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Family Life in Contemporary YA Fiction: Guest Post by Amy Spalding (Reece Malcolm List)

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As you may or may not remember, last fall I was part of a panel at the YALSA YA Lit Symposium all about contemporary YA fiction. At the very end of the panel, the audience had the chance to ask us questions or share comments, and one of the comments that stood out at me was that there aren’t quite as many representations of family in its varied and diverse forms as she wishes there were. Sure, we see divorced families and we see families where a parent is deceased, but there aren’t quite as many books out there about parents choosing to date again, remarriages, adoption, or other “non-traditional” family structures. 

On the spot, I couldn’t point out books that did feature any of those things. Of course, on the drive home from the event, I immediately thought of Amy Spalding’s The Reece Malcolm List, which features a mom who is dating (but not yet remarried), along with many other interesting family-centric elements. Amy’s second book, Ink is Thicker Than Water, also tackles many dynamic aspects of family life, and it only seemed natural to ask her to talk about writing family in contemporary YA. 

Amy Spalding grew up outside of St. Louis. She now lives in Los Angeles with two cats and a dog. She works in marketing and does a lot of improv. She has more tattoos than she can count.

Amy would love for you to visit her online at www.theamyspalding.com or on Twitter @theames.



Family & YA
I didn’t mean to write family-centric YA.
Actually, I didn’t mean to write YA at all, but let’s back up.
Growing up, I loved reading books about family. I had parents who were still happily married and a sibling who lived a very separate life from me. So what I didn’t live in life? I wanted out of my books. I craved the (fictional) intricacies of divorce and separation and long distance. I voyeuristically experienced brothers who helped with your schemes and sisters who told you smart things about lip gloss.
As I got older, my reading taste became more sophisticated…or perhaps trashier. I couldn’t get enough of long-lost family members. I wanted to know deep, dark family secrets.

As I wrote about teens and their families, at a certain point I did luckily realize I was writing young adult literature. But something I definitely didn’t know until someone pointed it out to me is I spent a lot of time writing about family.

To me it went without saying that family would show up a lot in a YA novel, even if one wasn’t perhaps so, er, obsessive about fictional families. Like me. Teens generally still live at home or at least in some manner under the charge of their parents. When you’re a teenager, your parents control a lot of your life—even and especially if you don’t want them to.

It’s this especially I saw the most of in YA. Parents were the roadblocks—to romance, to love, to sex, to hobbies, to extracurriculars, to cool afterschool jobs.

But I’ll be honest: that wasn’t what it was like for me, and it wasn’t what it was like for a lot of my friends. Our parents were around and fairly supportive—I mean, my parents were going to let me be a theatre major without too much squawking—and I didn’t have a curfew and I didn’t really get into any real trouble.
The stuff that came up was less surface and harder to describe than that. Suddenly I had a lot of thoughts about where I fit into the world and, therefore, into my family. Where did I want to live my life—definitely not St. Louis, and so did it mean I was somehow inherently different from Mom and Dad who seemed happy to be there their whole lives? Who was I, deep down—and was that Amy a different person than my parents thought I was? And if she was, did that change everything, somehow?
The main character in my new book, Ink Is Thicker than Water, Kellie, is going through a lot of this. With friendships changing, a new relationship, and some shifts within her family, Kellie has to figure out how she fits into all of that. She’s always been the comic relief who isn’t scared of anything and who never shows too much emotion. She finds out there’s not only more to her than that but that she’d like to change her life to explore new sides of herself. If she’s taking new paths and becoming a new Kellie, does that mean she has to relearn how her family works?

I think all of us have been nervous, and not just as kids, to take steps forward in live and unambiguously state I want this. Wanting more out of life is scary enough—telling people who’ve known you basically forever is another level entirely. Kellie might be nervous how people react to the girl who never cares too much about anything suddenly joining the school newspaper, but a lot of us deal with some variation of this over and over in life. Our family has one idea of us and how we function, and it can take some bravery to change that.

In my first book, The Reece Malcolm List, Devan already knows what she wants in life. She’s the kind of teenager who’s so driven in her quest—specifically to perform in musical theatre—she puts tons of adults to shame. But at sixteen, she’s shipped off to live with the mother she’s never known—and suddenly everything else has to be reevaluated. If she’s not the girl who’s never known her own mom anymore, who is she now? (Obviously I wrote this book because of my long-lost family obsession!) Sure, Devan uses her list and Google, but it’s not unusual in your teen years to suddenly wonder just who the heck these people are who raised you! I think it’s incredibly common to go through a period of figuring out who your parents are as people, not just Mom and Dad.

This all sounds really serious, but also I just love writing family! Let’s be real: I am an old lady, and that makes me much closer to the age of my main characters’ parents than them. (Ugh, I’m actually older than Reece Malcolm and Brad Harper, which is a bit mind-boggling, huh.) There’s no reason not to make these characters actual people with their own awkwardnesses and quirks and wants and needs. Lots of adults read YA, so why not give them characters their own age who seem like fully-realized people? And when I was a teenager, I loved reading what adults were getting up to. It all felt very grown-up and glamorous—so maybe it’s good to adjust those expectations a bit!

I guess the truth is that the older I get the less distance I feel. We’re all just people. Family might be this weird unit with its own set of expectations and rules, but these are also just other people. And that’s what I try to reflect when I write.

Paging Back: Diversity in Contemporary YA, The Role of Sports, Contemporary Series Books, and Girls of All Flavors.

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Because Simmone offered up a nice selection of Australian contemporary YA in her post this morning, I didn’t want to replicate the book list effort. So instead, let’s take a look back at some older posts that tackle different aspects of contemporary YA. First up, let’s talk about diversity — a topic that is perfectly fitting with our look at contemporary books published on the other side of the world.

“That’s not to say that we should immediately veto all novels that seem to draw on stereotypes. A crucial strategy in some narratives is to engage a stereotype up to a point so as to gradually dismantle it through the course of the narrative. This is what I try to do, for example, with the trope of the Hispanic family as a barrier to individual success in What Can’t Wait. While the protagonist struggles with her family’s ever-increasing expectations, in the end several members of her family rally around her to help her overcome her own personal crisis. Similarly, while I have a Latino dropout and gang member narrate The Knife and the Butterfly, his misogynist views and macho bravado gradually peel away as he comes closer and closer to total desperation.”

— from Ashley Hope Perez’s Diversity in Contemporary YA fiction.

This is a topic I continue to think about, especially in light of bigger conversations coming out of last weekend’s Kid Lit Con about what diversity means and what role bloggers can play in bringing issues of diversity within kid lit to light. I made a companion book list to go with Ashley’s post last fall, so it doesn’t include anything from this year, but it’s still worth exploring. 

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What role does sports play in contemporary YA fiction? What about the “sports” book?
“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.”
— from Geoff Herbach’s Why I Write About Sports. And it should be noted, too, that sports books aren’t “books for boys.” They’re books for any readers, regardless of whether they’ve a vested interest in athletics or not.
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Earlier this year, I blogged about contemporary series books. You should go check out the post, and make sure you read through the amazing list of suggestions from other readers in the comments.
I think this is a trend I’d like to continue seeing, particularly when it comes to those series which aren’t contingent upon one another, but instead are companions to one another. There’s something nice about contemporary series that show stories don’t end when the book ends; often there’s more to it. See books like Jo Knowles’s Jumping Off Swings and recently-released companion title Living With Jackie Chan.

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Also earlier this year, I wrote about complicated female characters, and all of the books in my post are contemporary YA. This is a topic I keep returning to again and again, and it’s something I think about, particularly because I think I’m finding the label of “unlikable” to be damning. It’s not that these girls aren’t likable. It’s that they’re complicated, complex, and they’re allowed to be who they are, regardless of conventional beliefs of what a good girl is and what a not-good girl is.
In that post, I linked to a few other posts, and I want to follow up with another link, this time to Courtney Summers’s outstanding piece called Writing for Girls. She writes:
“There are some people who need to see a girl in a certain way and if she is remotely outside of that box, they dislike it. The general worthiness of a female protagonist as a love interest is a biggie — male characters can be cold, flawed, and present behaviors bordering on abusive (emotionally and physically) without ever compromising their potential as a love interest. Girls who experience trauma are often dismissed as melodramatic, though a traumatic past will often add to the mystery and desirability of a male character.”
I’m still thinking about this, and I’m thinking about it from the perspective of a reader and a person who gets YA books into the hands of other gatekeepers and readers more broadly. How do you sell books with girls who may not be pretty and perfect? Do you apologize for her? Or do you allow her to speak for herself? Does that impact how you interact with girls, too? There’s a lot to unpack — but it’s worth unpacking and examining because real girls are complex, challenging, and imperfect. That’s how they should be in contemporary realistic fiction, too. And most are…but the responses to many of these girls are definitely interesting.

Contemporary YA Down Under: Australian Realistic Fiction Guest Post by Simmone Howell (Everything Beautiful)

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One of our readers — more than one, actually — requested we blog about contemporary YA from Australia, since we’re becoming more aware of it as it makes its way to the US. We’re familiar, of course, with Melina Marchetta (The Piper’s Son and Jellicoe Road), but there are plenty of other Aussies making a splash on this side of the world. Simmone Howell, one such author, is here to talk about what is in the water down under. . . and introduce us to some killer Australian contemporary YA. 

In the event you see an Australian book you’re interested in and can’t get it here or don’t want to wait to get it, you can always try searching Fishpond World for a title. Shipping is free (though some have said they’ve ordered and not received items in the past). 

Simmone Howell is the author of Notes from the Teenage Underground, Everything Beautiful and Girl Defective. In her youth she did indeed sink tinnies and chuck punches but now she is more highly evolved and does it through her characters. She lives with her family in Melbourne and likes coffee and Wes Anderson movies. Find her at simmonehowell.com and @postteen on Twitter. Girl Defective will be out with Simon & Schuster Antheneum in fall 2014.








“What’s in the water?” a little think on Australian YA contemporary Fiction




It is a fine and flattering question I get asked sometimes by US writers and readers regarding Australian young adult fiction (ozya). (The Brits rarely ask it, I think because, we’re still part of the Commonwealth, and it would not be done to admire blossoms sprung from convict soil.) What’s in the water? I looked it up. Lots of stuff — Hydrogen and Oxygen and Flouride.

Australians are self-effacing creatures, inept humble-braggers. Most of the YA authors I know worry that they might be a little bit crap. Australia is not a country for claiming success. It is wrong to think highly of yourself and anyone who does so in public must arm themselves for the storm of abuse! Traditionally, Australian characters fall into these categories: Good Blokes, Lovable Larrikins and Bonza Sheilas.

Our leading men cannot be confident and hunky – there should be issues, a certain attractive inarticulateness. The blurb to Marcus Zuzak’s The Messenger said something like: ‘Ed is in hopeless love with Audrey.’ – and that seems to me to be an eminently Australian condition – in any endeavour there should be the likelihood of failure.

Our leading ladies are emphatically not manic-pixie dreamgirls. Ideally, they should be able to knock back a tinnie, chuck a punch, save their best friend from getting date-raped, get the boy in the end but decide he’s not worth it. They’re multi-taskers and they refuse to be concerned with thigh gap.

Here are some recent reads that definitely have something in the water …

Creepy and Maud by Diane Touchell
A sort-of romance between a girl who has trichotillomania and the boy who spies on her. It’s sharp writing, never sentimental, it’s real and sometimes tragic but also full of memorable and funny lines. Creepy, talking about his parents and their disintegrating affection says of his mother: Once upon a time she lovingly washed his skidmarks …

http://diannetouchell.blogspot.com.au/

I’ll Tell You Mine by Pip Harry
About a goth girl who – due to an incident that is only revealed later – becomes a boarder at the school where she used to be a day-student. Great character and clear prose and this unabashedness about failure that makes the triumphs all that sweeter.

http://www.pipharry.com/

Cry Blue Murder by Kim Kane & Marion Roberts

An email correspondence between two teenage girls who are both obsessing over the case of a local girl who’s gone missing. These voices are so true, so full of the minutiea and inertia of being fifteen, and then you know, the subject matter is creepy, depressing – it’s a weird blend of a book and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it.

http://www.readings.com.au/news/the-way-we-work-kim-kane-and-marion-roberts

The Dead I Know by Scot Gardner
“Again, I felt something. A change in the weather, a shift in the season, something dawning or something setting. Some tide on the move or moon made full. Stirrings of ancient dust.”
There’s usually some point in a Scot Gardner book where I’m lost for words and feeling the hugeness of the world and have to have faith that if there’s a scrap of beauty in there somewhere he will lead me to it!

http://www.scotgardner.com/

Wildlife by Fiona Wood
Love and sex at a school ‘wilderness’ camp. This is beautiful and complicated and hasn’t crossed the water yet but will do so next year – look out for it!

http://fionawood.com/

Obviously there are more. Ozya is chock-full of writers to admire and learn from, and most of them are lovely people. I love to see our books travel – I come over all jingoistic. I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago and saw Cath Crowley’s Graffiti Moon at Green Apple books and I felt quietly thrilled. I’m very excited that my own novel Girl Defective will be published next fall (so long to wait!) and I hope to come over again to lurk in bookstores. Lost and alienated, flawed and funny, my favourite Australian characters are all these things. They fuck up but it’s okay. Go find them!

Contemporary YA Books Featuring Humor

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Humor is kind of personal. We all find different things to be funny, so sometimes what one reader considers to be a funny book another reader might not find as humorous. But the nice thing about humor being so personal is that there are so many books that could be considered funny. 

Good readers know, too, that funny books are not “easy” books. It takes skill to nail the voice of a funny book and it takes skill to maintain a level of humor throughout a story. 

Next month’s “Get Genrefied” guide is to YA humor, but because I think it’s a category of books we don’t talk quite enough about, I wanted to tease out a contemporary-only list of titles that span the last few years. I don’t think humorous contemporary books are published at the same pace that books tackling other topics are, so it would be hard to limit my list to titles in just the last two years. So it’s a little bit of a broader scope (though not too much — so yes, I’m missing some older titles).  

All of these books are either meant to be humorous throughout or they’re books that have a significant amount of page time devoted to being funny. Again, it’s a personal call on humor, but I suspect most of these books would be considered funny by the majority of readers. 

As usual, the list isn’t comprehensive, and all descriptions come from WorldCat. If you can think of other funny contemporary YA, I’d love to know more titles in the comments. I’ve also limited my list to one book or series per author. 

Since You Asked . . . by Maurene Goo: Fifteen-year-old Holly Kim, the copyeditor for her San Diego high school’s newspaper, accidentally submits a piece ripping everyone to shreds and suddenly finds herself the center of unwanted attention–but when the teacher in charge of the paper asks her to write a regular column her troubles really start.

Firecracker by David Iserson: Forced to attend public school after being expelled from her elite private school, Astrid earns the enmity of her new peers as a result of her biting wit and competitive worldview until fellow misfits teach her a lesson in humility.

Withering Tights by Louise Rennison (series): Self-conscious about her knobby knees but confident in her acting ability, fourteen-year-old Tallulah spends the summer at a Yorkshire performing arts camp that, she is surprised to learn, is for girls only.

Carter Finally Gets It by Brent Crawford (series): Awkward freshman Will Carter endures many painful moments during his first year of high school before realizing that nothing good comes easily, focus is everything, and the payoff is usually incredible.

Me & Earl & The Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews: Seventeen-year-old Greg has managed to become part of every social group at his Pittsburgh high school without having any friends, but his life changes when his mother forces him to befriend Rachel, a girl he once knew in Hebrew school who has leukemia.

Swim the Fly by Don Calame (series): Fifteen-year-old Matt and his two best friends Sean and Coop, the least athletic swimmers on the local swim team, find their much anticipated summer vacation bringing them nothing but trouble with unsucessful schemes to see a live naked girl and with Matt, eager to impress the swim team’s “hot” new girl, agreeing to swim the 100-yard butterfly.

Art Girls Are Easy by Julie Klausner: Fifteen-year-old Indigo Hamlisch is an art prodigy looking forward to her last summer at the Silver Springs Academy for Fine and Performing Arts for Girls. But her BFF Lucy Serrano is a C.I.T. this year, and that means she doesn’t have to hang out with Indigo and the other campers anymore: she can mingle with the counselors–including Indigo’s scandalous and unrequited crush, paint-splattered art instructor Nick Estep. But it’s not like anything is going to happen between Lucy and Nick–right? As Indy becomes more and more paranoid about what’s going on between her best friend and her favorite counselor, Indy’s life–and her work–spin hilariously out of control. 

Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters by Natalie Standiford: Upon learning on Christmas Day that their rich and imperious grandmother may soon die and disown the family unless the one who offended her deeply will confess, each of the three Sullivan sisters sets down her offenses on paper.

I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb: Omaha, Nebraska, twelve-year-old Oliver Watson has everyone convinced that he is extremely stupid and lazy, but he is actually a very wealthy, evil genius, and when he decides to run for seventh-grade class president, nothing will stand in his way.

Are You Going to Kiss Me Now? by Sloane Tanen: After winning an essay contest, high school junior Francesca Manning finds herself stranded on an island with five celebrities when their plane crashes on the way to a charity event.

Destroy All Cars by Blake Nelson: Through assignments for English class, seventeen-year-old James Hoff rants against consumerism and his classmates’ apathy, puzzles over his feelings for his ex-girlfriend, and expresses disdain for his emotionally distant parents.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: Cath struggles to survive on her own in her first year of college while avoiding a surly roommate, bonding with a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words, and worrying about her fragile father.

Freshman Year & Other Unnatural Disasters by Meredith Zeitlin: Smart, occasionally insecure, and ambitious Brooklyn fourteen-year-old Kelsey Finkelstein embarks on her freshman year of high school in Manhattan with the intention of “rebranding” herself, but unfortunately everything she tries to do is a total disaster.

Guy Langman: Crime Scene Procrastinator by Josh Berk: Sixteen-year-old Guy Langman, his best friend Anoop, and other members of the school Forensics Club investigate a break-in and a possible murder, which could be connected to the mysterious past of Guy’s recently-deceased father.

There is No Dog by Meg Rosoff: When the beautiful Lucy prays to fall in love, God, an irresponsible youth named Bob, chooses to answer her prayer personally, to the dismay of this assistant, Mr. B who must try to clean up the resulting catastrophes.

52 Reasons to Hate My Father by Jessica Brody: On her eighteenth birthday, spoiled party girl Lexington Larrabee learns that her days of making tabloid headlines may be at an end when her ever-absent father decides she must learn some values by working a different, low-wage job every week for a year or forfeit her multimillion-dollar trust fund.

Sparks by SJ Adams: A sixteen-year-old lesbian tries to get over a crush on her religious best friend by embarking on a “holy quest” with a couple of misfits who have invented a wacky, made-up faith called the Church of Blue.

Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan: When her mother dies, sixteen-year-old Molly moves from Indiana to California, to live with her newly discovered father, a Hollywood megastar, and his pampered teenaged daughter.



Audrey, Wait by Robin Benway:  While trying to score a date with her cute co-worker at the Scooper Dooper, sixteen-year-old Audrey gains unwanted fame and celebrity status when her ex-boyfriend, a rock musician, records a breakup song about her that soars to the top of the Billboard charts.

Freak Magnet by Andrew Auseon: Two teenagers, both burdened by grief and loss, find each other and gradually develop a strong connection.

She’s So Money by Cherry Cheva: Maya, a high school senior bound for Stanford University, goes against her better judgement when she and a popular but somewhat disreputable boy start a profitable school-wide cheating ring in order to save her family’s Thai restaurant, which she fears will be shut down due to her irresponsible actions.

Mostly Good Girls by Leila Sales: Sixteen-year-olds Violet and Katie, best friends since seventh grade despite differences in their family backgrounds and abilities, are pulled apart during their junior year at Massachusetts’ exclusive Westfield School.

My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger: Three teenagers in Boston narrate their experiences of a year of new friendships, first loves, and coming into their own.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan: When two teens, one gay and one straight, meet accidentally and discover that they share the same name, their lives become intertwined as one begins dating the other’s best friend, who produces a musical revealing his relationship with them both.

Humor in Contemporary YA Fiction: Guest Post by Maurene Goo (author of Since You Asked. . .)

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Something I know we don’t blog a lot about — something I don’t even see much of in the blogging world more broadly — are funny books. So today I thought I’d ask debut author Maurene Goo to stop by and talk about humor in contemporary YA fiction. She keeps it short, sweet, and right to the point of why these books are so important (and awesome).



Maurene Goo was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where she navigated her childhood by practicing extreme bossy lord-dom over her many cousins. She studied communication at the University of California, San Diego, and received a master’s degree in publishing and writing at Emerson College. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and a very old cat.

Why I Need the Lulz
I love comedy. I worship at the feet of comedy writers like Amy Poehler and Mindy Kaling. And it was David Sedaris who first made me fall out of a chair laughing so hard while reading. In fact, he’s the one who made me think, “Maybe all this writing stuff I like to do could turn into a book?” Because I relate to comedy. If you look at who I follow on Twitter, it’s a whole lot of funny people. 
But, I don’t just like comic writing because it makes me laugh. I like it because my favorite kinds of comic writing also has heart, it tells an authentic story using humor. And when you write contemporary YA, there’s a whole lot of feelings and emotions you have to communicate. So for me, I need the funny to balance things. I know my most powerful tool when telling a story isn’t that elusive magic that can make people cry (Rainbow Rowell, anyone?)— it’s the ability to make people laugh. (Although, Rainbow Rowell is also hilarious, damn her!)
It’s embarrassing, but I still laugh at the jokes in my book, SINCE YOU ASKED. My husband will occasionally find me standing up in the middle of my office, my book cracked open, chuckling. I love being in my main character’s head, she genuinely cracks me up. And it’s strange to say that, as if her jokes are separate from me, but it really feels that way once it’s written down. And really, that’s how I know that I liked what I wrote—when I’m standing there like a weirdo enjoying my own book.
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SINCE YOU ASKED… is Maurene’s debut novel, about a fifteen-year-old named Holly Kim who is the copyeditor for her high school’s newspaper. When she accidentally submits an article that rips everyone to shreds, she gets her own column and rants her way through the school year. Can she survive high school embarrassments, all while struggling to balance her family’s traditional Korean values?