Evaluating young adult literature on behalf of hypothetical adolescent readers may naturalize a series of myths about who adolescents are, what they care about, and what they are capable of.W ould adolescents choose to read this book? What problems or issues could I address with this book? Would adolescents see these issues as relevant? These are questions that English language arts (ELA) teachers often ask themselves when evaluating young adult literature (YAL), defined in this article as literature marketed for a youth audience. Indeed, these are the kinds of questions that we have used to guide our own instruction in our preservice teacher education courses on YAL. These questions always seemed logical given that they urge preservice teachers to consider and take seriously the needs and desires of their future students. However, we noticed that preservice teachers' responses to these questions often seemed to evoke limited ideas about their future students. Knowing the preservice teachers in our courses to be thoughtful, insightful people, we began to wonder about the questions we were asking and how they might be shaping our students' understandings of adolescents. In this article, we turn a critical eye toward these familiar questions, considering how they might create a restrictive framework for discussing both YAL and adolescence/ts.