen saga was a teenage mainstay in the 2010s, following a love triangle between a human, an angel, and a demon. Kate has since picked up where she left off with the adult romantasy White Lights, released earlier this month.

The book is set more than a decade after the events of the Fallen series and features an entirely different cast of characters, as well as a new story, in which the angels in heaven are inspired to give up their immortality for a human life. This approach allows fans of the YA series to return to a recognizable world, while simultaneously opening up the doors for new adult readers to enter Kate’s universe. (White Lights is a standalone, meaning that readers needn’t have read the original YA books to enjoy the new installment.)

Kate published her adult debut novel, a historical fiction called The Orphan’s Song, in 2021. “One simple biographical reason that I switched to writing adult novels was that I had children,” she explains. “The first book that I wrote in the adult space dealt with motherhood, and I really wanted to be able to write about that.” She explains that YA characters are often “necessarily” preoccupied with themselves and their own identities, while adult characters have “very different preoccupations,” grappling with questions like: “What kind of world do I want to live in, and how do I get to participate in that? How do I give back? Who am I helping? What kind of legacy do I want to leave?” Kate concludes, “That’s felt like the biggest difference [between] writing the character Desdemona in White Lights and writing Lucinda’s character in Fallen.”

Nor is Kate alone in her thinking. A July 2025 report in Publisher’s Weekly indicated that numerous authors are jumping from writing children’s books and YA books to adult books, keeping pace with their readers as their audience ages. Concurrently, and not coincidentally, the new-adult publishing genre has perhaps finally hit its stride.

Over the past two years, four of the publishers known as the “Big Five”—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan Publishers—have launched new-adult imprints. (Examples include Hachette’s Requited and Simon & Schuster’s Scarlett Press.) “New adult” bridges the gap between YA and adult, focused on protagonists between the ages of 18 and 25; hugely popular new-adult books include the Off-Campus series by Elle Kennedy, the Fourth Wing series by Rebecca Yarros, and Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston.

“The new-adult category very much feels like you’re reading YA—the beats feel similar, the payoffs, the tropes—but tackle subject matter that is a little more mature,” says Sara Goodman, the vice president and editorial director of YA and new-adult imprints Wednesday Books and Saturday Books at St. Martin’s Press, part of Macmillan. “You can just be a little spicier, but it’s beyond that. You’re focusing on a character’s certain time of life that’s a very defining one for a lot of people, which is when you’re out of your teens and trying to become an adult.”

Jennifer Iacopelli, author of Finding Her Edge, has written books in both the YA and new-adult categories, and, like Kate, she finds that one of the major differences between writing for a YA audience versus a new-adult audience is the protagonist’s level of ambition and agency. New adults are learning how to navigate making decisions themselves, Iacopelli argues, whereas young adults have more of their lives dictated by their parents. Similarly, new adults are often depicted as having more sexual agency; meanwhile, writing explicit sex scenes for a YA audience is trickier, if not outright off-limits.

“For a young-adult audience, you’re writing a sex scene to show [a character’s] growth, to make a choice, to decide what they want for themselves,” Iacopelli says. “You’re not writing a sex scene to create something that will turn your reader on. When you are writing new-adult, that is 100 percent the goal.”

There was first an attempt to launch the new-adult category in the U.S. back in the 2010s. But publishers couldn’t seem to commit to putting weight behind the new category and walked back books that were initially—at least internally—marked as new-adult, such as Sarah J. Maas’s mega-hit A Court of Thorns and Roses, which ended up publicly marketed as YA when it was published in 2015. At the time, there was a lack of new-adult infrastructure in bookstores and the publisher, Bloomsbury, was wary of positioning Maas away from her established YA fan base. Ultimately, this caused some confusion for readers and sellers alike.

“I was buying those books because they were listed in…the young-adult catalogs,” says Dhonielle Clayton, author of the YA book Tiny Pretty Things and a former schoolteacher and librarian. “That’s how I got bamboozled by Sarah J. Maas’s book with my students. I was like ‘Why are all my eighth graders trying to check out this book? What’s going on? They’re whispering.’ I found out why.” (Maas’s series is now classified as firmly adult for its use of sexually explicit scenes.)

It’s not hard to understand why some aging readers might be craving these explicit scenes and romance storylines: They want to see stories of actually successful romantic relationships. Across generations, people are dealing with widespread dating fatigue, particularly when it comes to dating apps—78 percent of users cite app burnout, according to a recent Forbes Health study—and their frustrations seem a likely indicator of what’s driving them to the romance aisle. (Romance book sales were up 5 percent overall last year, per The New York Times.)

Still, the new-adult boom is not only about the sex. “There are so many different aspects of new adult,” says Danielle Finnegan, brand marketing lead of the German new-adult romance publisher LYX Books, which expanded into the North American market in 2025. “You can have a fantasy, you can have a mystery, and of course, romance is usually involved in a lot of them. They’re generally easy, digestible reads that are exciting and fun to be involved in and to read in a time where the world seems like it’s on fire. I feel like a lot of people are reading new-adult as escapism.”

Social media now provides authors with actionable data about what readers want to read, especially as traditional media coverage of books decreases. “I think [social media] opened the gates a lot more to embolden writers to write the stories we want to write, regardless of the narrow lens that we might have seen in the past about what’s hot,” says Gretchen Powell Fox, author of the new-adult romantasy novels Splintered Kingdom and Shadow and Son, both set to publish later this year as part of her Shattered Crown series. “We’re getting it straight from the source now. I really think that it’s an amazing way to see where interests lie.”

Similarly, publishers now have a stronger understanding of why the new-adult genre is working this time around—and they’re hungry for more. “For writers who we might have been working with five years ago, their readers have grown up,” Goodman says. “We know that. We see it in the lines at their [book] signings…there’s an audience built in that has aged up into the new-adult category.”

Jasmine Guillory, known for her adult romances, such as The Wedding Date and The Proposal, is an exception to this rule: She’s moving into YA with her upcoming novel It’s Only Dancing, which arrives on October 6 and is marketed toward ages 12 and up. She’s had secret roots in this age group for years, however—the first book she ever wrote was YA, though it was never published—and she’s keen to serve a depleted modern YA market.

“I know, I’m bucking the trend, right?” Guillory says. “I’ve always loved YA novels and the idea of writing for that audience. I have so much love for and tenderness towards teenage girls; everyone makes fun of them and their enthusiasms and their fickleness and whatever, but I love those things about them.”

She continues, “In YA, everything feels heightened, faster, more important, more emotional. Adults have context for all of those big feelings, but teens have a lot less, and I loved really thinking through that and taking their feelings seriously.”

Multiple other authors interviewed for this story cited an interest in serving their readers at multiple life stages, keeping them engaged as they grow older. Clayton, for example, is in the process of creating what she calls a “literacy bridge,” in which she hopes to have a book to offer every age group. “I wanted young readers to be able to follow me from when they can’t read to when they become adults and have work in every single bucket,” Clayton says. She’s written middle-grade and YA (Tiny Pretty Things, which she co-wrote, got adapted by Netflix) and will soon release her adult fiction debut, Conjure the Bones.

As more and more authors move their audiences into new-adult and beyond, detractors argue that middle-grade, teen, and YA readers are being neglected. Just in the past year, Dial Books for Young Readers has shuttered, Bloomsbury U.S. Children’s division has had layoffs, and Macmillan Children’s Publishing dissolved children’s imprint Roaring Brook Press in favor of a new nonfiction and illustrated division. The New York Times also cited in its 2025 year-end books wrap-up that the YA category is struggling: Not taking into account Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins’s latest book, YA sales were down 12 percent last year.

Legacy brands might well be uniquely positioned to thread the needle: One upcoming case study will be Barbie: Dreamscape, a YA fantasy novel starring the famous Barbie and written by bestselling Lightlark author Alex Aster, which Mattel will publish in August. Meanwhile, American Girl is already preparing to invest more in the aged-up trend.

“We anticipate our fanbase really loving [Samantha: The Next Chapter] and wanting to know more,” Cygielman says. “What happens to Molly? What happens to Kirsten? And Addy? We really are excited to start to delve into these stories and see if some of the fans who wrote their own storylines are right.”