Just discovered this post with some great tips on the value of asking kids to be beta readers for your young adult novels from Kate Milford’s blog, The Clockwork Foundry.

I haven’t done this before with my own work, but I will! I have gotten a lot of great feedback and ideas from fellow writers and writing teachers, but some of the most helpful critiques I’ve gotten have been from people who are passionate readers (and who are not also writers), because they have tended to focus on their experience of the story: “I got bored (or confused, or excited, or intrigued) during this section. Why did [character name] to that in chapter 3? I didn’t have a good picture in my head of [character],” and so on. Writers sometimes skip right to analysis–what they think the problem is and how to fix it–which isn’t always what the author needs.