It's been fun reading your posts about all the books you are reading. It seems like love--or at least the promise of love--is paramount to everything all three of you have read. It makes sense since love and relationships are central preoccupations for most teen readers.
Beyond love, though, what themes and tropes are common throughout these books? I've been immersed in my own reading (recall that my focus is on popular YA published since 2005). Here are the commonalities I've discovered so far:
- First-person narrators--A first-person narrator does personalize a story; however, it also limits the viewpoint so much. I suppose the narrator's myopic view of the world nicely replicates how readers feel. We're all narrating our own stories, obsessing about the details, and limited to the information we have in front of us.
- Love triangles--Oh, lord, the love triangles! It's hard to feel sorry for main characters who have to choose between two equally perfect males.
- Good girls and bad girls--The delineation is uncomfortably clear. It's that age-old stereotype: Good girls are worthy protagonists; bad girls have oral sex.
- Girls who are seemingly ordinary but are actually very special--I think that's a common fantasy for teen readers--that no one as yet recognized just how special they are. Fear of being average or ordinary is a huge trope that runs throughout many of these books.
- Parents who are clueless or neglectful--Getting rid of the parents (either by physically removing them or by making them too stupid or preoccupied to be good parents) allows teen characters to find their own way, just as readers are metaphorically separating themselves from their own parents.
YA definitely has a limited formula, but there's not much that separates it from adult fiction. What is it that makes a YA book YA? One obvious answer is where it's shelved in the library or bookstore. But if someone mysteriously unshelved all the YA and removed the labels, would we still be able to identify it? What would be our clues? Do we need the larger genre to understand the work these narratives are doing?
So, I've noticed almost all of the books I've read are from first person which normally, at least I feel it does, lead to a somewhat unreliable narrator. Even if the character seems to be telling you everything, I always feel like they're holding something back. Oddly, with a large majority of my books, especially with Dante and Aristotle, I didn't get that feeling of unreliability. In Dante and Aristotle you get Ari's point of view and the way he speaks is very plain and doesn't at first seem to give a lot away, but in that he always seems to say exactly what he thinks. Instead of jumping around the topic of his brother and Dante he says how angry or confused he is. He doesn't seem to want to hide anything from himself or the reader, which I feel helped me get closer to his character. In comparison, Ash is told from third person and I felt very disconnected from Ash, even though you saw everything she did and was informed as to why she was doing some of the stupid things she did. That break from the first person narrative, at least in this genre of LGBT lit kind of took away from the connection to the character, which isn't good, since readers often look to these characters for an escape and to live inside another character for a while.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, I really haven't noticed many love triangles in my novels, except in Boy Meets Boy and Ash (two that I really haven't liked) and in both novels the love triangles seemed more problematic than they needed to be and took away from the story (or, at least it did in Ash). For the most part, love has been between just two characters, or one character and many others--but one at a time in the case of Cameron Post. In the LGBTQ genre I see this as an evolution for authors. Because currently LGBTQ rights have been followed by so many issues, I can see a lot of authors trying to write love stories so that they can encourage readers to fall for the characters and focus more on the greater picture of acceptance and persecution.
In my novels I've definitely noticed the trend of persecution (that was once again missing in Ash and Boy Meet Boy--why am I hating on these books so much? They weren't horrible... they just weren't good). Since persecution and a fight for identity is so large in contemporary society, it's definitely understandable why authors are choosing to put their characters in these situations. It's a way to send a message and tell the reader that they're not alone. Someone understands their plight. The interesting thing is that authors handle this issue in different ways. In Boy Meets Boy and Ash it was basically missing, in Dante and Aristotle the threat of it always loomed in Ari's mind but not in his immediate circles, In Cameron Post it was the huge classic issue that was very prominent in LGBTQ news during the 80's making this book an almost historical novel, and Ask the Passengers was the classic issue of persecution in family life and town life. But each author made a point of putting in acceptance at the end, and I'm guessing that was their way of saying "It'll all be okay. Things are going to suck for a while, but have faith" which may seem a little pandering, but for many readers this might be one of the few times they may see someone say that.