What Makes A Book YA? Plus Bookish Brits Vlog 16: Teenage Characters Outside YA

There is a lot of debate about what makes a book YA or teen fiction. I have been deliberately reading 'adult' or 'literary' fiction about teenaged characters in a bid to work it out for myself.

I think a lot of the time the difference is just marketing, but in other cases, the book has been written in a way that doesn't fit the conventions of YA. Below, I will go through each of the books mentioned in the above video and explain whether I think it could have been published as YA or not.

I insist very passionately that YA is an age category, not a genre, but nonetheless, books that are sold as YA tend to follow certain conventions. The main one is that the protagonist(s) must be teenagers. If there are shifts in point of view, at no point will we experience the point of view of an adult. I think another convention is that the story must feel grounded in teenage reality. The teenage experience is not a metaphor for something else or a flashback from an adult's point of view. If you replace 'teenagers' with 'children' and 'teenage' with 'childhood', you'll be describing children's fiction.

People often say that plot is critical to YA. Teenagers like a clear plot that grabs them and keeps them turning the pages. But so does everyone else. Plot is critical to the successful reception of almost every genre of literature, whether it's written for children, teenagers, or adults. One notable exception is literary fiction...

Swallowing Grandma, by Kate Long - Could have been YA

This is written in first person - the narrator is a teenager. It is a coming of age novel set in the time that it was written. This could definitely have been marketed as YA, however, none of the author's other books are YA. Her first novel The Bad Mother's Handbook was a number-one bestseller, so obviously her publishers wanted to market Swallowing Grandma as adult fiction in order to appeal to previous readers.

The Magic Toyshop, by Angela Carter - Couldn't have been YA

This deals with many of the same themes as a lot of YA books - coming of age, sexuality, relationships - but it's by an author whose entire output is classified as literary fiction. It's full of poetic language and literary allusions and metaphor. It's magical realism so it's set in a world that is a bit dreamlike and fantastic, the plot isn't clear, and the point of view shifts from character to character. In short, it doesn't really have anything in common with most YA except for the age of the protagonist. I'm not saying that YA fiction can't contain poetic language and evoke a dreamlike atmosphere but it's not very common - an example is Ash, by Malinda Lo. I loved Ash but a lot of other readers disliked it, and I think this is because when someone picks up a book that is marketed as YA they expect something that is quite down to earth. Even if it's set in a fantasy world, it will usually feel very grounded. The reader will be able to relate to the situations that the protagonist(s) gets into and the decisions they have to make. The Magic Toyshop is not realistic and only vaguely relatable!

Five Miles From Outer Hope, by Nicola Barker - Couldn't have been YA without major editing

First person, narrator is a teenager, very weird. Not quite as weird as Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory but heading along those lines for a while. Tangent: people I know keep wondering aloud about whether The Wasp Factory could have been marketed as YA - I would say yes, it could have been, it's got a teenage narrator - but much like with Swallowing Grandma it wouldn't have fitted the author's career trajectory. It's the same with Five Miles From Outer Hope - the author is a literary fiction writer. Also, there's a time jump at the end, so we see the narrator as an adult, and the whole thing makes more sense from the point of view of an adult. Without that chapter from the adult's point of view the book isn't as good. It pulls the whole thing together because there isn't really much of a plot. It gets away without a clear plot as is because it is literary fiction.

Bonjour Tristesse, by Françoise Sagan - Could have been YA

Bonjour Tristesse was published in 1954, long before the term "Young Adult" was coined. The narrator is a teenager, but at times she seems to be looking back from an older perspective, although the author was only 18 herself when the book was published. I actually read Bonjour Tristesse because Sarra Manning recommended it years ago. I think that if it was being published for the first time today, it could have been YA, if it weren't for the author's career path.

The New Girl, by Emily Perkins - Couldn't have been YA

This is a book with an ensemble cast and only one of them is a teenager. It is a coming of age story but it is also a story about older people and the choices they have made throughout their lives, so it could not be YA.

Let me know what you think - how would you define Young Adult literature? Which adult or literary novels do you think could be published as YA, today? If you're a writer who writes what might be considered Young Adult fiction, how do you feel about it?

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Book Review: The New Girl, by Emily Perkins

In an unnamed town, during a hot, dry summer, Julia, Chicky and Rachel are celebrating the end of school and waiting for the exam results that will determine their futures, whilst trying to decide what to do next. Although their town is dull - so boring that they sign up to a free class at the local library - it's a difficult place to leave. Everything they've ever known is here, and only Julia really thinks that she might leave, inspired by Miranda, their beautiful, charming new teacher.

But Miranda is no angel, having come to escape the city, and the mistakes she made at university. She seems like a positive influence, a breath of fresh air with big ideas and pretty dresses, but the longer she stays, the more her darker side comes out, and her presence cannot remain benign.

The main protagonists are Julia and Miranda, though the novel cycles through many other points of view. I found them both really interesting. Miranda is a narcissist dressed up in Manic Pixie Dream Girl clothing - black hair, fringe, and all. She enjoys inspiring people and getting them to adore her. She's convinced that she knows best and doesn't care about the emotional fallout of her actions. Julia is naïve but intelligent, and she knows that she has to leave the town if she wants to do anything really exciting with her life, though she has a strong emotional connection to her friends and family, especially Chicky, Rachel, and her mother.

I also loved reading about Julia's mother, Mary, who had Julia when she was young, and is now a kind woman who loves her daughter and husband, but is aware of everything she missed out on by staying in the small town. She struggles with her husband's lack of interest in their daughter, and with the possiblity that Julia might leave.

There were some characters that I would have liked to read more about, and some scenes that seemed skipped over. When Miranda first comes to the town, she goes to meet the local women, most of them mothers, at a party hosted by the woman who hired her to teach, Gretchen. We only get to read about the party before Miranda arrives, and I would have liked to have seen how it went. I would also have liked to find out more about Chicky and Rachel, especially Chicky, who is brash and brave and yet seemingly content to stay in the town.

I'd like to read more books that deal with these type of issues - books about deciding what to do next, about the mistakes new adults can make when dealing with people who have been adults for a lot longer than they have. If you like the idea of 'New Adult' but not the fact that most of the books sold under that category are romances, give this a try and let me know what you think, though it is literary fiction - rather than NA or YA - because the story is sometimes told from the parents' point of view. If you have any recommendations for me, please do leave a comment!

Book Review: St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell

If there is a more intriguing title out there than St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, well, I'd love to hear it, but I'd also be surprised by it's very existence! When I saw the spine of this book in the shop I couldn't resist picking it up. It's a collection of short stories, and one of the review quotes on the back cover mentions Angela Carter, who is one of my favourite writers. I took it straight up to the till. It took me a few months to finish, as with all short story books. I started reading it when I was reading a novel that was too large to cart around on the tube and it made a great travel read, as it's quite slim and easy to slip into.

The stories are not connected but what they do have in common is their magical realist atmosphere and quirky settings. Most of the stories draw on mythological or supernatural ideas and almost all the narrators or protagonists are teenagers, predominantly boys, but there are a few girls, most notably in the title story.

As I've written before in other reviews, I have issues with short stories and novels which feel like snapshots of a character's life rather than complete stories in their own right. I can't say that I didn't have issues with the abrupt endings of some of the stories in St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, but Karen Russell's imagination is so fantastic and her ideas are so interesting that I didn't mind that much.

 

My favourite story was the title story, 'St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves', which is about a pack of girls, the human children of werewolves, who have been sent by their parents into the care of a group of nuns, who give them new names and try to teach them to behave as humans are supposed to. I also loved  'Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers', about children with both magical and non-magical sleep issues, and 'from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration', which is narrated by a boy whose father is a Minotaur. 

I won't say anymore because at least half the fun of reading these stories comes from discovering the details! I would like to read more of Karen Russell's work, but her novel, Swamplandia! is based on one of the stories that I wasn't quite as keen on, so I might skip that and go straight to Vampires in the Lemon Grove, her second short story collection.

Book Review: Five Miles From Outer Hope, by Nicola Barker

6ft 3in 16-year-old Medve lives in a decrepit old hotel on an island in Devon, with her father and her younger sister and brother. Her mother and two elder siblings are elsewhere in the world, and Medve appears to be quite happily running things back at home, as much as they can be run with minimum effort, until a red-haired South African stranger, going by the name of La Roux, appears to disrupt things and drive Medve to frustration and humiliation.

Five Miles from Outer Hope is a weird book. I quite often really like weird books, but ultimately there was too much that seemed to be missing from this one for me to rate it as anything above 'okay'. I enjoyed it for the most part, I didn't get bored, but I found it unsatisfying in the end, even a little bit irritating.

It's literary fiction, and the blurb is completely ridiculous. 'An instant classic of teenage self-discovery' it says, of a book I'd never heard of before and only read because I happened to pick it up in a shop! So when I turned the first page I was anticipating a certain level of pretentiousness, but happily, it's not all that pretentious. It is quite funny, in places, although some of the humour is of the gross out, vulgar variety, and I didn't really laugh more than once at the quirks of the different family members.

Unusually for literary fiction, I found the teenage voice to be really strong. Medve's character comes across really well in her narration. But there were far too many italics. Italics, in my opinion, should be used for occasional emphasis, but in Five Miles they were used so frequently they became pointless very quickly. Maybe the author was trying to make it look like Medve herself, thinking it was a cool thing to do or something, had written it down like that, but I just found it annoying. Otherwise I liked the style of the writing, it was well balanced between description, interior monologue, and dialogue, and there were some really great descriptive sentences.

I know why Medve was chosen to narrate the story - it's about her growing up and possibly falling in love - but to be honest, I found her to be the least interesting of the bunch. She's vindictive, has issues with her older sister Poodle/Christabel, and wants to be the queen bee in the family, as much as she refuses to admit it to the reader. Yet I was more intrigued by the almost-intellectual, devious, Patch, who Medve initially writes off as being needy. La Roux had a whole history that was continuously hinted at, sometimes briefly delved into, but never fully explored. I also wanted Big, Medve's father, to have a bigger part in the story. I didn't feel like I got enough of an idea of what he was actually like as a parent most of the time.

I was about to accept that this book was an overgrown snapshot-style short story (the kind I generally don't get on with), until I got to the italic section in the last few pages, which jumps into the future like an epilogue. It places the rest of the novel into the context of Medve's whole life, and raises more questions than it answers. This part just made the whole thing seem ever more odd and unsatisfying as a novel. A lot that I would have quite liked to read in more detail was just skipped over.

I don't think I'll be rushing out to try another book by this author, but other readers might really like it. If you do like what I call snapshot short stories, those that focus on tiny segments of  characters' lives, then you might enjoy Five Miles From Outer Hope, especially as you do get to find out what happens afterwards in this one. It is a short novel with less than 200 pages, so if you're a fast reader you won't be risking much time.

Book Review: Pop, by Kitty Aldridge

It's the summer of 1975, and the UK is sweating through a heatwave. Maggie's mother has recently died and her father is in the USA, so the thirteen year old girl goes to live with her grandfather, Arthur, whom she calls Pop, and his dog, Blowbroth, in Sutton Coldfield. Pop's raison d'etre is the approaching annual pub quiz, which he hopes to win so he can impress a woman. Maggie is a quiet child, but helps him train, following her grandfather from pub to pub...

...and that's about it. There is painfully little plot to this novel, and the revelations about the characters do not make up for it for me. The writing contains some great imagery, and evokes the smoky, hot atmosphere really well. The various characters in the village are believable. Pop is very well characterised. Maggie, on the other hand, isn't. She doesn't seem like a real thirteen-year-old girl. There are no hormones, no periods, she doesn't express any desire to meet other people her age. The action follows her, but is always about other people. She is meant to be the central character, but the novel's title is very telling - the story is really about her grandfather. Maggie is an neutral observer, she lacks opinion, a character of her own. She doesn't even wonder about her own future, something I would imagine would be a prime concern for a young person who has just lost their mother. I could understand her silence if she was traumatised - but she doesn't appear to be that way either.

This is very well written. But when I was done, I wondered what the point was. The climaxes of the storyline are scenes with little impact upon the characters. It's a slice of life - but I wonder why it was sliced, what the author wanted to tell us. It reminds me of a lot of short stories that I have read and not got on with. My brain seems to need a proper plot to cling to, most of the time, otherwise I just won't "get" the story and will find it ultimately frustrating.

I would only recommend this book if you want to read some nice description as I didn't get much out of it at all. If you do get more out of those plotless short stories than I do, you might enjoy this. Let me know what you think!