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

Written by: Kelly on November 14, 2013.

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

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

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

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

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What role does sports play in contemporary YA fiction? What about the “sports” book?

“I was at a Wisconsin High School a few weeks back. I talked books in front of a group of maybe 100 kids. It was a Friday afternoon, last hour. Probably thirty percent of the attendees wore some form of football jersey or t-shirt (the school had a game later that evening). While a couple of the jersey wearers were obviously larger and tougher-looking than the general audience, most looked like regular kids who might just as easily have been mathletes or band geeks or whatever, except they wore a jersey. This picture confirmed something I already knew: at most schools there isn’t a stereotypical jock monolith filled with steroidal bruisers hell-bent on crushing the spirits of nerds. Most athletes are just your average kid.

Whatever average means. The starting quarterback at the school I visited was also the lead in the musical.”

— from Geoff Herbach’s Why I Write About Sports. And it should be noted, too, that sports books aren’t “books for boys.” They’re books for any readers, regardless of whether they’ve a vested interest in athletics or not.

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Earlier this year, I blogged about contemporary series books. You should go check out the post, and make sure you read through the amazing list of suggestions from other readers in the comments.

I think this is a trend I’d like to continue seeing, particularly when it comes to those series which aren’t contingent upon one another, but instead are companions to one another. There’s something nice about contemporary series that show stories don’t end when the book ends; often there’s more to it. See books like Jo Knowles’s Jumping Off Swings and recently-released companion title Living With Jackie Chan.

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Also earlier this year, I wrote about complicated female characters, and all of the books in my post are contemporary YA. This is a topic I keep returning to again and again, and it’s something I think about, particularly because I think I’m finding the label of “unlikable” to be damning. It’s not that these girls aren’t likable. It’s that they’re complicated, complex, and they’re allowed to be who they are, regardless of conventional beliefs of what a good girl is and what a not-good girl is.

In that post, I linked to a few other posts, and I want to follow up with another link, this time to Courtney Summers’s outstanding piece called Writing for Girls. She writes:

“There are some people who need to see a girl in a certain way and if she is remotely outside of that box, they dislike it. The general worthiness of a female protagonist as a love interest is a biggie — male characters can be cold, flawed, and present behaviors bordering on abusive (emotionally and physically) without ever compromising their potential as a love interest. Girls who experience trauma are often dismissed as melodramatic, though a traumatic past will often add to the mystery and desirability of a male character.”

I’m still thinking about this, and I’m thinking about it from the perspective of a reader and a person who gets YA books into the hands of other gatekeepers and readers more broadly. How do you sell books with girls who may not be pretty and perfect? Do you apologize for her? Or do you allow her to speak for herself? Does that impact how you interact with girls, too? There’s a lot to unpack — but it’s worth unpacking and examining because real girls are complex, challenging, and imperfect. That’s how they should be in contemporary realistic fiction, too. And most are…but the responses to many of these girls are definitely interesting.