Top 12 Literary Valentines (Or, Swoon-Worthy Girls in YA)

I missed a Twitter thread earlier today about literary valentines, so I thought I would make up for it here by listing my top 12 YA literary valentines.

(Obviously, my valentines are really the adult versions of these characters; I am not a perv. Though it’s worth noting that I did try to find some literary valentines among my adult books, but I had a lot more trouble there and quickly gave up the effort. The characters from adult books I was considering for this honor are all deeply flawed, which is good for character complexity, but not so good for picking valentines. The YA characters listed here are flawed too, but with them I can always tell myself their flaws will be overcome with maturity, and thus swoon after them contentedly.)

So, my top 12 (I was aiming for 10, but this was as far as I could narrow it down):

1. Hermione. (Obviously. Hermione should be everyone’s #1 literary valentine.)
2. Lyra from the His Dark Materials trilogy. (OK, yeah, Lyra is really young, but wise so far beyond her years, man.)
3. Jessica from Twilight. (Movie version only, obviously.)
4. Charlie from How to Ditch Your Fairy. (Though the constant basketball-and-cricket talk would get dull.)
5. Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. (Though I think she’d be too much drama for me, at any age.)
6. Sophie from The Explosionist. (She’s too smart for me, though. It would be awkward.)
7. Laura from Down to the Bone. (Though the adult version of Laura would be so far out of my league it’s embarrassing.)
8. Lindsey from An Abundance of Katherines. (I might even be willing to hang out in a dark creepy cave if it meant there was a chance of getting to kiss Lindsey.)
9. Sage from Almost Perfect. (I think partly because she taps into that save-the-awesome-yet-wounded-girl instinct we all have deep down.)
10. Amy from Little Women. (This is cheating a bit as the grownup version of Amy as presented in the book was actually not that interesting, but the teen version rocked, and in the 20^th century teen-Amy would’ve grown into a fabulous adult.)
11. Skye from Girl Walking Backwards. (Again with the saving-the-awesome-yet-wounded-girl thing.)
12. Diana from The Luxe. (Though I think she’d find me really boring.)

Common themes among my valentines: Smart girls. Perky girls. Girls who like to boss people around. Girls who are oppressed in some way and hence spend a lot of their time Overcoming Adversity.

So, not unlike the girls I tend to write about myself, then.

Interesting.

Review of 1950s YA Classic ‘The Cheerleader’ (Forerunner to ‘Forever’)

I cannot possibly say enough good things about The Cheerleader, by Ruth Doan MacDougall.

It’s a book I’d never heard of until a couple of days ago, when I was clicking around on Amazon looking for teen books from the 1950s. I almost passed it over, since this book was set in the 50s but published in 1973. I’m so, so glad I ordered it after all.

This will be a non-spoilery review, because I highly recommend that everyone, especially readers and writers of YA, read The Cheerleader for themselves, and the book is full of surprises.

So much of today’s YA, especially contemporary realistic YA, is trying to do what Ms. MacDougall does so astonishingly well here. I bought the book for the social history, since I’m writing a YA set in the 50s, but I feel like what I really got was a writing tutorial.

The Cheerleader wasn’t published as YA either in 1973 original release or in its 1998 rerelease, and although I suspect the frank sex scenes are the main reason for that, it does also violate one of today’s cardinal rules of YA: Although it’s told from the perspective of teenager characters, the tone is ever-so-slightly that of an older person looking back on her youth. For example:

“Well,” Snowy said, and she and Puddles strolled casually over to the bleachers, but they didn’t sit down because this would make them seem too obviously waiting for somebody to ask them to dance. They stood half-turned from the dance floor, as if they didn’t care, as if they were on the brink of dashing off to something far more exciting. There was, however, nothing in their world more exciting than this.

Nevertheless the book was clearly (and I’m basing this on the Amazon reviews) read by a lot of teenagers when it first came out. The Cheerleader predated Forever by two years, probably encountered less opposition than Forever since it wasn’t published as YA, and is, I suspect, how quite a lot of girls in the 70s secretly learned about sex.

(Btw ― yes, the protagonist of the book is nicknamed Snowy, and another main character is nicknamed Puddles, and both of these are treated as perfectly normal names by everyone around them. Ah, the 50s.)

Review of the Lesbian Pulp Classic ‘Spring Fire’

I’ve been doing a lot of reading from the 1950s as I work on my 1950s-set YA novel, and this week I dug into the 1952 classic Spring Fire. It was freaking awesome, probably because its author is Vin Packer, otherwise known as Marijane Meaker, otherwise known as prolific YA writer M.E. Kerr. (I’m embarrassed to admit that, though by all accounts her YA books are excellent, and I do have Deliver Us From Evie on my TBR shelf, Spring Fire is actually the first book of Ms. Kerr’s that I’ve read.)

Spring Fire was one of the first and most influential lesbian pulp novels, a genre that lasted until the mid-60s, paperbacks sold at bus stations and drugstores and the like that were printed on paper so cheap it wasn’t designed to last more than a year. Spring Fire sold 1.5 million copies. (For comparison, the first print run of Mockingjay was only 1.2 million.) It was rereleased in 2004 and is now available for a $1 Kindle download (though it’s not great quality ― you have to overlook a lot of typos, and mine kept randomly switching into italics, but hey, it was just $1). It’s very worth checking out ― besides being a good story, it’s fascinating for the social history (for example, I learned that being in a sorority in 1952 sucked, apparently).

Its protagonist is 17, which makes it a YA novel as far as I’m concerned. And as scandalous as it’s supposed to have been, there’s actually no more onscreen sex in Spring Fire than in most “edgy” contemporary YA. The sex scenes are no raunchier than they are in, say, The DUFF or Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

But because censorship was a very real problem when you were writing a book about lesbians in 1952, regardless of the level of sexual content, Spring Fire had to have a tragic ending ― there was no way these two women could ride off happily into the sunset together. But I don’t want to say too much yet, so first, be warned that this post will contain spoilers for the entire story.