The thing is that I don't always love YA as a genre and also sometimes I really do and also also sometimes books get called YA because they are written by women and the protagonist is under the age of 25 so like, whatever.
The thing that distinguishes YA from adult fiction with young protagonists is that YA characters are written for an audience that is assumed to be living with a heightened emotional sense of everything. Not just that the character is experiencing the world that way, but that the reader will resonate as they are with that character's emotions. "This is the first time I've had to do something like X" is a sentiment that hits the reader where they are. Fiction not aimed at young adults, even when writing such characters, aims at "You remember how it feels to have to do this for the first time". The goal is not resonance, but sympathy. And that changes the way that the characters are written.
Look, some of the time I am totally ready to be in "this is how it FEELS to be 17" as an emotional state, but sometimes I want to be invited into a character's life, not asked to embody them.
Anyway, this is about why I was both intrigued by and enjoyed The Beautiful and also kind of felt estranged from the characters. (This book that was not written for me did not work for me, complains reviewer.)
I wanted greater distance and more information, while the book's tight focus on Celine got in the way of what interested me about it. And also it does a really good job at being what it is. And what it is is not my thing.