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Female Sexuality in YA Fiction: A Look at the Landscape

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The more I write and think about YA, the more I find holes within it. Part of it is knowing I haven’t — and can’t — read everything. But part of it is that there simply are holes in the category.

I turned in a draft of the Q&A that will be a part of Amber Keyser’s The V-Word last week, and after having spent almost a year now reading and thinking critically about the ways that female sexuality are rendered in YA, there are definite places where YA can and should do better. I’ve been keeping an eye on this since writing about positive portrayals of female sexuality last summer,  and more, I’ve been keeping an eye on the discussions about sexuality as it’s depicted in YA.

The depictions of sexuality in YA matter because these are safe spaces for readers — teen readers, especially — can think about, explore, and consider what it means to be a sexual being. We don’t talk openly or honestly about sex as a culture, and we certainly don’t talk about it in positive, affirming, and empowering ways with teenagers.

With those thoughts in mind, I thought it might be worth talking about where we’re doing okay and where we could and should be doing better when it comes to sexuality in YA. What are we seeing? What aren’t we seeing? More specifically, I’m talking about female sexuality (and that extends, of course, to gender identity on a larger scale) and I’m talking about more realistic novels than fantastic. Which isn’t to say fantasy or other genre fiction doesn’t add to the discussion. It’s just not my strongest area of knowledge. I’d love any input or thoughts other YA readers may have on this topic, so feel free to think with me in the comments. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive but instead, something that spurs some thinking and discussion.

I’m fully aware there are presses publishing books that explore some of these topics — but accessibility is an issue, especially for teen readers. If it’s not something that’d be easily found on a library shelf, in a classroom, or in a bookstore, getting these books can be a challenge.

Virginity & Sexuality As Choice


When I was working through the books I’d read and doing research on sexuality in YA, one of the topics I had a really tough time with was virginity. It seems counterintuitive for virginity to be a tricky topic to find in YA, but it is. There are a few books in mainstream YA which tackle virginity — Terra Elan McVoy in Pure is an example, as is Purity by Jackson Pearce — but there aren’t many more.

Could it be because if sex and sexuality aren’t addressed in the novel in some capacity that we default our thinking to virginity? In other words, if we don’t know the character is sexually active or that she is living a pure life and that’s one of the subplots, if not the main story plot, do we just assume she’s a virgin and that’s it?

Not every book in YA is going to address sexuality, nor should it. It’d be silly to have these topics shoehorned into every novel and it’d be disingenuous to story, to character, and it’d be unfair to readers who’d be given something that doesn’t need to be there (which then makes reading a chore and makes it feel like a lecture, rather than a pleasurable pursuit). But what I want to know is why virginity outside of a religious/spiritual choice isn’t more common in YA? There’s nothing wrong with that choice, and I know it appears with some frequency in fiction geared toward that readership, but it seems to be the biggest piece of the virginity puzzle in YA when I’m not sure it’s the only piece we should be seeing.

Perhaps the best example of this I could find in fiction was Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi. This book is 22 years old, and yet, it did something really progressive and powerful that I’d like to see in a lot more YA today: Josie, the main character, is being physical with her boyfriend and enjoying it, but she then tells him she’s not ready to have sex with him. He goads her a bit about it, saying that she’s being ridiculous, especially since they’re having a good time, but she pushes back and tells him that her body and her choices about sex are her own and right now, she’s not feeling like she’s ready to have sex for the first time. This is a really powerful scene in the book, and one that made me pause and wonder why we don’t see more of this.

Where are girls who are choosing virginity because it empowers them to do that, outside of a religious choice?

I’d like to see more girls who are choosing virginity because that matters to them and because it makes them feel good to take and have that ownership over their own bodies and their own sexual lives. Not out of fear, nor out of duty. But because it’s exactly what they want.

Prude Shaming

The last few years have offered up a solid array of titles that explore slut shaming. Jillian and Mariko Tamaki do a great job of this in This One Summer, and there’s an especially good scene when the younger girl, Windy, tells Rose she’s unfairly labeling and judging other girls she doesn’t know — and she’s doing so in context of the sexual lives she knows nothing about. Jennifer Mathieu digs into slut shaming in her debut novel, The Truth About Alice, as well. There are other books that look at it with less focus than these two, but the important thing is that it’s there.

Is prude shaming though?

Perhaps because it’s tied into the fact we don’t see enough virginity-as-choice in YA (whether because of a religious reason or not!), but there’s also little exploration of what happens when you’re shamed because you’re choosing virginity.

I’ve seen bits and pieces of it — and even in Marchetta’s novel, Josie’s boyfriend picks on her when she stops him in that moment — but we need more. I’d love a book like Mathieu’s but showing the reverse: what happens when a girl’s choice of virginity becomes her downfall or the reason that she’s seen as any number of unsavory things? What happens when she asserts her right to choose not to do something makes her the center of bullying or the target of a community’s rage? Or what about when someone is asexual and simply isn’t interested in sex at all?

Even more, there are times when being a virgin isn’t a choice for teens. The opportunities for teens to have sex are far more limited than they are for adults. There’s a lot of ground to cover when it comes to virginity in YA, and I think prude shaming is a large facet within it.

Diversity


The biggest — and I mean biggest — failure in YA fiction when it comes to female sexuality is in diversity. And I mean diversity of every make, shape, and form possible.

Books that are doing a great job of portraying female sexuality have whiteness in common. It’s exceptionally rare to see a YA novel that tackles sexuality in a positive light that features a character of color. Hannah Moskowitz’s forthcoming Not Otherwise Specified (March 2015) features a queer character of color who is open, honest, and proud of her sexuality. She’s portrayed as enjoying female and male partners. Nina LaCour offers us a mixed race main character in Everything Leads to You, where she’s the center of a lesbian romance.

Both of these are rare sights.

In thinking about sexuality in YA, I had a near impossible job pulling out characters who were disabled discovering sexuality. Indeed, disability in YA already commands but a tiny part of bookshelves as it is, but the only discussion I could think to talk about in terms of a disabled person owning and exploring her sexuality was this powerful post by Kayla Whaley at Disability in KidLit. That isn’t a novel, though. It’s her life. Why aren’t we seeing more books like that?

If we consider mental illness a disability, we might be able to add more titles to the positive portrayals of female sexuality in YA mix — and even then, we’re not getting very far — but for stories featuring physically disabled main characters, the landscape is bleak.

More, we don’t have much diversity in terms of sexual choice itself. I noted above that we don’t see asexual characters (and asexuality is not the same as when we consider a default virgin narrative). We don’t see pansexual or demisexual characters. We don’t see many bisexual characters, though we’ve seen a few more in recent years, including Sophie in Tess Sharpe’s Far From You. We don’t see characters often who make choices outside of the one partner model — there is one I can think of but won’t spoil since it’s a semi-recent title. We also don’t see characters who see their sexuality as fluid and shifting; a lot of that may simply be because the teen years are about exploration and they’re a relatively short period within one’s lifespan, so discovering that fluidity can be tougher.

Female Masturbation


I’d actually begun an entire blog post titled “Going There: Female Masturbation in YA” a couple weeks ago, after reading this tweet from Andrew Karre:

I’m not sure if it’s because I was paying more attention over the last year or if it’s because I’ve come to dig out the cute way we talk around girls masturbating in YA, but this is something I think we’re seeing more than we believe we are. Could we do better? Absolutely. We can do better in not just seeing it happen more frequently, but we can do better in not being shy about describing what’s going on when a girl’s enjoying solo sex (fading to black or being euphemistic in a way that only those who are clued in know what’s happening).

When I served on Outstanding Books for the College Bound last year, one of the titles I nominated for one of the subcommittees I was on was Rookie: Yearbook One. It seems like a bit of an odd ball choice, but it’s an amazing resource. Besides diving into music and film and fashion and culture, this particular volume offered a really honest and blunt piece about why masturbation is important and why girls can feel empowered by knowing their bodies.


Rookie might not be hitting mainstream YA readers, but the fact that one of the biggest publications for teens, spearheaded by a teen, tackled this topic and found it important enough to feature in their print edition says a lot to me about how this is a topic teen girls are interested in and are talking about.

Beyond Rookie, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see masturbation pop up not just in Sarah McCarry’s All Our Pretty Songs, which I noted in my prior post on this topic, but I’ve seen it in other recent reads. There’s Julie Halpern’s The F-It List. There’s Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky (an older title, but a book that is entirely about female sexuality and highly recommended). There’s the classic from Judy Blume, Deenie, as well as Kody Keplinger’s The DUFF.

Then there’s Fiona Woods’s Wildlife, too, out in September, that I can’t recommend highly enough. Beyond featuring masturbation, Wildlife explores numerous facets of sexuality, and it’s empowering and validating in a way teen girls need to read and see, whatever choices they make for themselves.

We can keep doing better with this aspect of sexuality, and I hope that we do. Let’s see more diverse representations here. The majority of these stories are middle class white females — and we know there are many, many more types of girls than that. Let’s see this become a normal thing, rather than something that has to either be danced around or something that, when we read it, sticks out because seeing it called as much is a pleasant surprise.

Or, as I noted in the Q&A, it’d be great if we didn’t have to keep calling it female masturbation, as if it’s something wholly different than masturbation, period.

If you’re still thinking about this, I highly recommend reading Andrew Karre’s follow-up blog post to his tweet, regarding the comments teens in the workshop he and Carrie Mesrobian had. It’s insightful and I think not only shows what is and is not being seen by teen readers, but I think it speaks to why we can and should be having these conversations with teens.

They aren’t dumb.

Guest Post: Patty Blount on Researching Rape Culture for SOME BOYS

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Earlier this week, Kelly reviewed Some Boys by Patty Blount. Patty’s here today with a guest post talking about the research process behind the book. How can you wrap your head around doing research for a topic as huge as rape culture? 

***
Research is a critical part of my job, both as a software technical writer and as an author. It not only informs me, as the creator of the book universe, it helps me develop characters who feel real. I interviewed firefighters and visited firehouses for a book that will be released next year. I read everything I could find on organophosphate poisoning for a medical suspense novel I wrote several years back. But perhaps the most difficult topic to research was rape and rape culture for my latest release, Some Boys. 
Why, you’re probably asking, when something is so often in the news like rape, would it be hard to research? Good question. I suspect it’s because Google searches tend to reflect the topics that are trending at the time. I found it almost impossible to find articles that weren’t about the latest news, like Steubenville and Maryville. I also found it hard to find trustworthy information (i.e., not editorials) about the underlying sense of entitlement those rape cases suggest. 
That’s when I turned to my local library for help. Google got me only so far, so I chatted with a librarian and told her exactly what I was looking for – things like surveys that describe why people rape – is it always about control and fear, or is it sometimes about the sex? The answers to that research shocked me. I learned a good portion of acquaintance rapes are about the sex – which suggested to me that way too many people do not understand the definition of rape. 
That conclusion led me to start researching rape culture. I’d never heard the term until I began working on this book, but the more research I did, the clearer it became that rape culture is not new. It’s something that’s always been lurking in the background – the reason why parents teach their daughters to always travel in groups, to never leave a drink unattended, to walk with keys between their fingers. 
But what do boys learn? They learn not to throw like a girl, cry like a girl. They learn from a very young age that being a girl is less than being a boy. When they arrive at dating age, peers ask if they scored or got lucky, teaching boys that sex is a sport. And if all that wasn’t enough to raise my blood pressure, I began reading what politicians think of sexuality and became ill. Slapping on words to qualify rape? Suggesting that women should simply close their legs to avoid pregnancy? UGHHHH! The more research I did, the more I came to understand that rape culture is the systemic and insidious movement that cultivates, at the very least, disrespect for the female gender and its worst, misogyny. 
I knew my book needed to address these topics from the perspectives of both the male and female lead characters. I want female readers to understand what boys are facing and I want male readers to understand the fear I believe all girls experience. And I want, more than anything, for both genders to end use of the S word, a word I believe was slapped on girls for daring to like sex. 
I have to send sincerest thanks to the librarians at Sachem Public Library for helping me write a story that’s relevant.
***

Some girls say no. Some boys don’t listen.
When Grace meets Ian, she’s afraid. Afraid he’ll reject her like the rest of the school, like her own family. After she accuses Zac, the town golden boy, of rape, everyone turns against her. Ian wouldn’t be the first to call her a slut and a liar.
Except Ian doesn’t reject her. He’s the one person who looks past the taunts and the names and the tough-girl act to see the real Grace. He’s the one who gives her the courage to fight back.
He’s also Zac’s best friend.

Patty Blount works as a software technical writer by day and novelist by night. Dared by her 13-year-old son to try fiction, Patty wrote her first manuscript in an ice rink. A short version of her debut novel, Send, finished in the top ten of the Writer’s Digest 79th Annual Writing Competition.

Matriarchal Societies

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I’ve always been fascinated by depictions of matriarchal societies in books. They’re extremely rare in our own world (if they exist at all – please let me know if you know of any), meaning they’re most often explored in science fiction and fantasy, realms where the unusual, the unique, and the impossible are common occurrences.

By matriarchy, I mean a society ruled or governed by women in a simple sense, but also a society where women’s ideas, interests, and desires are valued above those of men. It’s different from a matrilineal society, where descent follows the female line (think of how cultural Judaism is inherited from the mother). It’s quite easy for one’s family name or identity to be derived from one’s mother while still existing in a culture that values men more. A matriarchy is more complex and more comprehensive.

In fiction, a matriarchal society is a deliberate choice. Sometimes the author intends to simply explore the idea, but usually it’s used as a way to critique our own patriarchal culture. Rather than presenting the matriarchy as a utopian ideal, though, most authors choose to present it as replete with its own problems and injustices. It’s not an antidote to patriarchies, but it is a response. And within the fantasy genre, where it seems like most authors like to write not just patriarchies, but patriarchies that strip women of most of the basic rights they now have in the 20th century western world, a book with a matriarchy stands out. It’s different, it’s interesting, and it’s always discussable.

On a pure story level, though, it’s a way for female characters to have the kind of power and influence that would be nearly impossible in a realistic novel, much the same way giving a girl magical abilities does. As a teen, that’s what drove me to these kinds of stories, and I wish there were more out there geared toward the 13-18 age range. I didn’t read many YA books in this vein as a teenager. Instead, I read adult books like Melanie Rawn’s Exiles series, which features a world where women hold power due to their ability to birth children, and Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels series, where powerful magical women rule over men in often terrible ways. Bishop’s series is particularly interesting to me, since it takes the commonly-accepted ideas about the differences between men and women and subverts them completely. (I like Rawn’s series, but I’m weary of books where people revere women because they can get pregnant. It’s too often used as method in our own world to reinforce the patriarchy.) Her characters exist in a necessarily violent world, as such power structures are only established and maintained through violence.

I’ve collected a few YA books featuring matriarchies below. In some of the books, the matriarchy exists as a smaller society within a larger patriarchal culture, though some of them do feature entirely matriarchal cultures. Are there any others you can think of? Even older titles are fine here, since there are so few of them. Descriptions are from Worldcat, and I’ve also provided a bit of my own commentary on some of the titles in italics.

Trial By Fire by Josephine Angelini
In her hometown of Salem, Lily Proctor endures not only life-threatening
allergies but humiliation at her first high school party with her best
friend and longtime crush, Tristan. But in a different Salem — one
overrun with horrifying creatures and ruled by powerful women called
Crucibles, she is Lillian, the strongest and cruelest Crucible …
Lily’s other self in an alternate universe where Lily suddenly finds herself. There she is torn between responsibilities she can’t hope to shoulder alone and a love she never expected. [This will be published September 2, and it should be on your radar. I’m currently reading it. It’s got a really intriguing hybrid science/magic system the likes of which I haven’t read before, and the matriarchy in the parallel world is equally unique.]

Sorrow’s Knot by Erin Bow
Otter is a girl of the Shadowed People, a tribe of women, and she is
born to be a binder, a woman whose power it is to tie the knots that
bind the dead–but she is also destined to remake her world.

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson
In a Brazil of the distant future, June Costa falls in love with Enki, a
fellow artist and rebel against the strict limits of the legendary
pyramid city of Palmares Três’ matriarchal government, knowing that,
like all Summer Kings before him, Enki is destined to die. [The matriarchy here is so detailed and so believable. Like the power dynamic in our own patriarchy, it’s simply taken for granted that the women rule and the boys die to make it so. I read this one for the Cybils (it was our winner) and it’s probably the best example I’ve read of a matriarchy where the purpose isn’t the matriarchy itself – the story still reigns. Bitch Magazine has a really interesting entry in their “Girls of Color in Dystopia” series about this book that explores the society and whether or not it can be considered dystopian.] 

Night Flying by Rita Murphy
As the time for her solo flight on the sixteenth birthday approaches,
Georgia begins to question the course of her life and her relationships
with the other women in her unusual family. [This addition is courtesy of Liz Burns, @LizB.]

Prized by Caragh O’Brien
Sixteen-year-old midwife Gaia Stone is in the wasteland with nothing but
her baby sister, a handful of supplies, and a rumor to guide her when
she is captured by the people of Sylum, a dystopian society where she
must follow a strict social code or never see her sister again. [I only have vague memories of reading this, but I do remember that Sylum is very matriarchal, not the world at large.]

Epitaph Road by David Patneaude
In 2097, men are a small and controlled minority in a utopian world
ruled by women, and fourteen-year-old Kellen must fight to save his
father from an outbreak of the virus that killed ninety-seven percent of
the male population thirty years earlier. [I haven’t read this one, but I’d be really interested to know just how utopian the world really is. I’m super wary of this kind of setup – has anyone read it who can weigh in?]

Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen
Tells of the coming of the White Queen –of deception, and war, and the changing face of history. [This is clearly quite vague. I got this title from kind Twitter respondent Stephanie Appell, @noseinabookgirl. I haven’t read it, so I don’t know the specifics of the culture represented.]

I’ve also read that the House of Night series by P. C. and Kristin Cast feature matriarchal societies, but I’m not sure how. If you’ve read them, perhaps you can weigh in. I also feel like there might be some historical fantasy – or perhaps simply historical fiction – out there that’s Pagan-centric and features matriarchal societies, even if they’re small ones. No YA titles come to mind, though.

Whose Feminism(s)?: Guest Post by Kirstin Cronn-Mills

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What happens when you read a book that other people have called “feminist” and you can’t get on board with that? When you have a reaction to a book that you can’t contain, what’s the best way of working through what your challenges are with the book? Kirstin Cronn-Mills decided the best way to tackle her thoughts would be to write a letter, which she’s sharing here. 



Kirstin Cronn-Mills is a writer and teacher in southern Minnesota.  Her second young adult novel, BEAUTIFUL MUSIC FOR UGLY CHILDREN, won the 2014 Stonewall Award.  Her third novel, ORIGINAL FAKE, will be released in early 2016.  Find her at kirstincronnmills.com, on Facebook, or on Twitter @kirstincm.





Whose Feminism(s)?


I reeeeeeeeeally want to sit down with this writer and talk about her choices for her main character. It’s something that always fascinates me: 1) do my imaginary people make choices because I let them, 2) does my subconscious force them into behaviors, or 3) do I make choices for them based on what’s best for the story? (All of the above?) I was more than a little panicked by what happened to Mary, and I didn’t really like the book, and lots of people DID, which always makes me wonder why I’m so dumb, so in general this book stressed me out. This is the letter I’d send the author if I felt brave, and if I didn’t think she’d hate me for questioning her so intensely.

Dear Fellow Writer:

You don’t know me, but we’re both Nebraska girls, so I turned to your book to find some ideas for my own adult book set in our beautiful state. Reading your work was a mixed blessing. You write wonderfully about the land we adore, but your main character made me want to rip my hair out.

Mary is in a YA-ish/New Adult age range (my characters’ ranges) when she loses both her husband and her lower leg in a car accident—she’s maybe twenty. She hasn’t gone to college, has gotten married early, and is fully intending to run a successful cattle operation with her in-laws. All this is fine. But you gave her a horrific situation, then never allowed her to talk about her grief. You let her wither in the hospital, then even more at home. THEN you made her choose a cold, conservative, awful preacher as her next husband (the only person who’d drive out and visit her on her parents’ ranch), because she figures no one will want her. I realize your setting is the early 80s, but wow, Fellow Writer, feminism had come to Nebraska by then. Why couldn’t she be allowed to know her own value? She’s a young woman, with so much possibility. Why consign her to such an awful fate?

As she fumbles through her early marriage, she finally gets a job so she can escape the awful people in her life (namely her husband and his congregation). She makes plans to leave him. Then all of a sudden you jump ahead nine years–and four children–into the future. She’s still with the jerk, and things are bad.

At that point, I almost put the book down.

I realize you wouldn’t have a book if Mary didn’t make some horrible choices. But WHY did you have a twenty-ish woman choose such an awful partner? Why did you let her think she had no options available to her besides becoming a slave to a closed-minded, awful man? You know about everyday feminism in Nebraska–women drive trucks, herd cattle, plow fields, and do everything men do because it’s essential to survival. You actually set her up that way! Both her family and her dead husband’s family relied on her expertise in all sorts of ways. So why did you fail her?

Of course, we also know that Nebraska ranch women work the second shift as well as the first–they cook and clean and raise children right along with herding cattle, and usually get no help from men with those tasks, so there’s feminist work to be done. But the fact that women are seen as equal ranch partners still means something, FW. It means that after her accident, Mary should have been able to get back into her ranching life, mourn her husband, and then become a happy, self-actualized human in whatever way she chose it. But that didn’t happen. I realize it made for more writing opportunities, but dang. She was pathetic, and I was pissed. She could have been so much more.

Granted, you did one feminist thing–Mary chose her terrible new husband, and she did it all by herself. She knew he was a jerk, and she knew she didn’t love him, but she actively chose him, which is more than lots of women get to do. Her family was furious, too, which counted for a lot. But there would have been plenty of conflict, had she been allowed to make different decisions. There’s patriarchy in them thar Sandhills, and a strong, independent woman could have had fun defeating the misogynist(s). Instead, you made her submit to them.

The most feminist person in the book is Mary’s father John. When Mary is mourning the death of one of their children (thanks to the choices of that crap-ass husband), her father needs her to help a cow give birth in a snowy, cold pasture. She hesitates, but his angry insistence that she get up, put her leg on, put her grief aside for a moment, and get back to work is the spark that brings her back to life. It’s a uniquely Midwestern/Western perspective on feminism, I think—“hey, woman, pull this calf and you’ll understand your worth again”–but it works. She comes back to her family and her career. The book ends with her as a successful woman married to a man she loves, with successful kids. You can’t hope for a more feminist ending. BUT WHY DID WE HAVE TO WAIT SO FREAKING LONG FOR HER TO GET HER SHIT TOGETHER?

Now, let me say this: maybe I’m full of shit. Maybe your non-feminist choice was only to allow her to become a feminist. Maybe you were trying to talk about how she didn’t know how to choose against the forces pushing on her, like patriarchy and ableism, when she was young. Of course, if she’d made good choices to begin with, it might have dissolved your story. But dang, FW. You and I both know the strong women in Nebraska. We also know the ones who meekly submit. Why did she have to be both? But maybe that’s just realistic.

Let me also say that if someone wrote me a letter like this, I’d be speechless. The world is wide, and feminism is wide. Lots of valid choices exist, and I’m questioning yours in public, which is pretty damn cheeky. So I hope you never see this letter. But this book made me panicked enough that I had to write it all out. I send you my apologies. People have called me a misogynist (and a transmisogynist) in my writing, so I think A LOT about why those readers believe I screwed up. Did you screw up? I don’t know. I can’t know. All I know is my reaction.

Wondering in Minnesota, but always your Nebraska pal,

Kirstin

***


Kirstin Cronn-Mills is the author of Beautiful Music for Ugly Children and The Sky Always Hears Me: And the Hills Don’t Mind. 

And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard

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Emily Beam’s boyfriend killed himself in their school library. It wasn’t intentional, and it wasn’t his plan. He maybe didn’t have a plan and it was a panic reaction. Emily was there.

A funeral, followed by a trip to Boston to see her aunt, and Emily is then sent to a boarding school in Amherst. It’s the same school Emily Dickinson once attended, and immediately, Emily feels a connection to the poet, through her words and her spirit. She also connects, in a weird, disconnected kind of way, to her new roommate KT. She doesn’t tell KT why she’s new in the middle of the school year, and KT doesn’t press her. She listens, then she lies to the other girls in their hall about why Emily is as quiet, reserved, somewhat off-putting as she is. The lies don’t make Emily happy. At least they don’t when they happen (lies are hard to keep track of, as she says) but eventually, Emily appreciates the lies because they tell her something much deeper about KT.

And We Stay is Jenny Hubbard’s second YA novel. Like her first, it’s technically historical fiction, as this is set in 1995. It’s a setting that frustrated me the entire time I read the book and long after finishing. There was nothing in this book, save for a couple of easily changed pop cultural references, that necessitated the time period setting, and the only way readers are privy to that time setting period is because Emily dates the poems she writes and shares in the story. In every other way, this was as timeless as could be, and I think this was a huge disservice to an otherwise outstanding book.

So now that I got out what didn’t work in the novel, here’s what did: the writing. This is literary YA at its finest. It’s carefully and thoughtfully constructed, as Hubbard manages to weave Emily’s past right into her present. The story is told in third person, and as we learn more about Emily’s background and why she’s truly at this boarding school, we also see how she’s fitting into the present and making sense of her past at the same time. We get the pieces of the past alongside with her present, which is offered to us in her own poetry. That poetry, inspired by Dickinson but wholly Emily’s, comes between each chapter of narrative. The poems are reflections on what happened and they serve to make sense of Emily’s story not just for us as readers, but for Emily herself. But even on the paragraph-by-paragraph level, Hubbard succeeds in telling bits of the past right into the present moment. Emily, who is grieving significant loss, falls into moments of reflection and those moments come right in the present. There’s not info-dumping here. It’s elegant, careful, and it’s tight enough that it never overwhelms the story.

There’s more to this than Paul’s suicide, though. And yes, this will be spoiler territory up until the * in the review. Emily harbors a secret, and it’s one that she has to make the most sense of for herself: she was pregnant with Paul’s baby. This isn’t a secret baby though. Paul knew about it, and Emily shared the news with him the moment she found out (he, in fact, bought her the pregnancy test, which she took at a McDonald’s bathroom in a scene that was so stark and gutting to read that it is impossible not to completely get Emily in that moment). The two of them, being incredibly responsible, did talk about the what ifs. But ultimately, Emily made the choice that she would have an abortion, and it was a decision she made with the help of her parents. She delivered the news to Paul, and it wasn’t news he was happy to hear.

Paul wanted to propose marriage and have the baby. But Emily couldn’t do that — she notes it would have been unfair to her, and to Paul, and to the baby. There’s an incredible paragraph in the story before the big reveal where Emily notes that girls don’t get to have choices. That the holes in their lives are ones they have to learn to deal with. That in a situation where there’s a baby, a boy has two choices: propose marriage or leave. It’s not meant to belittle the emotional struggle of what a boy who gets a girl pregnant goes through, but rather, it’s meant to highlight that there’s a physical aspect for a girl in the situation. A literal piece of her body created and taken in some manner or other. So when Emily makes that pronouncement to Paul, the things between them get ugly. They can’t be a couple anymore, and with that breaking up — with that news — Paul panics and does what he does.

The trip to Boston after his funeral was the trip away from their small town, where Emily could safely have the abortion. The move to the boarding school, her way to make sense of what happened without the judging eyes of the town. Without feeling like a victim for making a choice for her own body and her own life. Without feeling responsible for what Paul did with his.

Emily’s time at the boarding school isn’t perfect. She’s not a perfect girl. She breaks rules, and she finds herself in trouble. She smokes, and she isn’t good with attending to all of the responsibilities expected of her. But that’s who she is. It’s part grief, and part of something bigger that makes her a whole and flawed person. Emily’s also incredible secretive about what happened to her, and even as she begins to understand her roommate KT better, she’s reluctant to be honest. Paul’s sister calls the dorm, and it’s hard enough for Emily to take the call, let alone then face her roommate afterward. It’s when Emily overhears KT defending Emily’s right to privacy and her own secrets, though, when Emily realizes KT is, perhaps, the best kind of friend she can ever ask for.

And that’s really where I think And We Stay shines. Many will find the relationship between Emily and Dickinson and Emily and her own writing to be powerful here, but I thought the way Hubbard developed an incredible, supportive, and caring friendship between KT and Emily was the knockout element. We don’t see a whole lot of it, nor should we. Emily’s protective of everything, and her grief often counteracts what’s going on in the world around her. But there’s no question that KT respects and honors, and when Emily finally opens up, KT doesn’t press her. She listens, she offers support, and she offers a bit of herself back to Emily in a way that’s not meant to say she’s had it worse but instead to say no one is perfect and that bad things happen and you can’t always make sense of those things.

There’s something really rewarding in reading a book where the girls aren’t all bad or nasty. They aren’t all perfect here — there are girls here who are snippy or thrive off gossip — but then there are girls here like KT who knows there’s much more to being a friend than that. It’s not just KT, though. There is an entire cast of well-rounded females in this story, all of whom have flaws and make mistakes, and many of whom become real mentors for Emily as she works through what she needs to work through. Of course, there’s the thread of Emily Dickinson, too, and the way that Dickinson’s contributions to not just literature but cultural history as a female weaves well into Emily’s own understanding of self. It’s by unraveling the complexities of being a girl that Emily understands that that is the entire nature of being a girl: it’s complex. That the holes in her life, be they physical or emotional or mental, are things she can patch up with her own strength and forward movement.

* And We Stay has no romance, aside from the reflection upon Emily’s relationship with Paul, and the story ends with girls empowering girls. It’s the kind of message that’s surprisingly rare in YA, and I think that’s what will resonate with readers who pick this up. This certainly could be labeled a feminist novel. The smart lines and messages about what it means to be a girl are hard to overlook — and they’re never preachy nor over the top. They’re skillfully discovered as Emily works through the events of the last couple months of her life.

Which is why I return again to my earlier criticism of the timeframe. There are a couple of very minor things that I could see a setting without a time stamp causing problems with, but they’re so minor, they could have been written around. In setting this book in 1995, I felt like what could have been an outstanding and powerful novel about the value of friendship, the challenges of grief, and the merit of feminist thinking and behaving was undercut. Nothing that happened between 1995 and today’s world has changed so significantly that this needed to be historical (and it’s historical — 1995 was almost 20 years ago, so even today’s 18 year olds weren’t yet born). It’s unfortunate that so much of the time I wanted to know why this choice in time because it really detracted from so much of the hugely positive aspects of the book. I suspect that other readers will wonder the same thing, and I think many will note, like I did, that the girl on the cover sure looks like a teen out of 2014, rather than one out of 1995 in terms of style.

Hubbard’s interweaving of Emily’s personal poetry between chapters works in the story, rather than detracts from it. I’ve read a number of books that have tried to incorporate the character’s own writing into the text and it’s a place I skip because it adds nothing (I think of things like Cath’s fan fiction in Fangirl). In And We Stay, I found myself eager to read Emily’s poetry. It was not only well-written and believable from the voice of a teen girl, but it added so much depth to what she’d been through. Her poetry also becomes a way that she lets KT in and it’s the way that KT really professes her friendship to Emily. She respects Emily’s talent and she gets it in a way no one else really can.

Pass And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard off to readers who like complex, literary novels, as well as those who love stories that may feature Emily Dickinson, young writers, or stories about grief and loss. Readers who liked Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things by Kathryn Burak will like this one, though there’s no mystery in Hubbard’s novel. Likewise, this is a book to hand to those who want a story about friendship, complex, compelling, and flawed female characters. It’s feminist and empowering, and it should offer loads of opportunities for readers to think about what it is to be a girl in the world today (even though it’s set in 1995 — which, yes, I am going to keep bringing up because I wish it weren’t). It’s a slower read, but it’s very rewarding. I can easily see this being the kind of book with great adult crossover appeal, too.

As for the title, it’s a line from a Dickinson poem that plays a huge part in Paul and Emily’s shared lives — and the life Emily has to work out in the after. It cements in the final pages of the story.

And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard is available now. Review copy received from the publisher.