ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ubiquity of portable music in teenage culture, it is odd that authors of Young Adult literature often overlook the importance of music in their writing, or even sometimes get it wrong in terms of technology or currency. Young Adult literature of the twenty-first century reflects this new form of self-fashioning in various ways, but positioning music as the centre of the project of a character's identity formation occurs less often in the literature than in real life. 'Music' is a very small word to encompass something that takes as many forms as there are cultural or sub-cultural identities. The emphasis on identity construction is perhaps enough of a reason to focus on the place of music in Young Adult literature, but recent research into cognitive neuroscience and the specific area of adolescent brain development renders the topic even more salient for scholars of youth literature.
