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Romance in Contemporary YA Fiction: Guest Post from Tiffany Schmidt (author of Send Me A Sign)

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Ready to talk about love in contemporary YA fiction? Today, Tiffany Schmidt talks about the aspects of romance in a novel that just work and she offers up a host of titles to satisfy readers looking for those very things. 

And don’t forget, you can enter to win an advanced copy of Tiffany’s Bright Before Sunrise right here at STACKED.

Tiffany Schmidt’s first crush was G.I. Joe. Her first hundred or so kisses were with the boy next door (she was a very affectionate toddler).  Tiffany now lives with her saintly husband, impish twin boys, and a pair of puggles in Pennsylvania. When she’s not writing, she’s frequently covered in toddler and puggle kisses–they’re both rather drooly, but absolutely priceless. SEND ME A SIGN was her debut novel, BRIGHT BEFORE SUNRISE will follow in February 2014, and the ONCE UPON A CRIME FAMILY series begins in 2015 with HOLD ME LIKE A BREATH. 








I love a good love story.



When I ask this question:



I look like this:

And when I read romance, I want to swoon. I’m primed to sigh, let my heart race, and stare dreamily at the pages.

But, wanting to swoon doesn’t mean I will. Swooning has to be earned. (Okay, I’m done with the gifs, I promise!)



Since I was asked to write this post, I’ve been trying to figure out the elements of an effective contemporary YA romance… and if you’re looking for a universal answer, sorry. Romance is personal. It’s as personal as a person can get. It’s why you crush on Person X and your best friend crushes on Person Y. (If you and your best friend are BOTH crushing on Person Z, let’s just hope Person Z is fictional so you can share!)



~*~



Tiffany’s List of Bookish Things That Make Her Swoon #1:  More than Attraction



For me, romance is about the give and take of personalities; it’s the way the characters push and influence each other in meaningful ways.



I’m not talking about why they want each other. Why do they need each other? What does each person in the relationship bring out in the other? Not in some epic “I need a boyfriend/girlfriend/significant other to complete me” way — this isn’t Jerry Maguire and I think we’ve all learned that Tom Couch-Jumper Cruise isn’t exactly a guru for relationship advice. But, what about combining the two halves of the relationship equation makes the whole greater than the parts? How do the characters challenge each other and what do they offer that the other one needs?



Good relationships: in fiction and in life, are about that balance of being complimentary and challenging. Being able to be both a safe haven, and a motivation. I love books that show this dynamic, including: Jordan Sonnenblick’s ZEN AND THE ART OF FAKING IT, Miranda Kenneally’s THINGS I CAN’T FORGET, Katie McGarry’s PUSHING THE LIMITS, and my own upcoming BRIGHT BEFORE SUNRISE.

~*~



Tiffany’s List of Bookish Things That Make Her Swoon #2 : Exes that aren’t Evil



Romantic interests shouldn’t be interchangeable sprockets. It shouldn’t just be: he/she is hot, ergo our kisses will be sparky and we should commence a Happily Ever After sequence.



I love when books explore the concept of not-right boyfriend/girlfriends. Not because the guy or girl is abusive or awful, but because it’s not the right time, not the right chemistry… not the right person. Break-ups because things aren’t wrong, but they’re not right can be heartbreaking. They’re realistic and make a sizzling next relationship appear all the more sizzling in comparison.



Some great books that nail this concept are: the hilarious forthcoming KISSING TED CALLAHAN (AND OTHER GUYS) by Amy Spalding, Jenny Han’s SUMMER series, E. Lockhart’s RUBY OLIVER series, and my SEND ME A SIGN.



~*~



Tiffany’s List of Bookish Things that Make Her Swoon #3: Yearning.



Yearning done well is like sitting in a room where cookies are baking. After being tormented by the aroma of melting chocolate and vanilla for the eleven extra-long minutes it takes for that dough to bake (and, if you’re smart, that extra minute or two so they cool down and don’t burn your tongue) the first bite is even more delicious.



If the author has caught me up in his or her character’s desire, then that first kiss is going to make me flush; that rejection is going to make me want to hug the rejected (and feed them cookies).



In fact, the want can be so much more appealing than the have. My high school years were full of crushes. Full of daydreams of: could he like me? Will he ever notice me? And semi-stalkerish tendencies to do things like have my best friends help me figure out the routes the different Hes took to their classes so I could create hallway opportunities for them to be dazzled by my ability to blush and smile… and, hopefully, fall for me. After which I’d spend way too much of my own classes writing notes analyzing the way he said “Hello.” Did his head tilt and raised eyebrows mean: A) I’m trying to look hot? (HE WANTS ME TO THINK HE LOOKS HOT!?!)  B) I’m confused. Do I know you? Maybe I want to. or C)Why is this crazy girl smiling at me?



Um, other people did this too, right?



Throw some obstacles between the book’s characters. Mutual yearning? Yes, please! Give me some almost-kisses, half-confessions, missed-signals, extended gazes, accidental touches. Feed me delicious yearning (or cookies) and I’ll fall in love with you.



For books that excel at this, I suggest Stephanie Perkin’s ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS, Emery Lord’s upcoming debut OPEN ROAD SUMMER, Polly Shulman’s ENTHUSIASM, and Bill Konigsberg’s funny and achingly real OPENLY STRAIGHT.

~*~

I spent wayyyy more of my teen years crushing than dating. (Based on what I shared above, I know this is a shocking revelation). And the What happens next? part of the romance equation was a mystery I badly wanted to solve.



Maybe this is why Tiffany’s List of Bookish Things that Make Her Swoon #4 is: Books that Transition Beyond the Yearning.



Early in my writing career someone told me: “No one wants to know what happens after the happily ever after. They may think they do, but they don’t.” I’m going to disagree. I loved having crushes. I love crushing along with heroes and heroines. BUT: If being IN a relationship isn’t more fun than the crush from afar — i.e. you like the IDEA of the person more than the REALITY — then you’re dating the wrong boy or girl.



I’d love to see more books where the characters get together earlier in the story. While the yearning portions of books are lovely and make us flip their pages, I’d love to see more stories where healthy romantic relationships are depicted. Where the curtain isn’t dropped with the suggestion of coupling up = happily ever after. Novels that take us past that point and depict a young couple working out some of their early insecurities and issues; that show us the romance and heartache of settling into a relationship. Like the moment when you’ve hung up on your boyfriend/girlfriend for the first time and you’re cradling your phone, praying they’ll know you want them to call back. Or you’ve slammed a door and you hope they’re waiting on the other side figuring out the perfect words to transform the emotions inside you from anger and hurt to comfort and passion.



Relationships are not a destination. They’re not an end-point. They’re always a journey. They should always be challenging and growing and evolving. Some great books that show this: FANGIRL by Rainbow Rowell, IF I STAY by Gayle Foreman, BOY MEETS BOY by David Levithan, INFINITE MOMENT OF US by Lauren Myracle, and the JESSICA DARLING series by Megan McCafferty.



~*~



Now that you have a sneak peak at some of the things I love about contemporary romance, leave a comment below and tell me what’s on your swoon list or what other romantic books I need to add to my To Be Read pile ASAP!

Contemporary YA Books Featuring Mental Illness

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Mental illness and mental well-being are topics that keep emerging in contemporary YA, and they keep being explored in worthwhile — even life-changing — ways. This list features very recent contemporary YA titles that have tackled mental illness in some capacity. 

All of these titles were published in the last two years, though many, many more titles have come before and many more will come after. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but rather one meant to show a range of experiences. Some of the descriptions aren’t entirely insightful as to what the mental illness tackled is, and sometimes that’s purposeful (The Stone Girl, for example, highlights the eating disorder but there is most definitely a mental illness coexisting with it). 

If you have other favorite contemporary realistic YA titles that tackle mental illness and mental well-being from any period of time, feel free to leave the title and author in the comments. And yes, you may borrow and share this list as you see fit. 

Descriptions are from WorldCat, unless otherwise noted. 

Wild Awake by Hilary T. Smith: The discovery of a startling family secret leads seventeen-year-old Kiri Byrd from a protected and naive life into a summer of mental illness, first love, and profound self-discovery. 

Opposite of Hallelujah by Anna Jarzab: For eight of her sixteen years Carolina Mitchell’s older sister Hannah has been a nun in a convent, almost completely out of touch with her family–so when she suddenly abandons her vocation and comes home, nobody knows quite how to handle the situation, or guesses what explosive secrets she is hiding.

Something Like Normal by Trish Doller: When Travis returns home from Afghanistan, his parents are splitting up, his brother has stolen his girlfriend and car, and he has nightmares of his best friend getting killed but when he runs into Harper, a girl who has despised him since middle school, life actually starts looking up.



Charm & Strange by Stephanie Kuehn: A lonely teenager exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy must either surrender his sanity to the wild wolves inside his mind or learn that surviving means more than not dying. 

Crash and Burn by Michael Hassan: Steven “Crash” Crashinsky relates his sordid ten-year relationship with David “Burn” Burnett, the boy he stopped from taking their high school hostage at gunpoint.

Drowning Instinct by Ilsa J. Bick: An emotionally damaged sixteen-year-old girl begins a relationship with a deeply troubled older man.

Crazy by Amy Reed: Connor and Izzy, two teens who met at a summer art camp in the Pacific Northwest where they were counsellors, share a series of emails in which they confide in one another, eventally causing Connor to become worried when he realizes that Izzy’s emotional highs and lows are too extreme.
Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos: A sixteen-year-old boy wrestling with depression and anxiety tries to cope by writing poems, reciting Walt Whitman, hugging trees, and figuring out why his sister has been kicked out of the house.
Zoe Letting Go by Nora Price: Zoe goes to a facility to help cure her anorexia as she comes to terms with the loss of her friend and her own identity. 

Bruised by Sarah Skilton: When she freezes during a hold-up at the local diner, sixteen-year-old Imogen, a black belt in Tae Kwan Do, has to rebuild her life, including her relationship with her family and with the boy who was with her during the shoot-out.

Perfect Escape by Jennifer Brown: Seventeen-year-old Kendra, living in the shadow of her brother’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, takes a life-changing road trip with him.

This is Not A Drill by Beck McDowell: Two teens try to save a class of first-graders from a gun-wielding soldier suffering from PTSD. When high school seniors Emery and Jake are taken hostage in the classroom where they tutor, they must work together to calm both the terrified children and the psychotic gunman threatening them–a task made even more difficult by their recent break-up. Brian Stutts, a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq, uses deadly force when he’s denied access to his son because of a custody battle. The children’s fate is in the hands of the two teens, each recovering from great loss, who now must reestablish trust in a relationship damaged by betrayal. Told through Emery and Jake’s alternating viewpoints, this gripping novel features characters teens will identify with and explores the often-hidden damages of war. 

Chasing Shadows by Swati Avasthi: Chasing Shadows is a searing look at the impact of one random act of violence. Before: Corey, Holly, and Savitri are one unit– fast, strong, inseparable. Together they turn Chicago concrete and asphalt into a freerunner’s jungle gym, ricocheting off walls, scaling buildings, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. But acting like a superhero doesn’t make you bulletproof. After: Holly and Savitri are coming unglued. Holly says she’s chasing Corey’s killer, chasing revenge. Savitri fears Holly’s just running wild– and leaving her behind. Friends should stand by each other in times of crisis. But can you hold on too tight? Too long? In this intense novel, told in two voices, and incorporating comic-style art sections, Swati Avasthi creates a gripping portrait of two girls teetering on the edge of grief and insanity. Two girls who will find out just how many ways there are to lose a friend– and how many ways to be lost. 
The Girls of No Return by Erin Saldin: 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.
OCD Love Story by Corey Ann Haydu: In an instant, Bea felt almost normal with Beck, and as if she could fall in love again, but things change when the psychotherapist who has been helping her deal with past romantic relationships puts her in a group with Beck–a group for teens with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Cracked by K. M. Walton: When Bull Mastrick and Victor Konig wind up in the same psychiatric ward at age sixteen, each recalls and relates in group therapy the bullying relationship they have had since kindergarten, but also facts about themselves and their families that reveal they have much in common.
Freaks Like Us by Susan Vaught: A mentally ill teenager who rides the “short bus” to school investigates the sudden disappearance of his best friend.
Lexapros and Cons by Aaron Karo: Realizing that his OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) is out of control, seventeen-year-old Chuck Taylor, who wants to win his best friend back and impress a new girl at school, tries to break some hardcore habits, face his demons–and get messy.
Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick: A day in the life of a suicidal teen boy saying good-bye to the four people who matter most to him.
Pretty Girl-13 by Liz Coley: Sixteen-year-old Angie finds herself in her neighborhood with no recollection of her abduction or the three years that have passed since, until alternate personalities start telling her their stories through letters and recordings.
The Stone Girl by Alyssa Sheinmel: Seventeen-year-old Sethie, a senior at New York City’s Franklin White girl’s school, has outstanding grades, a boyfriend, and a new best friend but constantly struggles to lose weight.

Mental Illness in Contemporary YA: Guest Post from Hilary T. Smith (author of Wild Awake)

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Let’s kick off contemporary week with Hilary T. Smith’s post about the importance of good, solid, realistic fiction about mental illness.

Hilary Smith is the author of the novel WILD AWAKE and of this semi-defunct blog. She lives in Portland, OR, where she is studying North Indian classical music and doing her best to keep the neighbors from having her spaceship van towed.

Burn the Pamphlet, Wrestle With the Bear: Mental Health Narratives and YA Literature

Our cultural scripts for mental illness are pretty uninspiring. The suicide pamphlet in the school nurse’s office advises you to Get Help and Speak to a Counselor, where “help” is often a code word for “life-long medication,” and the counselor might be the wise healer of your dreams, or might be a not-very-wise adult who hands you another stupid pamphlet and sends you on your way. If you weren’t so busy being outlandishly sad or paranoid or hyper, you would be tempted to shout: “People! I am going through what may prove to be one of the most potent and devastating experiences of my life, and you want me to read a fucking pamphlet?”





In a cool culture, they’d send you into the forest to wrestle a grizzly bear, or everyone in your village would surround you in an all-night evil-spirit-dispelling drum circle dance, or they would give you a nice old Pippi Longstocking house on a leafy street where you could live in a way that worked for your brain and didn’t bother anyone.





Anyone who has been on the receiving end of the suicide pamphlet (or the OCD pamphlet or the psychosis pamphlet) can tell you that when it comes to talking about mental illness, our culture has a terrifyingly limited vocabulary. We tiptoe. We oversimplify. We squawk the same Top Ten Tips over and over like parrots in a cage.
The conversation about mental illness has become completely jammed up by this squawking, and it’s going to take a lot of smart, inquisitive, and imaginative people to unjam it.





This is where YA comes in. Many of those potential conversation-changing people are kids and teens right now. One of the exciting things that YA literature can do is provoke teens to question different elements of their culture—whether you’re talking about politics, gender stuff, or reality TV. Why should mental health be excluded from that kind of questioning?





One thing I love about YA right now is that so many books have moved past the “issue-addressing” narratives of previous decades and are delving into the messiness and complexity of experiences like mental illness not as “issues” to be “resolved” but as part of a larger story. What is the difference between an “issue novel” and a novel-novel, and why is this difference important?





In an issue novel, the Problem is shown to be a certain situation or behavior (teen drinking! disordered eating! manic escapades!) which is shown to cause Conflicts that result in Consequences. The conflicts and consequences surrounding this single situation or behavior are the main drivers of plot and character; the story is over when the situation has been defused and/or the behavior modified. A novel-novel might also involve a problematic situation or behavior which creates conflicts and consequences, but the Problem is shown to be something greater than that choice or behavior. The Problem might be free will, or social justice, or alienation, or finding one’s place in the world—but whatever it is, it takes place in a much larger context in which the “problematic situation or behavior” forms a small piece. With that in mind, the plot might not hinge on the situation or behavior or at all—it might simply be taken as part of the background.





If The Catcher In The Rye was an issue novel, we might see Holden Caulfield receiving counseling for the death of his brother, getting help for his drinking habit, making up with his parents, and going back to school.





If Wonder When You’ll Miss Me was an issue novel, the story would most almost certaintly revolve around the protagonist “coming to terms” with her highschool tormentor instead of hitting him in the head with an axe and running away to join the circus with her imaginary twin.





In Dante and Aristotle Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the teenaged characters drive into the desert to smoke pot. In a lesser version of the story, the pot smoking would be discovered and addressed and Made Into An Issue; luckily for the reader, Benamin Alire Saenz allows it to simply be a beautiful and believable part of the story.





So how do we write YA novels involving mental illness without turning them into issue novels? First, ask yourself if a given behavior or situation really needs to be treated as an “issue” at all (with all the capital-r Resolutions that this entails). Is mental illness really the main source of conflict in the story? Or can mental illness be part of a story about love, or freedom, or intergalactic space wars? Do you need to “Resolve” it in a dramatic way? Or can you treat it like Dante and Aristotle’s illicit toking in the desert?





As a YA writer, you are quite literally affecting the range of stories teen can access about mental illness. Are you going to hand them another pamphlet, or send them to wrestle with the bear?
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Hilary has offered up a signed copy of Wild Awake to one winner. Enter below and I’ll draw a name at the end of the month.

Contemporary YA Week @ STACKED

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Welcome to the third annual contemporary YA fiction week here at STACKED. I am so, so excited to get this week kicked off because there is so much great stuff to share.

Like in years past, I have a nice array of guest posts from contemporary YA authors. We’re going to travel across the globe to talk about Australian contemporary YA, we’ll talk about mental illness and contemporary YA, humor in contemporary YA, and much, much more. In fact, I have 7 guest posts lined up, along with a host of book lists.

After seeing what people were interested in reading about earlier this year, I noticed some of the topics that were mentioned were topics that have been covered here before — either during a prior contemporary week or elsewhere. I thought that in addition to new posts, I’d rerun some older content, as well, in order to give a huge range of voices and insights into contemporary YA.

So in short, contemporary YA week will be a little longer than one week this year. It’ll be closer to a week and a half long, with two posts a day. I promise a lot of worthwhile reading, thought-provoking guest posts, and, I hope, useful book lists of titles within a given topic and titles to get on your radar for the coming year.

And perhaps — just perhaps — I’ll tell you a little bit more about my book about contemporary YA sometime at the end of this series.

Contemporary YA fiction week will start tomorrow with a guest post about mental illness as it’s depicted in YA, with a sharp take on the idea of “the problem novel.”

Get Your Contemporary YA Fiction Fix

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Remember last June when STACKED hosted a week-long celebration of all things contemporary young adult lit? We got such great feedback, especially about the book lists, that it was impossible to ignore an opportunity to continue advocating for this genre.

If you hop out of your feed reader (or if you’re on our site already) scroll down the right side bar. There’s now a box for contemporary ya lit, including a link to a rough database we’re building. It’s our hope readers looking for a certain type of contemporary read can use this to find good reads, fill holes in their personal/library/school collections, and discover how vast the genre is.

It’s our hope to highlight both current reads and back list titles and as reviews post on our blog, we’ll update with links to them.

Happy reading!