“Why?” has been the question on our readers’ lips - via tweets - when they heard that The Da Vinci Code is to be republished in a “YA edition”. The book, to be published in September, will precede the film release of another Brown title, Inferno, in UK cinemas in October. But what is there in The Da Vinci Code which is inaccessible to teenager readers? Is Brown going to get rid of the sex scenes (no shortage of those in YA fiction)? The violence (I can’t remember any)? Religion? Are any other contemporary writers planning to “translate” themselves to younger readers?

I was also 12 when I read the Da Vinci Code. The book gripped me entirely. To be honest, it probably wouldn’t have hooked me in as much were I reading it later.

Brown’s novel did two crucial things for me at the age when I started thinking hard about who I was and what was important to me.

Firstly, it helped me take religion as a story rather than the story. Influenced by my religious grandmother and school, I collected icons as a child and was all into bells and smells. At 12, I developed ideas about gender. Feminism and religion, in my teen mind, contradicted each other. And Brown came just at the right time, with his theory of an anti-feminist conspiracy of the Church in having erased Magdalene’s role in Jesus’s and Christianity’s lives. The protests that ensued in the Catholic and the Christian Orthodox Churches only confirmed my new discovery that, alongside important values, religion held a lot of… myths.

Secondly, the book got me into thinking about art. While reading The Da Vinci Code, I stared at my dad’s book of reproductions of Leonardo’s paintings for hours. Visual art has since become a big part of my identity.

So, if the book made me think about some of my most important values, I guess I... got it? And so did my cousin, aged 13, who read three other Dan Brown books afterwards, and, it seems, so did many other teens. If anything, I wonder whether a very large proportion of the novel’s readers were indeed teens, helping it to reach its sales figures of more than 200 million copies in 44 languages.

But the outrage at this publishing decision is not just about patronising teenagers. It’s also about insulting a fiction genre. Holly Bourne, author of bestselling YA titles Soulmates, The Manifesto On How To Be Interesting and Am I Normal Yet?, protested that the rewriting of The Da Vinci Code implies that:

So why is Dan Brown re-writing The Da Vinci Code for YA audience, cough cough, market? The answer is, most probably, money.