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Adrenaline-fueled, Male-Centered Contemporary YA Fiction

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With Eric Devine’s post on male violence and aggression, I could think of no better sort of list to write than one featuring contemporary realistic YA books that are male-centered and feature high adrenaline and, in most cases, violence of some kind. These books are gritty and intense. 

All descriptions come from WorldCat, and most of these titles were published in the last 5-7 years. I’d love to have more titles to add to this list, so if you can think of any, feel free to offer them in the comments. 

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.

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

Press Play by Eric Devine: While making a documentary to get himself into film school, Greg accidentally captures footage of brutal and bloody hazing by the lacrosse team, and he must decide whether to release the film or keep the secret.

Blade: Playing Dead by Tim Bowler: A fourteen-year-old British street person with extraordinary powers of observation and self-control must face murderous thugs connected with a past he has tried to forget, when his skills with a knife earned him the nickname, Blade.

Violence 101 by Denis Wright: In a New Zealand reformatory, Hamish Graham, an extremely intelligent fourteen-year-old who believes in the compulsory study of violence, learns that it is not always the answer.

Freeze Frame by Heidi Ayarbe: Fifteen-year-old Kyle believes he does not deserve to live after accidentally shooting and killing his best friend.

Dirt Road Home by Watt Key: At Hellenweiler, a reformatory for second-offenders, fourteen-year-old Hal Mitchell will soon be free if he can avoid the gang violence of his fellow inmates, but the real enemy may lie elsewhere.

Efrain’s Secret by Sofia Quintero: Ambitious high school senior and honor student Efrain Rodriguez makes some questionable choices in pursuit of his dream to escape the South Bronx and attend an Ivy League college.

If I Grow Up by Todd Strasser: Growing up in the inner-city projects, DeShawn is reluctantly forced into the gang world by circumstances beyond his control.

Dirt Bikes, Drones, and Other Ways to Fly by Conrad Wesselhoeft: Seventeen year-old dirt-bike-riding daredevil Arlo Santiago catches the eye of the U.S. military with his first-place ranking on a video game featuring drone warfare, and must reconcile the work they want him to do with the emotional scars he has suffered following a violent death in his family.

Unlocked by Ryan G. Van Cleave: While trying to impress a beautiful, unattainable classmate, fourteen-year-old Andy discovers that a fellow social outcast may be planning an act of school violence.

When I Was The Greatest by Jason Reynolds: Ali lives in Bed-Stuy, a Brooklyn neighborhood known for guns and drugs, but he and his sister, Jazz, and their neighbors, Needles and Noodles, stay out of trouble until they go to the wrong party, where one gets badly hurt and another leaves with a target on his back.



Blank Confession by Pete Hautman: A new and enigmatic student named Shayne appears at high school one day, befriends the smallest boy in the school, and takes on a notorious drug dealer before turning himself in to the police for killing someone.

Bystander by James Preller: Thirteen-year-old Eric discovers there are consequences to not standing by and watching as the bully at his new school hurts people, but although school officials are aware of the problem, Eric may be the one with a solution.

Run The Game by Jason Myers: A cocaine-addicted teenaged guitarist in a rock band falls dangerously in love with a fourteen-year-old prostitute.

Dear Life, You Suck by Scott Blagden: Irreverent, foul-mouthed, seventeen-year-old Cricket Cherpin, living under the watchful eye of Mother Mary at a Catholic boys’ home in Maine, has such bleak prospects he is considering suicide when Wynona Bidaban steps into his world.

Diary of a Witness by Catherine Ryan Hyde: Ernie, an overweight high school student and long-time target of bullies, relies on his best friend Will to watch his back until Will, overwhelmed by problems at home and guilt over his brother’s death, seeks a final solution.

Period 8 by Chris Crutcher:  Paul “the Bomb” Baum tells the truth. No matter what. It was something he learned at Sunday School. But telling the truth can cause problems, and not minor ones. And as Paulie discovers, finding the truth can be even more problematic. Period 8 is supposed to be that one period in high school where the truth can shine, a safe haven. Only what Paulie and Hannah (his ex-girlfriend, unfortunately) and his otherclassmates don’t know is that the ultimate bully, the ultimate liar, is in their midst. Just about everyone else who stops by the safe haven of the P-8 room daily are deceived. And when a classmate goes missing, all hell breaks loose. 

Break by Hannah Moskowitz: To relieve the pressures of caring for a brother with life-threatening food allergies, another who is a fussy baby, and parents who are at odds with one other, seventeen-year-old Jonah sets out to break every bone in his body in hopes of becoming stronger.

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.

The Necessity of Violence: Guest Post from Eric Devine (Author of Press Play, Dare Me, and Tap Out)

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To kick off Contemporary YA week here at Stacked, let’s hear about violence — male-led violence more specifically — from author Eric Devine.





Eric Devine is the author of multiple works of Young Adult fiction, most recently, Press Play, which was published in October. He is also a veteran high school English teacher who spends as much time teaching as he does completing field research for his novels. His work has been listed by YALSA and Booklist for reluctant readers and for Best in Sports. He is married to his high school sweetheart, and his wife and he have two wonderful daughters and two not-so-wonderful Labradors. Find out more at ericdevine.org, facebook.com/ericdevineauthor, or Twitter: @eric_devine









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The punch being thrown in the image above is one of the most positive outlets for the young man pictured. He is Michael, and his violence was one of the best things I could have experienced.

I am sure many will look at this picture and see nothing but aggression, nothing but anger. That is true. But there is also the release of tension, a catharsis. Michael was abused and he grew up violent. Without this mosh pit and his ability to hit people in a constructive way, he would have killed someone. However, I did not grow up abused and in a violent household, so why was being around him such a positive development for me?

For many adolescents there is a very real desire to take shit out on things and people. I needed someone to tell me this was okay and not to hate myself for feeling such. I wasn’t alone. I had a friend who fought not only people, but telephone poles and trees. I’ve known others who have abused animals and themselves. If I were a psychologist, I might have the answer about why this occurs, but I’m not and so I don’t. What I can tell you is that the desire is real and is not something that ended with my grunge-era generation. As an educator, I see boys hitting each other all the time, slamming each other into lockers, and sometimes breaking out in real fights. And, to a degree, this is perfectly fine.

Constructive versus Destructive

There was a tradition, a kind of game among my friends, which we would play in a basement. Typically, we were emboldened by illicit substances, and at some point the fight would be suggested. Then the music was cranked, and weapons were grabbed. Someone would yell, “Doorknob,” and the game was on. The goal: get to the doorknob at the top of the stairs. But to succeed, you had to cross a battlefield, where it was every man for himself.

Bottles were smashed into faces, golf clubs swung into legs, and a thousand punches were thrown. And, yet, we all liked each other. We fought like this, game after game, until everyone was too exhausted to continue. This was before the publication of Fight Club, and as crazy as it sounds, our fights focused on the exact desires explored within the novel. This was a safe way for us to test our mettle. We could beat on one another and come to know just how much we could take, which would be important if it were ever someone else doing the beating. And we learned how to fight back, a skill I still see as valuable.

The last time we played this game is the first time I got knocked out. One of my friends punched me so hard in the back of the head that I fell to the floor and stayed there for a few minutes, out cold. I saw this man just the other day and congratulated him on his second child. There’s no ill will. He taught me a powerful rule in fighting: never let anyone get at your back. My father couldn’t teach me this; he didn’t know. But my friends could, and those beat downs served me well in college and beyond.

This is all to say that violence can be and is constructive. Mike moshed and fought with us and released all his rage so that he didn’t hurt anyone more than was acceptable. He knew enough about himself to seek this. I will never stand in judgment of someone who knows his needs and finds a constructive way to fulfill them. Mike may have “To Thine Ownself Be True” tattooed on his body now, but he was living the adage, then, and in turn, teaching us a powerful lesson.

Destructive

The conversation about teen violence should always focus on the destructive end, the place where males, particularly, do not have the outlets they need to channel this energy, and therefore, do so in grossly inappropriate ways.

Fighting is not the problem. The display of power is. My friends and I fought each other, but we never tried to dominate, we sought to learn. When boys fight for revenge, bring weapons into school, assault and rape their girlfriends or boyfriends, we should all be alarmed. This is unacceptable. This should be addressed. And beyond the obvious education necessary, one way would be to provide a safe environment for boys to work out their aggression.

Boxing gyms used to be as popular as MMA gyms are today. They served an outlet, often after school, and often free to troubled youth. Every person I know who participates in some violent discipline, like martial arts or boxing, talks about the respect of it, the way they know they don’t have to fight, but can if need be. My friends taught me the same. And post-basement brawls, we were the least aggressive males on the planet. Fighting was out of our system, and it felt good to have it gone. It didn’t make us want more.

Yet, unfortunately, we also played football together. This may seem contradictory, because aren’t sports a perfect venue to channel this negative energy?

As violent sports go, football does not teach you discipline. In fact, it just became another place for us to release our pent up violence, and we were often rewarded for our ability to hurt people. It doesn’t need to be this way, but often sports like football and lacrosse and hockey offer very little beyond the inducement to be violent. Because aggression and a violent propensity can make you an all-star. And we live in a society that rewards such, on and off the field.

Therefore, something that allows teen males to “blow off steam” in a safe way, without reward for being nasty, with only a goal of being constructive with anger, is a potential solution. There is no one-size-fits-all answer for what that looks like, and that’s okay. Just ask the teens what they want; they’ll let you know.

Fact versus fiction

In all of my novels there is at least one fight scene. Often there are more. Some might dismiss the authenticity of my stories, feeling that I have a limited perspective because of my upbringing, and not a true reflection on American culture. That notion is wrong.

I write what I see and hear, predominately from my students. I even had them respond to a journal prompt so I could better inform myself for this article. The “boys will be boys” adage came up time and again. And as frustrating as that was to see––because as an adult male, I loathe that easy excuse––it also makes sense. Every one of my forty-eight students polled had something to say about violence. Had I asked them to write about love, the connections might not have been so handy.

We live in a violent world. My students see this and know that “boys throw punches, and girls talk shit behind your back.” Yes, this is a very stratified notion of gender behavior, but it is still illuminative. This is what teens see. Boys who need to express their anger and frustration, punch. Girls who need to, use manipulation more than overt violence. They are all being socialized into roles with violent implications, and there is a social desire for them to uphold the framework.

So let them blow it up. Literally. Give teens more outlets, physically and emotionally. Let them climb into a ring with gloves and head gear. Let them work it out. Then guide them toward books that speak about violence and let them talk about how they resonate. Give teens a safe context in which to explore and you will see less violence, not more.

I know that may seem like a lofty conclusion, but based on my experience, and from what I see every day, there’s little harm in trying to see if I’m right. As a species, we are a violent animal. Simply because we can communicate better doesn’t mean we are always going to. However, it should be the goal. Yet, to reach it, we might need to reframe how we look at violence. Much like with the picture above. Possibly what we see is not a roadblock, but rather, an appropriate step toward a better path.

Guest Post: Wherein A Male Responds

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When my husband read my earlier post about gender and reading, he vehemently disagreed with everything I said. Rather than having this be a one-sided conversation, I offered him the chance to share his piece in response to the boy cave/gendered reading idea. While I still disagree with the notion we should offer separate spaces or push the idea that gender matters, he makes a really thoughtful argument I can’t help but share.

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In 1928, when Virginia Woolf wrote “A Room of One’s Own,” based on her lectures and arguing that “women must have money and a room of her own to write fiction,” her explicit point was to illustrate the need of women authors for independence but more implicitly, the need of women in general to rise above their impoverished place in society. That they have, at least in relative degree to 1928. To deny that sexism still isn’t in the board room, the classroom and, indeed, the library would be simply ludicrous. Yet, you must concede, women have come a long way in their pursuit of equality, and progress continues to be made every day.
The pursuit of equality, in fact, has been so successful that women are, if not welcome, at least an increasingly familiar sight in many areas long dominated by men such as the board room and classroom. Whereas there was no female Supreme Court Justice prior to 1981, there are now three. In 2010, twelve Fortune 500 CEOs were women versus 2000 when there were only three. My point again is not to say that women have reached full equality, but rather that progress, while perhaps slow, is still occurring.
This should be celebrated. However, simultaneously, the rise in the status of women has not so much achieved equality and equilibrium between the sexes as it has encroached on mens’ status. Over the last half century, books ranging from the beat classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to non-fiction Guyland explore the modern male psyche as an increasingly confused, wayward place that has been deprived of key psychological needs by the fact that women have somehow been injected into all spaces.  In order to achieve equality, men are made to cater all of our actions to a sensibility which is not ours naturally.  What this did, initially, was bring about sorely needed equality, but while it continues to exist in the same form it did 40 years ago that makes men cater and not resist.
Our code of conduct is increasingly narrow both by the entrance of women and the conflict we have between our social construct of masculinity and what society expects. Boys are told not to fight or play in the house, and when faced with a conflict, we are not entirely sure how to respond. Rites of passage used to be commonplace, but not so any longer (“too dangerous” or “too stupid”). Our age-old role models, our fathers, are increasingly rare. Thus, our ideas of masculinity and what it means to be a man are increasingly convoluted. We compensate, invariably, by seeking to find out what is masculine. Some men go to the extreme and rebel, hoping brute strength makes them a man. Some join mens’ social groups, one of the few bastions left to confer amongst ourselves. Some simply search and fail. The point is that, without a firm sense of identity, we struggle. I, myself, try to form strong male friendships which, in tandem with my marriage, ground my sense of self. Though, when I first relocated somewhere as an adult and had no male friends yet, I was very much lost.
This all brings me to possibly one of the most unfortunate losses in identity: the loss of space. Our homes are one of the greatest losses of all. Prior to modern architecture, men and women did both have their spaces. Now, with homes designed to be open, men ended up being the losers. We retreated to the less desirable places in the home – my dad practically lived in our basement. As a boy, I had my room, but even that had limitations that my mom enforced. I distinctly remember the woods being where my friends and I could play and be “boys,” without the constant guard of the parental big brother.
This all leads me to the case of “the Cave,” a boys-only reading space in a public elementary school. The library is to the boy much as the “Victoria’s Secret” is to the grown man. It can be an utterly terrifying place. Part of that is how we are socialized, it’s true. But, that’s ultimate irrelevant when it comes to practical considerations. This is not our place – never was, never will be. Why? We were told that girls, who are “made of sugar and space and everything nice,” read. Add to that the fact that boys inherently learn better through interaction versus reading, and you there you have it. Books, the library, the whole kitchen sink isn’t for us.
I think “the Cave” is an awesome idea because it not only brings boys into the library, it gives them a space they don’t really have and can’t really have. Further, it makes that space inviting by appealing to a boy’s interests, particularly gross things but also adventure and action, those things that many of us, later in life want so desperately to have when we’re wearing ties and driving mid-price sedans. It also exposes boys to books that they almost certainly would not have been exposed to before. One parent in the Cave article remarked about how her son’s reading interests grew beyond Harry Potter. Awesome. What possible problem could you have with this place?
Well, many of you reading this, including my wife, believe that gendered books and gendered space are bad things which create inherently hostile environments. On the contrary, they make some of us more comfortable in a world in which we are afraid to even think about stepping out of line. The terms “boys book” and “girls book” are, of course, simplifications as there are many diverse tastes. But, boys have very few safe things that are universally agreed to acceptable, and they cling.
When I was in third grade, I must have been a brave kid, because one day, during reading time, I marched over to the shelf of books and got the Baby Sitter’s Club. I didn’t have the slightest interest, and I may have even done this on a dare. It was awful – I had no interest. But I read the thing, possibly to see what would happen (I’m still slightly a troublemaker, as my wife will tell you). Here’s what happened: I was ostracized by boys and girls alike for a few days. Neither side found this acceptable. It gradually faded, as these things do. But I learned a lesson – step too far outside of the realm of acceptable, and you’ll pay. So, argue with me now, books are not gendered.
Now, I was asked to comment on some of the more popular YA books of the last few years that I read at my wife’s request and comment on their gender appeal. So, I’ll discuss them here briefly:
  • The Hunger Games: The full series is not inherently gendered, though I think there is more girl appeal overall. There’s a lot of themes that many boys would find alien: (I) sisterhood, (ii) a female character struggling with her emotions with two male characters and (iii) the idea of media sensationalization. True, there is a significant amount of action, which even I, as a grown man, enjoyed. But, we have to realize that, at some point, boys are not Katniss.
  • Glow: Glow, inherently, is a girl’s book. The book does a good job of moving between the plight of the boys and the drama of the girls’ capture, and in doing so, attempts to appeal to those traditional archetypes: the girls escape by cunning, the boys in-fight. Do you see a pattern? Girls read, boys fight. How much more interesting this could have been had the boys been captured and the girls abandoned to fend for themselves.
  • Divergent: I loved Divergent, as would, I suspect many boys. Why? Can you see the appeal of going from a life of rules and order to one in which there is danger and excitement? This book does an excellent job of merging the likes of boys and girls. Yet, with a female lead character with emotions for a boy, is still foreign.
Books are, in some way, inherently gendered for women. That’s because boys are not naturally drawn to reading entirely in and of itself. In a study done in Wehrwein, Lujan and DiCarlo (2006), researchers found that among undergraduate physiology students, the majority of women preferred one dominant learning style while men preferred a combination of learning styles including visual, auditory, reading and kinesthetic learning. Thus, a book is sometimes but not always thing that everybody wants, but boys are less likely to prefer it alone. Yet, given the space and given the chance to start within my comfort zone, I can be brought to read even YA, which is not my interest at all. I suspect many boys would feel the same way about reading in general.
My wife and her colleague, Liz Burns, make some valid points about gender equality, and I see their argument. It would seem patently unfair to cater to one group, such as boys, while not providing a separate area for girls. What may not be so obvious is that the intimidation of that girls’ area would be far worse for a boy than vice versa. The point made in the article about the Cave – that placing items in the girls’ area would inherently cut access – is true. It is the modern inverse of placing Woolf’s books in a Roaring Twenties barbershop.

Over 80 years ago, Virginia Woolf demanded a room for a woman’s one. Nowadays, it’s us guys asking. Can you let us have it?  And once we have it, let’s both respective our separate spaces while having a very large common space.