How Dark Are YA Covers, Really?

One last post on cover trends before we move on to other topics: I just have to share the very brilliant Kate Hart's analysis of the darkness of YA covers in 2010. Kate looked at 400 covers of Young Adult novels released in 2010 to see if claims that teen books were all dark were founded:

What she found was very interesting, and incredibly important. Because there's at least one very significant way in which YA covers are not dark, and that's when it comes to race:

I've talked about issues of race in and on the covers of YA fiction at great length before, so I'll let Kate's post speak for itself. I highly encourage you to check out the entire post here.