Contemporary YA Fiction Featuring Memorable Settings Book List

November 8, 2012 |

Memorable settings in contemporary YA take a number of shapes — sometimes it’s the actual where of the story taking place and sometimes, it’s more about the atmosphere surrounding the where of the story’s place. I’ve rounded up some of the memorable settings I’ve read in the last couple of years, but I’d love to hear any other titles you think make good use of setting.

I’ve purposely left out all books featuring road trips because I’ve already posted an extensive booklist of road trip books this year.

All of these books were published between 2010 and today, and all descriptions come from WorldCat. I’ve tried to note what the setting is, too, to give an idea of why it stands out.

The Princesses of Iowa by M Molly Backes (Iowa): After being involved in a drunk driving accident in the spring, Paige Sheridan spends the summer in Paris as an au-pair and then returns to her suburban Iowa existence for her senior year of high school, where she begins to wonder if she wants more out life than being popular, having a handsome boyfriend and all the latest clothes, and being a member of the social elite.

Narc by Crissa-Jean Chappell (Miami): When his little sister is caught with a bag of weed, seventeen-year-old Aaron Foster takes the fall. To keep the cops from tearing his family apart, Aaron agrees to go undercover and help bust the dealer who’s funneling drugs into his Miami high school. But making friends with the school’s biggest players isn’t easy for a waste-case loner from the wrong part of town.

Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach: Just before his sixteenth birthday, Felton Reinstein has a sudden growth spurt that turns him from a small, jumpy, picked-on boy with the nickname of “Squirrel Nut” to a powerful athlete, leading to new friends, his first love, and the courage to confront his family’s past and current problems.

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins (Paris): When Anna’s romance-novelist father sends her to an elite American boarding school in Paris for her senior year of high school, she reluctantly goes, and meets an amazing boy who becomes her best friend, in spite of the fact that they both want something more.

Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff (Brooklyn/Greenpoint): Sixteen-year-old Kid, who lives on the streets of Brooklyn, loves Felix, a guitarist and junkie who disappears, leaving Kid the prime suspect in an arson investigation, but a year later Scout arrives, giving Kid a second chance to be in a band and find true love.

Don’t Breathe A Word by Holly Cupala (Capitol Hill, Seattle): Joy Delamere is suffocating from severe asthma, overprotective parents, and an emotionally-abusive boyfriend when she escapes to the streets of nearby Seattle and falls in with a “street family” that teaches her to use a strength she did not know she had.

Like Mandarin by Kirsten Hubbard (rural Wyoming): When shy, awkward fourteen-year-old Grace Carpenter is paired with the beautiful and wild Mandarin on a school project, an unlikely, explosive friendship begins, but all too soon, Grace discovers that Mandarin is a very troubled, even dangerous, girl.

Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson (Poconos, Pennsylvania): Taylor Edwards’ family might not be the closest-knit–everyone is a little too busy and overscheduled–but for the most part, they get along just fine. Then Taylor’s dad gets devastating news, and her parents decide that the family will spend one last summer all together at their old lake house in the Pocono Mountains. Crammed into a place much smaller and more rustic than they are used to, they begin to get toknow each other again. And Taylor discovers that the people she thought she had left behind haven’t actually gone anywhere. Her former best friend is still around, as is her first boyfriend…and he’s much cuter at seventeen than he was at twelve. As the summer progresses and the Edwards become more of a family, they’re more aware than ever that they’re battling a ticking clock. Sometimes, though, there is just enough time to get a second chance–with family, with friends, and with love.

Frost by Marianna Baer (Frost House at a remote boarding school): When Leena Thomas gets her wish to live in an old Victorian house with her two closest friends during their senior year at boarding school, the unexpected arrival of another roommate–a confrontational and eccentric classmate–seems to bring up old anxieties and fears for Leena that may or may not be in her own mind.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E Smith (airplane): Hadley and Oliver fall in love on the flight from New York to London, but after a cinematic kiss they lose track of each other at the airport until fate brings them back together on a very momentous day.

Unbreak My Heart by Melissa Walker (boat): Taking the family sailboat on a summer-long trip excites everyone except sixteen-year-old Clementine, who feels stranded with her parents and younger sister and guilty over a falling-out with her best friend.

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley (rural Arkansas): Seventeen-year-old Cullen’s summer in Lily, Arkansas, is marked by his cousin’s death by overdose, an alleged spotting of a woodpecker thought to be extinct, failed romances, and his younger brother’s sudden disappearance.

Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield (small town Appalachia): Unveils the details of a horrific murder, its effects on permanent and summer residents of the small Appalachian town where the body is discovered, and especially how the related violence shakes eighteen-year-old Becca’s determination to leave home as soon as possible.

Shine by Lauren Myracle (small town southern US): When her best friend falls victim to a vicious hate crime, sixteen-year-old Cat sets out to discover the culprits in her small North Carolina town.

Dreamland Social Club by Tara Altebrando (Coney Island): Jane, her twin brother Marcus, and their father have been on the road since her mother’s departure years ago, but when they inherit a house on Coney Island, Jane not only begins to find a home, she learns much about her mother, too.

Stolen by Lucy Christopher (rural Australia): Sixteen-year-old Gemma, a British city-dweller, is abducted while on vacation with her parents and taken to the Australian outback, where she soon realizes that escape attempts are futile, and in time she learns that her captor is not as despicable as she first believed.

The Girls of No Return by Erin Saldin (rural Idaho school): A troubled sixteen-year-old girl attending a wilderness school in the Idaho mountains must finally face the consequences of her complicated friendships with two of the other girls at the school.

Wanted by Heidi Ayarbe (Carson City, Nevada): Seventeen-year-old Michal Garcia, a bookie at Carson City High School, raises the stakes in her illegal activities after she meets wealthy, risk-taking Josh Ellison.

Please feel free to add your favorite contemporary titles published in the last two years to the comments that feature great settings — the more interesting, the better!

Guest Post: Molly Backes on Setting and Why it Matters in Contemporary YA Fiction

November 8, 2012 |

Why Setting Matters (or “Where You At?”) by Molly Backes

Setting matters in fiction because it matters in life. I wrote the early drafts of The Princesses of Iowa in a little house in the mountains of New Mexico, halfway between Albuquerque and Moriarty. When I looked out my windows, I saw scratchy Russian thistle, the blue-violet slopes silhouetted against the sky, the fat roadrunner that lived in my backyard, the occasional coyote. But on the page, I tried to recreate the Midwestern landscape of my youth: red barns against fields of bright yellow soybeans, bittersweet vines wrapped around sagging farm fences, the wide blue Iowa sky.

Setting – where we are, where we come from, when we are, when we’ve come from – shapes us. Part of the fun of writing The Princesses of Iowa was taking familiar characters and relationships (the high school mean girls) and transposing them into a world I recognized as my own. I once overheard my agent describe my book as “Gossip Girls of Iowa.” At first I was horrified, but then I fell in love with the idea. Because we all know the mean girls in New York and California, the mean girls with money and power, with designer clothes and private schools and fancy cars. We see them on TV and in the movies all the time. But those girls don’t live in my world. In my world, the rich girl doesn’t get a BMW on her 16thbirthday, she gets a brand new Subaru. Where I come from, to be financially successful, you don’t have to be the CEO of a global corporation; being the town’s orthodontist puts you at the top of the economic food chain.

For me, a large part of the appeal in reading contemporary fiction is coming across that perfect detail – something you’ve noticed, or heard, or felt in your own life, something you may not have even put words to, or something you believed no one else has ever noticed – and saying, “Yes! Yes, that’s exactly how it is!” It’s reassuring, that moment of recognition; it validates your own experience and affirms that you’re not alone in the way you experience the world.

The joy of writing contemporary fiction is in the opportunity – and the challenge – to find those unique details, to capture the world as you experience it. And – if you’re doing it right – setting isn’t just descriptions of pretty landscapes; it pushes action, and reveals character.

Every character comes from somewhere, and every character has a prism of assumptions — cultural, regional, religious, political, familial, social — and emotions through which she views the world. Her assumptions shape the way she sees, how she makes her metaphors, how she speaks, how she reacts, what (and who) she admires, what she loves. Her emotions determine the things she notices and how she processes them.

For instance, take two women at a small-town fair. One is in her late seventies, and she’s there because she wants to revisit the place she met her late husband. Her joints hurt, she’s a little cranky, and she grew up in a time when children were taught to be seen and not heard. The way she describes the fair will be filtered through her prism: it is loud and garish, it’s not what it used to be, it’s shabby and small where it used to be magnificent, it’s too hot, it’s vulgar, it’s lonely. Everything she describes, every interaction she has, and every emotional reaction she has reveals her character, because everything she says and notices is filtered through her unique worldview.

The other woman is fourteen, just a girl, who’s spent the summer between eighth and ninth grade selling produce at a roadside farmstand. She’s tan and strong and friendly, with enough cash in her pocket to ride every single ride. For her, the fair is full of possibility: it’s the social scene of the summer, the one time all summer that the teens of the town are all in the same place at the same time. She’s changed, and she can’t wait to see if anyone notices. To her, the hum of the crowd is intoxicating, and in it she hears all the conversations she might have, with newly-interesting boys who never noticed her before. The rides look thrilling and the lights enticing. And because she’s spent the summer hauling produce, she compares the unfamiliar colors and shapes of the fair to the familiar ones of the vegetables. The funhouse is the purplish black of a ripe Black Bell eggplant, and the sweaty tendrils of her hair stick to her face like corn silk.

Everything they notice, everything they say, the way they move and how they interact with the setting — it all reveals character.

With each draft, we have to pay close attention to these details, because often they reveal more about our characters than we know ourselves. And if done well, all these tiny details, many of which will go virtually unnoticed by readers, add up to a greater whole — a living, breathing, complicated person with a history and a future, someone who will live on in your reader’s mind long after he finishes your book.

***

M. Molly Backes is the author of The Princesses of Iowa (Candlewick) and is the assistant director of StoryStudio Chicago, a creative writing studio. She lives in Chicago, where she stops to pet every dog she sees. Follow her on Twitter @mollybackes or stalk her on her block at mollybackes.blogspot.com.

Contemporary YA Fiction Featuring Sports Book List

November 7, 2012 |

Looking for a good contemporary book featuring sports and athletics in some capacity? Here’s a nice, solid list of titles to check out. As has been the theme all week, these books are all published between 2010 and today, and all descriptions come from WorldCat. If you’ve got a title you’d like to add, drop it in the comments.

Boy21 by Matthew Quick: Finley, an unnaturally quiet boy who is the only white player on his high school’s varsity basketball team, lives in a dismal Pennsylvania town that is ruled by the Irish mob, and when his coach asks him to mentor a troubled African American student who has transferred there from an elite private school in California, he finds that they have a lot in common in spite of their apparent differences.

Stealing Parker by Miranda Kenneally: Parker Shelton pretty much has the perfect life. She’s on her way to becoming valedictorian at Hundred Oaks High, she’s made the all-star softball team, and she has plenty of friends. Then her mother’s scandal rocks their small town and suddenly no one will talk to her. Now Parker wants a new life.

The Final Four by Paul Volponi: Four players at the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament struggle with the pressures of tournament play and the expectations of society at large.

Anything But Ordinary by Lara Avery: A slight error left Olympic diving-hopeful Bryce Graham in a five-year coma and now, at at twenty-two, she must adjust to a world that went on without her and to visions that may or may not be real.

Audition by Stasia Ward Kehoe: When sixteen-year-old Sara, from a small Vermont town, wins a scholarship to study ballet in New Jersey, her ambivalence about her future increases even as her dancing improves.

Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip by Jordan Sonnenblick: After an injury ends former star pitcher Peter Friedman’s athletic dreams, he concentrates on photography which leads him to a girlfriend, new fame as a high school sports photographer, and a deeper relationship with the beloved grandfather who, when he realizes he is becoming senile, gives Pete all of his professional camera gear.

Leverage by Joshua Cohen: High school sophomore Danny excels at gymnastics but is bullied, like the rest of the gymnasts, by members of the football team, until an emotionally and physically scarred new student joins the football team and forms an unlikely friendship with Danny.

Playing Hurt by Holly Schindler: Chelsea Keyes, a high school basketball star whose promising career has been cut short by a terrible accident on the court, and Clint Morgan, a nineteen-year-old ex-hockey player who gave up his sport following a game-related tragedy, meet at a Minnesota lake resort and find themselves drawn together by the losses they have suffered.

Catching Jordan by Miranda Kenneally: What girl doesn’t want to be surrounded by gorgeous jocks day in and day out? Jordan Woods isn’t just surrounded by hot guys, though. She leads them as the captain and quarterback of her high school football team. They all see her as one of the guys, and that’s just fine. As long as she gets her athletic scholarship to a powerhouse university. But now there’s a new guy in town who threatens her starting position…suddenly she’s hoping he’ll see her as more than just a teammate.

Head Games by Keri Mikulski: Basketball star Taylor, who doubts that she is attractive due to her height, reluctantly agrees to participate in a fashion show, an event complicated by her divided feelings about two boys and about her team’s preparations for the playoffs.

The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen: When a school bus accident leaves sixteen-year-old Jessica an amputee, she returns to school with a prosthetic limb and her track team finds a wonderful way to help rekindle her dream of running again.

Bunheads by Sophie Flack: Hannah Ward, nineteen, revels in the competition, intense rehearsals, and dazzling performances that come with being a member of Manhattan Ballet Company’s corps de ballet, but after meeting handsome musician Jacob she begins to realize there could be more to her life.

Compulsion by Heidi Ayarbe: Poised to lead his high school soccer team to its third straight state championship, seventeen-year-old star player Jake Martin struggles to keep hidden his nearly debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Crossing Lines by Paul Volponi: High school senior Adonis struggles to do the right thing when his fellow football players escalate their bullying of a new classmate, Alan, who is transgendered.

Jersey Tomatoes are the Best by Maria Padian: When fifteen-year-old best friends Henry and Eve leave New Jersey, one for tennis camp in Florida and one for ballet camp in New York, each faces challenges that put her long-cherished dreams of the future to the test.

Queen of Secrets by Jenny Meyerhoff: Fifteen-year-old Essie Green, an orphan who has been raised by her secular Jewish grandparents in Michigan, experiences conflicting loyalties and confusing emotions when her aunt, uncle, and cousin move back from New York, and her very religious cousin tries to fit in with the other football players at Essie’s high school, one of whom is Essie’s popular new boyfriend.

Shutout by Brendan Halpin: Fourteen-year-old Amanda and her best friend Lena start high school looking forward to playing on the varsity soccer team, but when Lena makes varsity and Amanda only makes junior varsity, their long friendship rapidly changes.

Center Field by Robert Lipsyte: Mike lives for baseball and hopes to follow his idol into the major leagues one day, but he is distracted by a new player who might take his place in center field, an ankle injury, problems at home, and a growing awareness that something sinister is happening at school.

Perfected by Girls by Alfred Martino: Melinda Radford has difficulty everyday because she is on the boys wrestling team.

Guest Post: Geoff Herbach On Writing Sports in Contemporary YA Fiction

November 7, 2012 |

Why I Write About Sports by Geoff Herbach

When I was fifteen, I ate two peanut butter sandwiches every night before bed. Yes, I was often hungry. I was fifteen and dudes of that age are often very, very hungry. But that’s not why I’d eat those sandwiches. They actually made me want to throw up, because I’d already had a giant dinner and then I’d lie down with that peanut butter brick in my gut and I’d think “gain weight, gain weight, gain weight” and then I slept fitfully and had nightmares about terrible car accidents and girlfriends leaving me and school hall thuggery. I was 5’9” and I desperately wanted to weigh 170 pounds by sophomore year.

In the mornings, I’d take all that peanut butter protein and I’d lift weights like a wild monkey, screaming and throwing things around. I couldn’t gain weight.

Around that time, my mom, an English teacher, handed me Vision Quest by Terry Davis. It’s about a wrestler, Louden Swain, who is dropping weight so that he can wrestle the other best wrestler in Washington State. Louden (yes, there’s a reason my Stupid Fast character is named Felton – dorky version of Louden) works out like a wild monkey. He puts his health in danger to achieve his goal. I loved this book so much, I would have glued it to my body (I did carry it everywhere).

Here’s the thing, though: I entered that book through sports, but I didn’t want to live in it just because there’s a dude in there working out like a wild monkey. Louden had a complicated home life (I had a complicated home life). Louden had to go to work after school (I had already delivered newspapers at 5 a.m. for three years), Louden had to make decisions about the importance of his own desires when his desires might harm the community (was I debating individualism with him?). A really beautiful girl moved into his house (was he adult enough to attract her?). A host of side characters told him what they knew about life (I listened, too). The wrestling aspect of the book acted as a candy coating. The revelation of friendship and true character and real love was the medicine I needed as that dorky fifteen-year-old.

I was at a Wisconsin High School a few weeks back. I talked books in front of a group of maybe 100 kids. It was a Friday afternoon, last hour. Probably thirty percent of the attendees wore some form of football jersey or t-shirt (the school had a game later that evening). While a couple of the jersey wearers were obviously larger and tougher-looking than the general audience, most looked like regular kids who might just as easily have been mathletes or band geeks or whatever, except they wore a jersey. This picture confirmed something I already knew: at most schools there isn’t a stereotypical jock monolith filled with steroidal bruisers hell-bent on crushing the spirits of nerds. Most athletes are just your average kid.

Whatever average means. The starting quarterback at the school I visited was also the lead in the musical.

Clearly sports are important in our culture. Sure, probably too important. Because they are important, they provide a common language, a doorway. Wallflowers have their books. Music freaks have their books. Lovers of the supernatural have more books than they can possibly read. Often, these books aren’t about music or geekery or ghosts in the end, but they’re about love and tragedy and friendship and hard decisions. When I read John Coy, Chris Crutcher, Bill Konigsberg or Matt de la Pena, I enjoy the sports, but mostly, I identify with great characters who are dealing with the complexity of real life.

Thirty percent of the kids in that auditorium wore football stuff.

When I was fifteen, I carried around Vision Quest, not because it taught me about what it takes to be a better jock. The book taught me about a wider world and a way of being and a way of negotiating complexity. It both reminded me of me and stretched my understanding and empathy.

I do love athletics. But, I don’t write about football for the sake of football. The football player on the cover of Stupid Fast is a point of entry. And, I’d love to see a copy of Vision Quest in every locker in the locker room.

***

Geoff Herbach is the author of a trio of award-winning YA books about Felton Reinstein, dork turned jock: Stupid Fast, Nothing Special, and I’m With Stupid, which hits shelves in the spring. You can find more info at geoffherbach.com or follow him on Twitter @geoffherbach. Meanwhile he teaches creative writing at Minnesota State, Mankato.

Contemporary YA Fiction Featuring Diverse Characters Book List

November 6, 2012 |

Looking for a good contemporary read featuring diverse characters and story lines which feature diversity? Here’s a selection worth checking out. I’ve included books where the author or main character are people of color to the best of my ability. I have limited my selection to not include titles specifically addressing LGBTQ or physical disabilities for sheer space reasons.

All of these titles are published between 2010 and today, and all descriptions come from WorldCat. As always, if you can think of other contemporary titles featuring diversity in some capacity, leave a comment!

What Can’t Wait by Ashley Hope Perez: Marooned in a broken-down Houston neighborhood–and in a Mexican immigrant family where making ends meet matters much more than making it to college–smart, talented Marissa seeks comfort elsewhere when her home life becomes unbearable.

A Certain October by Angela Johnson: Scotty compares herself to tofu: no flavor unless you add something. And it’s true that Scotty’s friends, Misha and Faclone, and her brother, Keone, make life delicious. But when a terrible accident occurs, Scotty feels responsible for the loss of someone she hardly knew, and the world goes wrong. She cannot tell what is a dream and what is real. Her friends are having a hard time getting through to her and herfamily is preoccupied with their own trauma. But the prospect of a boy, a dance, and the possibility that everything can fall back into place soon help Scotty realize that she is capable of adding her own flavor to life.

Beneath a Meth Moon by Jacqueline Woodson: A young girl uses crystal meth to escape the pain of losing her mother and grandmother in Hurricane Katrina, and then struggles to get over her addiction.

Bronxwood by Coe Booth: Tyrell’s life is spinning out of control after his father is released from prison, his little brother is placed in foster care, and the drug dealers he’s living with are pressuring him to start dealing.

When the Stars Go Blue by Caridad Ferrer: Soledad Reyes decides to dance Carmen as part of a drum and bugle corps competition, not knowing if it will help or harm her chance of becoming a professional ballet dancer but eager to pursue new options, including a romance with the boy who invited her to audition.

The Good Braider by Terry Farish: Follows Viola as she survives brutality in war-torn Sudan, makes a perilous journey, lives as a refugee in Egypt, and finally reaches Portland, Maine, where her quest for freedom and security is hampered by memories of past horrors and the traditions her mother and other Sudanese adults hold dear. Includes historical facts and a map of Sudan.

Stay With Me by Paul Griffin: Fifteen-year-olds Mack, a high school drop-out but a genius with dogs, and Céce, who hopes to use her intelligence to avoid a life like her mother’s, meet and fall in love at the restaurant where they both work, but when Mack lands in prison he pushes Céce away and only a one-eared pit-bull can keep them together.

The Trouble with Half a Moon by Danette Vigilante: Overwhelmed by grief and guilt over her brother’s death and its impact on her mother, and at odds with her best friend, thirteen-year-old Dellie reaches out to a neglected boy in her building in the projects and learns from a new neighbor to have faith in herself and others.

Black Boy, White School by Brian F Walker: When fourteen-year-old Anthony “Ant” Jones from the ghetto of East Cleveland, Ohio, gets a scholarship to a prep school in Maine, he finds that he must change his image and adapt to a world that never fully accepts him, but when he goes home he discovers that he no longer truly belongs there either.

Illegal by Bettina Restrepo: Nora, a fifteen-year-old Mexican girl, faces the challenges of being an illegal immigrant in Texas when she and her mother cross the border in search of Nora’s father.

Under the Mesquite by Guadelupe Garcia McCall: Throughout her high school years, as her mother battles cancer, Lupita takes on more responsibility for her house and seven younger siblings, while finding refuge in acting and writing poetry.

If I Tell by Janet Gurtler: Raised by her grandparents, seventeen-year-old Jasmine, the result of a biracial one night stand, has never met her father but has a good relationship with her mother until she sees her mother’s boyfriend kissing Jaz’s best friend.

Bitter Melon by Cara Chow: With the encouragement of one of her teachers, a Chinese American high school senior asserts herself against her demanding, old-school mother and carves out an identity for herself in late 1980s San Francisco. **Despite the 1980s time period, this is close enough to contemporary in terms of story that I’m including it.

Teenie by Christopher Grant: High school freshman Martine, longing to escape Brooklyn and her strict parents, is trying to get into a study-abroad program but when her long-time crush begins to pay attention to her and her best friend starts an on-line relationship, Teenie’s mind is on anything but her grades.

I Will Save You by Matt De La Pena: Seventeen-year-old Kidd Ellison runs away to work for the summer at a beach campsite in California where his hard work and good looks lead to friendship and love but painful past memories surface in menacing ways.

Jazz in Love by Neesha Meminger: When her mother launches the Guided Dating Plan to find Jazz the perfect, suitable, pre-screened Indian mate, Jazz realizes she must act fast to find a way to follow her own heart and stay in the good graces of her parents.

The Latte Rebellion by Sarah Jamila Stevenson: When high school senior Asha Jamison is called a “towel head” at a pool party, she and her best friend Carey start a club to raise awareness of mixed-race students that soon sweeps the country, but the hubbub puts her Ivy League dreams, friendship, and beliefs to the test.

Bestest. Ramadan. Ever. by Medeia Sharif: Not allowed to eat from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan and forbidden to date, fifteen-year-old Almira finds that temptation comes in many forms during the Muslim holy month, as she longs to feel like a typical American girl.

Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri: Twelve-year-old Cole’s behavior causes his mother to drive him from Detroit to Philadelphia to live with a father he has never known, but who soon has Cole involved with a group of African-American “cowboys” who rescue horses and use them to steer youths away from drugs and gangs.