Bettye's Inquiring Mind Wants to Know

The name of my book to be released in 2008 has been changed, something that happens fairly often in the industry. I originally called it The First Fifty Years, because the theme is turning 50 (yes, an idea straight out of real life). The marketing department at the publisher was concerned that this would be a turn-off for the younger demographic. We tossed around a few titles, and it looks like we going to go with Once Upon a Project (because a key element is that the women met as children over 40 years before, when all their families lived in a low-income housing project on the South Side of Chicago).

I can understand their concerns about not wishing to alienate a significant portion of the buying public, but this does get my typical writer's mind wondering. I'm going to go out on a limb here – I have no statistics to back me up and am speaking purely from what I've seen – and say that a high percentage of contemporary novels today are about people in their twenties and thirties. I recently read a page-turner about college students (if you're curious, it was Kayla Perrin's mystery, We'll Never Tell), and while I enjoyed it very much, the fact that the characters were young enough to be my daughters did not escape me.

Which brings me to the question: Would you be likely to pick up a book about middle-aged folks, or can you relate (or do you simply prefer) storylines revolving around younger characters? If so, how young?