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All the authors are Mormon, and all the target audiences are the adolescent readers referred to by publishers as young adults. Martin's Press is publishing "The Chosen One," a novel about a 13-year-old living in a polygamist community, by Carol Lynch Williams. Just this month, Berry's novel, "The Amaranth Enchantment," is being published by Bloomsbury, "Everything Is Fine," by Ann Dee Ellis, is being published by Hachette, and "Taken By Storm," by Angela Morrison, is being published by Penguin. That Mormon writers have come to loom large in an increasingly popular literary genre can be linked to several unique characteristics of their faith and culture: an aversion to the sex and swearing that prevails in adult fiction, a propensity for large families that often means a child-focused life, and an affinity for fantasy writing.

Rowling, is clearly spurring new interest in fiction for teenagers. None of the other Mormon authors has achieved that kind of success, but Shannon Hale's "Princess Academy" was a New York Times bestseller and a Newbery Honor Winner, and the success of "Twilight," as well as the Harry Potter series, by non-Mormon writer J.K.

The most famous among them, of course, is Stephenie Meyer, a practicing Mormon from Arizona whose "Twilight" series, about a teenage girl who has a no-sex-before-marriage relationship with a dreamy adolescent vampire, has sold an astonishing 28 million books and spawned a film that has already grossed $188 million. The novel is, she grudgingly admits, wholesome.Īnd that's what links Berry, of Maynard, Mass., and other Mormon writers, many of them young women, who are surging into the genre of young adult literature, finding a happy marriage between the expectations of their religion and the desires of a burgeoning publishing niche. Julie Berry's first novel is a fairy tale with a prince and a witch and love and despair.