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I would say, the main difference would be content and severity of themes. For example, Peretti wrote a YA Fiction series about a Christian archaeological family and their adventures that deals with heavy themes and is a really great series in my opinion. He also wrote more Adult Fiction like The Oath, This Present Darkness, Piercing the Darkness, etc, which all deal with heavier themes, more adult content, etc. I would say that most of his novels(I haven’t read all of them) are okay for a non-squeamish 16+ audience. Peretti is not the standard unfortunately, however – many, many Adult Fiction novels I’ve read I would not recommend for younger audiences. This is typically only in non-Christian fiction however.

In YA Fiction, I typically expect in a good novel strong themes that may be darker, but not completely hopeless, some violent content and maybe some sexual content, but nothing explicit(Especially not in Christian fiction. I’m not entirely against the mentioning of it in YA Fiction, but I don’t want anything explicit in any novel preferably. ). Take into mind I’m not a particularly squeamish reader so I will read stories that are a bit heavy if they have good themes sometimes, but I don’t want some content there.

In Adult Fiction, I expect some heavier, darker themes at times that deal much more with death and tragedy in a realistic manner than YA Fiction at most times. Any novel can deal with these themes, but in YA it seems there’s it’s a little ‘cleaner’ and more hopeful, while Adult Fiction can get rather hopeless and heavy at times even for me as a non-squeamish person who doesn’t mind harder stuff. I prefer all my fiction to still carry some element of hope, in Adult Fiction that hope is not always continually present while in YA(except for the ultimate low occasionally) it always seems to light up the background. If that makes sense. 😉