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Mental Illness in YA As a Minefield—Explore at Will: Guest Post by Rachel M. Wilson (author of Don’t Touch)

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There’s never going to be a time where it’s not worth talking about mental illness, wellness, and health. It’s important to address it head on with contemporary YA especially, and it’s important to have it addressed from a variety of standpoints and perspectives. Welcome to Rachel M. Wilson, who is here to talk about the exploration of mental illness in YA and the expectations that are built around it in the books — and in the flesh.






Rachel M. Wilson studied theater at Northwestern and received her MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her debut novel Don’t Touch came out from HarperTeen in September, followed by “The Game of Boys and Monsters,” an eerie standalone short from HarperTeen Impulse. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, 



Rachel now writes, acts, and teaches in Chicago, Illinois.






One of my favorite theater games for young people is called minefield—yes, it’s dark, all the best games are. One student’s blindfolded, and the rest of the class creates an obstacle course out of chairs, desks, textbooks, the healthy options they failed to eat at lunch … Then another student verbally guides his or her blindfolded partner through the minefield. If so much as the hem of a sleeve touches one of the obstacles—EXPLOSION. We’re all done for.



Writing about mental illness can feel a bit like that, especially when writing for young people.
There are so few YAs touching on mental illness that any new addition is expected to do some heavy lifting, to fill a gap or meet the needs of a particular set of readers. Authors, gatekeepers, and readers are coming from a dozen different angles and attitudes about what mental health in YA fiction should look like.



Some of these attitudes I agree with. Others, I’m not so sure. Some represent opposite ends of a debate while others only seem to, and many are steeped in such muddy waters that I’d rather not see them presented as absolutes. In any case, here are a few of the “musts” and “shoulds” I’ve encountered:



  • YAs about mental illness should be medically accurate.
  • Mental illness in YA should, like everything else in a novel, serve as a metaphor for larger themes.
  • YAs about mental illness should include lighter scenes or humor to give readers a break.
  • A YA about mental illness must leave the reader with a sense of hope.
  • A mentally ill character in a YA must be shown to receive treatment and “get help.”
  • A YA about mental illness should portray adults as potential allies.
  • Recovery from mental illness should be portrayed as long and difficult.
  • Recovery from mental illness should be portrayed as a positive and hopeful experience.
  • YA that addresses the stigma surrounding mental illness risks reinforcing stigma.
  • YA about mental illness should portray pharmaceuticals in a positive light.
  • YA about mental illness should focus on therapy as a preferable treatment to pills.
  • Suicide is a dark subject that alienates readers—proceed with extreme caution or avoid altogether.
  • YAs about mental health run the risk of glamorizing mental illness (and especially suicide)—proceed with extreme caution or avoid altogether.
  • Mental illness is an affliction, separate from a character’s true personality, to be struggled with, defeated, and recovered from.
  • Mental illness never fully goes away, and thus should be embraced as an integral part of a character’s identity and personality.
  • We need more books in which mental illness is the primary problem facing a character.
  • We need more books in which mental illness is incidental and not the primary problem facing a character.
  • YAs about mental illness are “problem novels,” and thus, about as literary as after-school specials.
  • YAs about mental illness are “problem novels,” and thus, very important for young readers.



Phew! It’s enough to make a girl want to write fantasy, sci-fi, dystopia, ANYTHING with a filter, any genre that’s not expected to mirror the struggles of actual teens in this present-day, real-here-now world. And of course, the contradictions and conflicts in the above statements reflect contradictions and conflicts found in said real world. Woe to the author who tries to navigate this minefield with zero explosions.



Thanks to the stigma that still surrounds mental illness, our culture’s conversations about it are somewhat stunted and unsettled. People hold strong (often conflicting, sometimes uninformed) attitudes about therapy, pharmaceuticals, suicide, and even the legitimacy of psychology and psychiatry as fields of medicine.



When I enter a conversation with someone in my social circle, I can safely talk about any number of potentially touchy subjects—gay marriage, reproductive rights, the somewhat-progressive-somewhat-problematic lyrics of Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass”—with a fair expectation that we’re going to more or less agree. If I start a conversation about mental health, I know no such thing.



I’ve been told that psychiatric drugs are part of an oppressive conspiracy or a crutch or a placebo, heard close friends say they don’t “believe in” mental illness, heard more guys than I can count complain about their “crazy” ex-girlfriends, read one too many tweets about the “selfishness” of suicide. Thankfully, comments like this don’t derail me as they once did, but they used to set off personal explosions that might throw me off track for months. And so naturally, I avoided these conversations.



I think that’s part of why it’s still hard for YA readers to find books touching on mental illness. We’re not all comfortable with the conversation—we’re not sure how our thoughts on the subject will be received, so we keep our mouths shut.



Of course, the least common variety of mental illness—the dangerous and scary kind—is the easiest to talk about and best represented in pop culture. Mass shooters and serial killers receive tons of media attention. The one genre with no shortage of mentally ill characters—and with a relatively uncomplicated point of view on mental health—is horror. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of horror, including horror about psychopaths, but in most of these stories, crazy=scary=bad.



Contemporary YA about mental illness has to thrive in a stigmatized climate. But it also has to navigate another kind of fear—the fear of the power of fiction. When we start talking in absolutes, fear is often at play. The “musts” and “shoulds” listed above are testaments to the power we recognize in these stories. Contemporary, realistic stories strip away the distance that’s integral to historical and speculative fiction. Because of their proximity to real life, we credit these stories with a special potential to guide or mislead teen readers … to help or cause harm.



But here’s the thing. Like the explosions in a game of minefield, the scary consequences in a work of contemporary fiction are still fiction—parts of a story that reader and author co-create. The actor traversing an imagined minefield can rip off the blindfold and see only desks. The reader can slam a book shut, take a break, or stop reading altogether. A reader’s investment in a story gives it power, and this investment remains in the reader’s control. Fiction that questions or explodes some of the above absolutes can offer a safe way for readers to explore their own conflicts and concerns around mental health. The least comfortable part of the story might be the part that rings most true.



I love that Meg in Nina LaCour’s The Disenchantments feels ambivalent about taking the medicine that prevents her panic attacks. I love that Lisha in Corey Ann Haydu’s OCD Love Story gets fed up with Bea’s symptoms and isn’t always an empathetic friend.



Readers who’ve written to me about seeing themselves in Don’t Touch tend to mention some of Caddie’s less comfortable traits—like her reluctance to be open about her problems. One reader told me about the guilt she still feels about having kept so many secrets from her friends. Another mentioned this line: “… right then I want to tell him everything and see how he reacts, see if anyone can understand and not think I’m crazy like I know I am” (147).



She wrote, “Thank you for writing that. Thank you for making that an OK thought to have.”



That’s a line that I might have cut if I’d let fears about reinforcing stigma or using the word “crazy” in a negative way take precedence over Caddie’s voice. It’s hard to predict what bits and pieces of story will mean the most to a reader.



No book can satisfy every “must” and “should” listed above. One that tries will likely come out feeling sanitized and dishonest. Explosions can be messy, but they can also clear a path. So let me present an absolute I can get behind:



YA that includes mental illness should seek to honestly represent a unique character’s experience of a particular illness in a particular place and time and all the messiness and conflict that goes along with that.



As with other categories of diversity, it’s important to allow for diversity and difference within narratives about mental illness—to embrace books that start conversations, that address stigma and conflict, that deal in messiness. Writing, recommending, and reading fiction about mental illness can feel fraught with peril, but it’s still important to step onto the field.



It’s been great to see books about mental illness included in the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, and I was excited to see a panel of authors who self-identify as “basket cases” talking about their experiences with anxiety, depression, & ADHD at YALL Fest. These conversations aren’t always comfortable, but silence and stigma are bestie-best friends, so let’s keep the conversation flowing.



As for recommendations:





Guest Review: The Silence of Six by E. C. Myers

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Frequent guest contributor Matthew Jackson – freelance writer, film & book critic, and professional nerd (plus Kimberly’s cohabitator) – is back with a review of E. C. Myers’ latest book, The Silence of Six. In 2012, Jackson reviewed Myers’ Norton-winning Fair Coin for us. He has also written frequently here at Stacked on the subject of horror.

One minute, 17-year-old Max Stein is sitting in his high school auditorium, watching a live presidential debate. The next, he’s watching – along with everyone else in the room – as his friend Evan hacks into the debate’s live video feed and shoots himself after uttering a very cryptic question: “What is the silence of six, and what are you going to do about it?”

That this is how the new novel from E.C. Myers – the Andre Norton Award-winning author of Fair Coin, which I loved – opens is compelling enough. That it happens within the first 15 pages of the novel is something I found outright gripping. Myers rockets the story from establishing scenario to brutal catalyst almost immediately, trusting his readers to take his hand and follow him on what will be a bullet-train of a techno thriller. Handled clumsily, this kind of set up might make the reader skittish. In Myers’ hands, though, it sends a message: All will be revealed if you just hang on for the ride.

Because Evan made contact with him shortly before his death, Max is suddenly at the center of a government manhunt, and a conspiracy that he can’t possibly begin to comprehend. Reeling from his friend’s drastic act, and desperate for answers, he must dive back into his own previously abandoned hacker identity, and navigate a complex online world of aliases, back doors, secrets and lies, before it’s too late to find out what Evan really gave his life for.

I remember all-too-well the emotionally harrowing feeling that everything when you’re a teenager, even the most mundane thing, is a high-stakes moment, so I’m a sucker for stories that take that all-or-nothing rollercoaster of adolescence and morph it into an adventure where the stakes actually are high. In the world of The Silence of Six, the secrets teenagers harbor really are worth dying and killing for. The government really is out to get you. Every keystroke really can be watched over by someone else. This is a world of whispers and codes and masks, both physical and virtual, a world where you sometimes have to lie and steal to survive another day, a world where the truth could mean permanent silence. It’s got all the trappings of a government conspiracy blockbuster, but instead of a renegade cop or a paranoid reporter, a handful of resourceful teenage hackers are in the driver’s seat, and that makes it all the more engaging.

One of the things I found most impressive about Fair Coin was Myers’ ability to simultaneously deliver the goods we’ve come to expect from a story of that kind, and subvert those expectations. He does it again with The Silence of Six. It’s a techno-conspiracy-cyber-thriller, with everything that implies. It’s a search for the truth, a story about making it to the center of this knot of secrets no matter what, and to that end it’s a breathlessly entertaining page-turner that darts artfully forward from page one and never lets up. But that doesn’t mean Myers won’t to stop play with some of the conventions he’s working in. His hero is not an action star or an always technically precise supergenius. He’s a gifted, scared kid determined to find whatever right he can in a world that’s just gone wrong for him in countless ways. What looks like it could be a romantic subplot evolves into something else entirely, as Max forms a connection with another hacker that’s built more on personal stakes and, perhaps, a mutual sense of mischief than something romantic. The hacking done by the characters isn’t a few quick keystrokes of brilliance, but rather a series of clever, yet often imperfect, ploys to get to the next clue. The hacking in this story is both messy and satisfyingly geeky, giving it a realism that nerdier readers will happily get lost in. Perhaps most importantly for a thriller, though, the solution to this puzzle is both satisfying and surprising. Even if you actually do think you see the end of this book from a mile away, how Myers and his characters arrive at it, and what happens when they do, still manages to defy a few of the rules set forth by so many stories of this kind.

With The Silence of Six, Myers has again proven his gifts as a storyteller who both celebrates the tropes of genre fiction and wants to pick them apart and stitch them back together into a new creature. It’s a lightning-fast thriller with other, darker themes lurking beneath, and even if you think you’ve read books like this before, it will find a way to surprise you.

Review copy received from the publisher. The Silence of Six is available today.

Guest Post: Victoria Signorelli and Kathleen Willard of Gay YA

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It’s not often we do guest posts for people who aren’t authors. But today’s guest post, from Vee Signorelli and Kathleen Willard, is one I am so excited to share. If those names don’t sound familiar to you, maybe their blog does. These two ladies — teenagers — run GayYA.org. This is an incredible resource of book reviews, book lists, and discussions about all things relating to LGBTQIA+ in YA, and it’s one that I turn to regularly. If it’s not on your reading radar already, it should be. 
 
Let me reiterate that the two minds behind this site, as well as its Tumblr and Twitter accounts, are teenagers. Their work and their insight into YA is keen and thoughtful, and I had to ask them to come talk about why they started the site, what they offer up on the site, books that have impacted them, and more. 
**
One night in May of 2011, Jessica Verday announced to the internet why she’d pulled out of the anthology Wicked Pretty Things: one of the editors said they would not include her piece unless she changed her m/m pairing to an m/f one. The internet exploded. A #YesGayYA hashtag formed on Twitter. Hundreds of blog posts went up. People came out of the woodwork to talk about similar experiences, and to promote LGBT YA. My older sister and I were both scrolling through our Twitter feeds the night of this announcement. We ushered each other over to read stories of characters being “straightened” by publishers/editors/agents who didn’t think they would sell, or someone explaining why they needed LGBT YA. We both saw the same thing: tons of people calling out for representation, with no way to reach publishers, agents, and editors, and nothing to connect them to each other. To this day, we don’t know who said it. But it was announced, “someone really needs to make a website on all of this stuff.” We looked at each other over the top of our computer screens.

“are you…”

“thinking…?”

“Yes!”

“SAME.”

We realized there was a huge demand for representation of the people, and no one organizing to talk about it past some hashtags on Twitter. We were only sixteen and twelve at the time, but it wasn’t even really a question in our minds: we knew how to do websites, and we knew social media.

We both identified as straight at the time (ha ha), and we really knew nothing about the LGBTQ community. To be honest, we were probably the least qualified people to do the job. But, we had the time and the passion and the knowledge of websites to be able to do it. We made many mistakes: calling a pairing of two bisexual guys “gay” when it should’ve been M/M, using “gay” as an umbrella term for the entire LGBTQIA+ community, and generally just being the most clueless people in the world. It was a learning curve, but once we realized we were not the ones who needed to do the speaking, we got out of the way.

We got some great posts on our site, and many wonderful and rich conversations going. We both enjoyed it, and put a good amount of time into it. But there was only so much effort two presumably straight teens could put into something like this— we were convinced that all LGBT lit was dreary and full of angst, and the words “the problem is, it’s just not good” were muttered frequently. We had no over-arcing vision for the site, and were really getting nothing out of it, except getting to talk to some authors who we were convinced wrote solely angst. So after about two years, we abandoned our site. It was partially due to issues at home, but the site had started to drag on us. If it had been something we were still incredibly passionate about, I don’t think we would’ve let it go.

It didn’t really look like it would ever get going again, especially after my sister headed off to college.

Then, this past winter when I turned sixteen, I went through a process of figuring out my own identity. It was an extremely hard time for me, as I had never heard of either non-binary genders or pansexuality and it took me a long time to realize that they fit me. During this time, I found such solace in books. Beautiful Music for Ugly Children by Kirstin Cronn-Mills really opened up the door to self discovery, because Gabe, the MC was trans and happy. I had the same thing with The Realm of Possibility by David Levithan which made me feel like however I identified would be accepted. And Far From You by Tess Sharpe, which made me feel OK about my attraction to girls. Eventually, I figured out what my identity was through tumblr (non-binary and pansexual), but I got the humanity and the ability to discard shame from books. I remember the first time I held in my hands a book that had me in it (which was Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff)– a book that had a happy ending. Every time I was told that people like me didn’t exist, every time I started to believe that I would never be happy, I had something physical to cling to that proved to me I really was here, that I had a chance at a good life.

But I also ran into a lot of difficulty: because most people don’t even know people like me exist, I can count on one hand the books that have non-binary people in them. And I had the resources to be able to find them. I understood more than ever the importance of not only queer YA, but the service I had an opportunity to provide through GayYA.org.

I realized that there were a lot of teens out there like me, looking for themselves in books. And I realized I had a chance to really help them out. So, this March, I decided to start it back up. For the first time since we began, I had a vision and purpose.

Kathleen:

I never “figured out” that I was gay, as so many people do later in life. I knew from the beginning. I thought girls were the bomb. I had a substantial crush on Daphne from Scooby Doo. I also thought that something was horribly wrong with me–that I was wrong, and needed to be fixed–because I did not know that queer people existed.

Representation is pretty important to me.

I don’t know exactly when I figured out that there is a word for what I am, but it hit me somewhere around age nine, watching Willow and Tara become a couple in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

At age eleven, I came out to my parents, and while they were really surprised, they also really didn’t care who I fell in love with as long as I was happy. The notion that Gay is OK grew and grew in my mind; it cautiously morphed into pride, then bloomed into lesbian feminist rants, and the rest is history.

Flash forward six years and picture an angst-ridden teen riding the bus with a cup of coffee in her hand, wearing enough black clothing and red lipstick and false confidence to be mistaken for a widow spider, while simultaneously searching her person for her bus pass. That’s me.

I have known Vee and Maria, the founders of Gay YA, for years and years; I witnessed the growth of Maria’s first fansite, an homage to Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely Series, and the birth of Gay YA.

Early this spring, Vee decided to singlehandedly reboot Gay YA after a dormant period. One day, as I was presumably sipping on tea and V was working on Gay YA’s Tumblr, she said, “What have I done?! I have so much to do!” And I said, “I can do that for you if you want.” She handed me the laptop. This happened several times with several tasks over a period of several months.

In early summer, I said: “Have I become your co-conspirator?”

And she said: “Yeah, if you wanna be.”

I did.

Helping to run Gay YA started out as a cool hobby to promote something very close to my heart; it has become something much bigger and a little bit scary. After running our social media and receiving positive feedback, I realized that I have stumbled backwards into the opportunity to support–even help?!–queer youth just like me, who are looking for themselves on the page.

Vee:

Very frequently, my parents will ask me with a twinge of hope in their voices if I’ve ever rethought getting into this– they still think I’m a straight girl. “No,” I respond with a smile. “Not at all.”

Although my workload is huge and overwhelming and growing every day, re-booting this site has lead to some of the most amazing experiences in my life. I live in Minnesota, which is secretly one of the coolest states in the country (especially in a literary sense). I’ve gotten to meet some of my favorite authors, usually through events at the Loft Literary Center, or Addendum Books. Though it still terrifies me to go up and squeak at them, I now have something I can say. We’ve even gotten to interview some of our favorite authors (like Francesca Lia Block!!).

And we’ve been able to make a difference for teens and adults looking for representation. The last few years have been HUGE for queer YA books— the representation is out there! It’s just hard to find. And we have been able to collect a thorough knowledge of all the titles, and are able to recommend exactly what people are looking for. We’re far from becoming the exhaustive resource that I have my eye set on, but we’re getting closer by the day.

Kathleen:

In the last few months, we have been spectators to the site’s explosion (in a good way).  There has been an influx of posts, followers, questions, and general publicity to the point that that between the two of us, it is a daily struggle to keep everything running smoothly.  Part of the struggle is financial: we each contribute 2-10 hours to the site on any given day (in addition to keeping up with a high school education), for which we are not paid.  For me, this is in addition to a part-time job; for Vee, it means giving up having a job at all. Our operating costs add up to approximately $100/month, which is a LOT when you’re taking from one part-time job and a $40 allowance.

I recently added a donation button to the site– anything is greatly appreciated: 50 cents to $50.

Although something like 50 cents seems like nothing, it really helps us a lot.

Vee:

We have a number of new things happening with our site. We are currently are accepting (until the end of October) applications to become a regular contributor to our site.

We’re also looking to gather a small group of dedicated volunteers to help us with some small but essential tasks, so we can continue tackling the big picture things. We’re completely strung out with everything we’ve got going on now, because it all just sort of happened, and had no grasp on the amount of work it would all take. We have a lot of cool project ideas running around our heads, but no time to enact them, because of all the day-to-day emergencies we have to keep up with. Volunteer help is essential to keeping this community and project moving forward. See here for more information!

I’ve had the opportunity of working with Nita Tyndall on GayYA’s Masterlist Project. We’ve made a wiki and are cultivating a three pronged project to help people looking for queer YA find exactly what they’re looking for. It’s entirely community driven, and we’d love it if you joined us!

We just started up our first book club, and we’re reading Pantomime by Laura Lam. Check out the schedule and how you can participate!

We also have continual opportunities for authors, teens, and everyone else. And if you have an idea for something you’d like to work on with us, or have a question, comments, or anything else, my email is always open at victoria@gayya.org.

We’re really looking forward to expanding this website in new and awesome ways, and we hope that you’ll join us!

Guest Post: Fiona Wood on Female Sexuality in YA Fiction

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I’ve been thinking and writing about female sexuality in YA for a couple of years now. It’s a topic that continues to fascinate and frustrate me. I’ve talked at length about what good examples are out there, and I’ve talked at length about what’s missing.

Today, I’m turning the blog over to a guest who has written one of the best examples of female sexuality I’ve seen in YA in a long time, Fiona Wood. Her recently-published US debut Wildlife presents an honest and unashamed exploration of female sexuality, offering a range of experiences, emotions, and words to describe a variety of sexual situations. She’s here to talk about the choices she made, as well as what she thinks some of the more solid YA novels that tackle female sexuality are.

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Teenage years are the years of sexual maturation. The location of early sexual experience in a field that ranges from respect/pleasure/affirmation to abuse/fear/vilification is hugely influential in forming a sense of self, and self-worth.
What role can the representation of sex in YA fiction play here?
Although it’s not the job of fiction to educate, it is nonetheless a job that fiction does well. It’s a private delivery of food for thought, away from the classroom. In the context of a society wallpapered with frequently unchallenged sexism and misogyny, fiction can offer, for example, female characters with self-awareness and agency, characters standing up to sexism, characters recovering from abuse. Fiction gives readers the opportunity to test their ideas and experience against those explored in the narrative. When it comes to sex, and particularly to young women becoming empowered, the more information they have, the better. 
When I’m writing, my job is to be true to character, and story. But I don’t write in a vacuum; I’m responding to a time and a social context; writing is political, and I write as a feminist. I have the readership age group in mind, and ask myself what I wish I’d been able to read at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
As a teenager I was always searching the bookshelves for intel about sex, and never finding very much. Somehow, Judy Blume’s Forever and Deenie did not make it to the shelves of my school library, though Go Ask Alice, which includes a really disturbing sexual abuse scenario, was freely available. When I read a book that opts for a dissolve when it comes to sex, rather than providing any detail, I can feel my sexually curious teenage-self asking, but what are they doing? What is actually happening? That’s why I like the idea of realistic representation of sex in YA fiction.
During the course of Wildlife’s narrative, protagonist Sibylla’s sexuality is expressed frequently, and is integral to her character. Theory and practice on sex and romance are on a collision course, accelerated by Sib’s manipulative best friend, Holly. The book’s other narrative voice, Lou, recalls a happy sexual relationship from the perspective of grieving the loss of her partner.
I always enjoy reading a treatment of sex that rings true to character. A few favourites include the humour, vulnerability, and honesty in the sex scenes between Tara and Tom in Melina Marchetta’s The Piper’s Son; Evan’s unflinching ownership of his past sexual opportunism in Sex & Violence by Carrie Mesrobian; the tender, awkward beauty of Riley Rose and Dylan’s sex in Everything Beautiful by Simmone Howell; and Deanna’s sense of injustice at the gender double-standard that attaches to her sexual history, in Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl.   
In an ideal world, by the time they are thinking of becoming sexually active, girls will be well-educated in all aspects of sex and sexuality, and have the knowledge and confidence to trust their judgement with regard to what they do, when, and with whom. I think young readers benefit from access to a range of narratives that deal frankly with sex before they become sexually active. This seems particularly important at a time when most teenagers have seen multiple iterations of pornographic imagery, offering a limited, unrealistic, and often misogynistic representation of sex.  
I hope readers will lose themselves in the story, and find themselves in the characters of Wildlife. I also hope they’ll wonder: What do I want my first sexual relationship to be like? What sort of conversations about sex will I have with a prospective partner? What might I do differently from this, or that, character? 

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.