Perhaps no children’s book has been more subject to the corrosive influence of commerce than Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Its tangled publishing history features professional bullies more ruthless than Mr. McGregor (whose wife put Peter’s father in a pie) pursuing this hapless rabbit across time, committing acts of piracy, “copyfraud,” and criminally bad taste. Potter’s longtime publisher, Frederick Warne & Co., has joined their ranks, baking Peter into an unseemly sequel, The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit (about which more later).

The bunnysploitation seems especially glaring in light of Potter’s unique gifts as writer and illustrator. Born in London in 1866, Potter was an assiduous student of animal anatomy and behavior from childhood on. She and her younger brother Bertram furnished their nursery with exotic pets, wild and domestic, bringing home mice, lizards, bats, frogs, birds, and, of course, rabbits. The children became determined amateur naturalists, documenting their finds in sketchbooks, never squeamish about studying dead specimens. (Indeed, when their captives succumbed, sometimes to rather outré diets, the young Potters would boil the skeletons and draw them as well.)

Beatrix carried her affections into adulthood: Potter scholar Judy Taylor once compiled a list of the author’s named pets throughout her life, tallying eighty-nine. Among them was the rabbit Benjamin Bouncer, who perished after breaking a tooth on hard candy. But he and his successor, the beloved Peter, lived long lives, providing ample opportunities to study their attitudes and habits.

With this intimate familiarity, Beatrix Potter became one of the finest observers of rabbits since Dürer. And not just rabbits: clothed or not, the mice, pigs, red squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, cats, foxes, and owls of her books are all true to life, animated by a keen eye for muscular and skeletal structure as well as by the common postures and characteristic movements she captured. Animals in her tales do fantastical things — mice embroider buttonholes; newt Sir Isaac Newton, clad in a species-specific “black and gold waistcoat,” dines on “grasshopper with lady-bird sauce” — but they do them plausibly. They are charming and convincing in large part because they are rendered naturalistically. This can be seen in all of her tales but also in a pen-and-ink drawing, the meditative masterwork “The Rabbit’s Dream” (c. 1899). A sleeping rabbit conjures itself under a counterpane in bed, surrounded by portraits of itself in over a dozen different positions — stretched on its side, prone with legs kicked back, with feet tucked under the body, with ears erect, ears folded back, ears parted over the shoulders, etc. A virtuosic performance, it remains among the most moving of Potter’s works, a testament to imagination enriched by experience.

Potter first told the story of Peter Rabbit in 1893 in a picture-letter sent to the bedridden son of her former governess. Its simple line drawings introduce the principals — Peter and his siblings; his mother; and his nemesis, Mr. McGregor — while its tiny tale of temptation and trial in an English garden unfolds in simple perfection. Several years later, she borrowed the letter back, expanded it, and, after failing to interest publishers in producing a small, affordable book with a single color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations (she felt color throughout was too expensive), printed it herself; it was snapped up by friends and relations. She quickly secured a contract with publisher Frederick Warne, agreeing to redo the illustrations in color.

The book proved an immediate success on publication in October 1902, rapidly selling out a first printing of eight thousand copies. “The public must be fond of rabbits!” Potter wrote to the youngest Warne brother, Norman (to whom she would be briefly engaged, before his untimely death in 1905); “what an appalling quantity of Peter.” To her dismay, the firm failed to register copyright in the United States, leading to piracies and loss of revenue. Although she helped save the company in 1917, after embezzlement by another Warne brother nearly bankrupted it, she scolded them on quality, condemning a copy of Peter Rabbit’s Almanac for 1929 as “wretched.” She wrote sharply, “It is impossible to explain balance & style to people, if they don’t see it themselves.” While she enthusiastically crafted her own unique merchandise prototypes — including an extraordinarily soulful Peter Rabbit doll — she could have had no idea of the extent of commodification to come.

After Potter died in 1943 at the age of seventy-seven, Warne cast itself as the guardian of her legacy. But eventually the guardian began behaving badly, seeking to wring profits from its most famous long-eared property. In 1983, Warne was acquired by Penguin, itself owned by the international conglomerate Pearson, the largest book publisher in the world. Then, as scholar Margaret Mackey chronicles in The Case of Peter Rabbit: Changing Conditions of Literature for Children, Warne embarked on the expensive process of remaking printing plates for Potter’s books. While the new reproductions were a welcome improvement, Warne festooned them with what Mackey terms “aggressive” assertions of copyright, although Peter was already in the public domain. (In the UK, copyright protection lapsed but was then extended until 2013 when the European Union “harmonized” copyright law.) Warne seized on its “re-originated” illustrations to declare itself “owner of all rights, copyrights and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations,” going so far as to attach a “tm” to the scampering Peter on the cover. Back in 1979, the publisher had sued a competitor, claiming trademark rights to eight images from Potter’s books that, it argued, were identified in the public mind with Warne alone. The case was settled out of court, but Viva R. Moffat, a legal scholar who teaches at the University of Denver, has called Warne’s claims (in a paper on “Mutant Copyrights”) a “stretch.”

Warne has applied for trademarks here and in the EU for every imaginable Peter Rabbit–related item that might feasibly be sold, from “books and texts in all media” to “toilet seat covers” and “meat extracts.” Moffat assails the practice of forcing trademarks to pinch-hit for lapsed copyright, while another legal expert, Jason Mazzone (who teaches intellectual property law at Brooklyn Law School), defines the placement of misleading warnings on public domain works as “copyfraud” in his book by the same name.

Warne’s zealous pursuit of its rights has not deterred it from crass acts of its own. In 1987, the same year it published its painstakingly remade edition, the firm allowed Ladybird Books, a purveyor of cheap paperbacks owned by the parent company, Pearson, to market The Tale of Peter Rabbit with bowdlerized text, eliminating Potter’s dry wit, dispensing with the pie made of Peter’s father (Mrs. Rabbit instead explains that Mr. McGregor just “doesn’t like rabbits”), and replacing Potter’s illustrations with photos of stuffed animals. Warne was excoriated in The Times of London, which condemned the new edition as “Hamlet without the ghost, Othello without the handkerchief.” Undaunted, a few years later Warne took out an advertisement in The Bookseller — “Peter Rabbit™ Packs a Powerful Punch” — threatening those who wandered into its garden with “expensive legal action” (see below).

The text of Warne’s advertisement asserting its legal rights to Peter Rabbit.

Now the firm has set its hobnailed boot upon Peter again, muddying the same waters it sought to protect:  publishing The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, a large-format sequel written by actress-celebrity Emma Thompson and illustrated by Eleanor Taylor, whose previous books include Go-Go Gorillas. The idea did not originate with Thompson. According to her, Warne solicited the sequel, sending her two half-eaten radishes and a note purportedly written by the Rabbit Himself. The story finds Peter once again in Mr. McGregor’s lettuce patch (ground already covered in Potter’s own sequel, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny), climbing into a picnic basket, and being carried off to Scotland, where frenetic adventures involving a giant black rabbit named Finlay McBurney ensue. Smarmy in tone, the text relies heavily on italics and typographical tricks to engender interest. Its author clearly knows little about rabbits, suggesting that Finlay’s mother goes about with her ears “tied in a neat knot.” (One hopes an impressionable toddler will not do the same to a pet.) Saddled with a thankless task, artist Taylor produces soft-focus brushwork that seems timid and amateurish, lacking Potter’s precision and authority, her unerring color sense, and her humor. Taylor’s Mrs. McGregor is copied from Potter’s privately printed original and is more appropriation than homage, while poor Finlay’s chest juts above his kilt like a pouter pigeon’s. Missing are Potter’s beautifully detailed portraits of flora and fauna, from the water beetle in The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher to the Red Admiral butterfly in The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse. No one, it seems, has done more to dilute Potter’s work than her own publisher.

Other ersatz sequels have proliferated recently, as publishing houses cash in on classics, from The Wind in the Willows to Winnie-the-Pooh to A Little Princess to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Indeed, there will be sequels to The Further Tale: Thompson has signed up for two more. Ultimately, such derivative stuff can’t harm the originals, just as a bad production of Shakespeare can’t touch the play itself. But sequels, it seems to me, are particularly confusing to the youngest readers, who are just developing notions of authorship. As the editor of the Library of America’s edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, I’ve been asked by children where the recent sequels, written by an heir who never met Wilder, came from. From someplace hotter than the Dakotas, I think.

What sets The Further Tale apart is that it presents inferior work to an audience of very young children who have not yet developed the intellectual capacity to distinguish between original and unoriginal text and art. In her discussion of the multiplicity of Peters, scholar Mackey quotes Margaret Meek’s essay on the profound influence of early encounters: “Children’s literature is undeniably the first literary experience, where the reader’s experiences of what literature is are laid down. Books in childhood initiate children into literature; they inaugurate certain kinds of literary competencies.” The competency that The Further Tale inaugurates is that of copying. It tells children, It’s acceptable to be unoriginal. It’s acceptable to exploit the work of others. And it’s acceptable — even desirable — to make money from that exploitation. This is being done in an era when publishing has been beset with scandals involving plagiarism and other unethical practices, the perpetrators of which are often young. With the model set by today’s publishers, this is hardly surprising. Perhaps Warne could learn a lesson from the original Peter: gluttony always leads to tears.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Water in the Park: A Book About Water & 
the Times of the Day

For more on Water in the Park, read “Five questions for Emily Jenkins.”

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It was noticed — my imagination — and praised until I was nine or so, when my mother started rebuking me for having too much of it. Perhaps I’d provoked her, paradoxically, by wandering in my chatter too close to truths that needed to stay secret. Whatever her reason, this was a blow to me — an attack on my best protection, and my joy.

I could have given up right then and withered away, and might have if it hadn’t been for books. Whatever else my family’s faults, they read. My mother took me each week to the library, where I was encouraged to wander freely through the children’s room, choosing whatever pleased me. On one wall were picture books for little kids; on the other walls, the books with chapters — “real” books, to my mind, or what we now call middle grade books. I flew through those middle grade books, six or more a week, finding solace and hope.

Consider one of my favorite series, Mary Norton’s Borrower books, about people so tiny they could live under the floor, surviving on the gleanings of humans. Stacked matchboxes became a chest of drawers, a hatpin a weapon against threatening bugs, a potato enough food for weeks. What vast imaginations the Borrowers needed, to see a cutlery box as a possible boat, or a boot as a home. And even better — I understood this early on — what a vast imagination Mary Norton had needed to create the Borrowers. Or E. Nesbit the Psammead, Noel Streatfeild the Fossil sisters, C. S. Lewis the wardrobe, Norton Juster the tollbooth — the list was long and laden with riches.

My decision was made. Since splendid imaginings were too much for the real world, I threw in my lot with the authors and their creations, and stayed there until I grew up and no longer needed the shelter. By then, however, living without books had become impossible — the act of reading was as natural and essential to me as eating or sleeping. And so I read and read, and eventually I wrote a middle grade book of my own, but that is another story.

Not all children are treated as badly as I was, and for that we can be grateful. But all children have to work out the role of creativity, fantasy, and learning in their lives, often at the same age I was when books saved me — nine to twelve, the years for reading middle grade books. This is when children are moving toward an identity apart from their families but haven’t yet submerged themselves in peer groups. For these brief and wondrous years, they are individuals open to and ripe for the very best we can give them, including those books written just for them, books that invite them into the world outside their families, their schoolrooms, their own lives.

The list of middle grade books available these days is immeasurably longer and richer than when I was a child fifty years ago. Frank Cottrell Boyce, Christopher Paul Curtis, Kate DiCamillo, Polly Horvath, Grace Lin, Hilary McKay, Louis Sachar, Laura Amy Schlitz, Jerry Spinelli, Rebecca Stead, N. D. Wilson, Lisa Yee — these are only some of the authors writing superb books for middle graders. Into the midst of such treasure, however, creeps a troubling trend. The immense success of young adult books, written for teens and known to everyone as YA, has been overshadowing the quieter middle grade category and, in some cases, threatening to subsume it.

For example, a list of “The Greatest Girl Characters of Young Adult Literature,” published online by The Atlantic Wire in 2012, was made up almost entirely of middle grade stalwarts like Meg Murry, Harriet M. Welsch, Claudia Kincaid, and, even worse, those marvelous young girls our seven- and eight-year-olds read about: Ramona Quimby and Pippi Longstocking. I’m happy to say that a great outcry ensued, leading to a mea culpa from The Atlantic Wire, plus an excellent discussion of what exactly YA is (among other things, books written about and for teens, not children). Another example: a 2012 NPR online poll, “Best-Ever Teen Novels? Vote for Your Favorites,” got into a mess when it — correctly — rejected all the votes for middle grade books. Much complaining followed, which led to further explanations, which led to…more complaining. And still the mix-ups come, though not all are so public. Just ask any middle grade writer when was the last time he or she had to run the so-you-write-YA gauntlet. Then hold onto your hat.

Some of this confusion is understandable. Long before YA was dreamt of (most say sometime in the sixties), children’s books were written in which the characters grew from childhood into adolescence and even adulthood. To name a few: Little Women, the Anne of Green Gables series, the Betsy-Tacy series, and the Little House series. So should we now re-categorize them as YA? No. The children’s book world, if not the general public, is certain of that. Those books were written for children, are safe and appropriate for children, and would probably bore the socks off any teenager reading them for reasons other than a nostalgic return to her own childhood. Then there’s the more recent Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling’s behemoth, which brought on further category confusion by starting out in middle grade, then aging into YA as Harry himself aged into adolescence. On top of all that, not only is there the sad fact that middle grade is not as snappy and memorable a term as YA, it is also too often seen as a synonym for middle school, which is another thing altogether.

So is all this confusion really a problem? Does it matter? Not in terms of teens or adults reading children’s books, or even of children reading YA books (the less sexual and violent ones, that is). But in terms of maintaining the boundaries of the middle grade category — so that children know where to go for books that address their particular lives — it matters a great deal. Not just to the children who are, like I was, unprotected and floundering, desperately in need of an imagination-filled haven. No, it matters to all children. As Monica Edinger wrote in response to the NPR brouhaha (“Stop Calling Books for Kids ‘Young Adult,’” November 2012 on the Huffington Post), “Those adults who enjoy reading young adult books today like to reminisce about their favorite teen reads. But when they include children’s books among them and call them YA, they are marginalizing the true readership of these books. My fourth grade students are children. They are not young adults.” Exactly. And, besides, claiming Ramona for YA is like your older sister borrowing your favorite sweater to go out with her boyfriend while you have to stay home with the babysitter. It’s just not right.

Those of us who write middle grade books are a proud bunch, certain that our work is important, that we’re building lifelong readers, maybe even saving lives. And we’re absolutely certain that we’re not a part of YA. Please help us keep the boundaries high and childhood safe for children. They need it, and we owe it to them.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Not here. While I’m firmly in favor of the right of people of any age to read up, down, or sideways as they choose, here at the Horn Book we like to think there is a bright line between publishing for adults and publishing for kids, defined as people of an age between birth and high school graduation. In no small part, we like to think this because it makes our work easier. But, like Jeanne Birdsall, I believe the line has value, too.

I came into librarianship more than thirty years ago as a YA librarian. Young adult literature was an almost completely different animal then. The books were shorter, the protagonists younger; sex might be happening, but it was off the page. (Judy Blume’s Forever is the big exception, but Forever was published, nominally, as an adult book.) You might have seen some four-letter words, but you’d never find a fuck on the first pages as you do at the beginning of Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park, a YA novel that gets a starred review this month. Thirty years ago, YA books were labeled “12 and up,” and, as these things usually go, they were mostly being read by ten- to thirteen-year-olds. The first “14 and up” I can remember seeing was Margaret Mahy’s The Catalogue of the Universe, and now that age range is the rule.

Do you ever wonder if 14 and up, sometimes way up, should still be our job? Martha Parravano, the other day, was going through a book cart of new ARCs when she literally threw up her hands in submission to the lineup of fat, glossy YA novels. Their size, their number, their…perfectly respectable selves. I say “perfectly respectable” because the professionalism of these books is not in question, from jacket design on in to the catchy stories, fluid writing, and vivid characters (see Katrina Hedeen and Rachel L. Smith’s “What Makes a Good YA Love Story?” for a consideration of a baker’s dozen of excellent books showing just one slice of YA lit). But the fact that there is so much of it presents a question for everybody in the business of books for young people. Has contemporary YA lit outgrown our caretaking? And forget their staggering numbers: why are novels for people old enough to vote even our business? Bowker’s recent “Understanding the Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age” report revealed that it is adults, not teens, who buy most YA books, and those adults are buying them for their own reading pleasure. By and large, however, YA books are published by the children’s divisions of their publishers. Eleanor & Park is published by St. Martin’s Griffin, one of the very few cases I can think of where YA, labeled as such, comes from an adult trade division. I wonder if more of the grownups should be taking on their share.

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to Be a Teenager appeared first on The Horn Book.

Several years ago, I asked an author about the snappy dialogue in his nonfiction picture book about a poet. He said the words were a combination of excerpts from the poet’s autobiography and some things the author “rather assumed.” The book, he continued, got “whacked in a couple of reviews.”

It wasn’t because the book was badly written. It was because it contained fabricated dialogue but was presented as nonfiction. This was a classification malfunction.

Early drafts of my nonfiction picture book Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman did not contain dialogue. An editor I’d queried suggested I add some, but the word whacked had spooked me into feeling that any dialogue could nullify the nonfiction status. So I resisted.

Soon, however, I grew curious. I went back through the text and found instances where I could replace exposition with a punchy quotation from one of the published interviews from my source material. As luck would have it, these happened to occur fairly evenly throughout the manuscript.

That editor did not end up acquiring the book. And the one who did, Janet Schulman, felt that picture book biographies do not need dialogue. I told her I used to feel the same way, but now that I’d tried it, I liked the outcome. So Janet obliged me, and the dialogue stayed.

Avoiding the trap of making up quotations is not the only nonfiction dialogue danger. While doing market research for Boys of Steel, I came across reviews dinging eight nonfiction picture books for lack of attribution in the back matter. (This was in terms of both quotations and facts in general.)

Still seeing whacked warning signs, I asked Janet if the acknowledgments in the book could include the following: “All dialogue is excerpted from interviews with Jerry and Joe” (referring to writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman). At first, she didn’t think it was necessary. To try to validate my request, I referenced the eight tsk-tsk reviews I’d found and the poet-profiler’s unpleasant experience in the dialogue trenches. Janet kindly obliged me again.

Though I’d lobbied to insert that disclaimer, even I was surprised when it was singled out in the very first review (Booklist): “A bibliography and assurances that ‘all dialogue [was] excerpted from interviews’ puts factual muscle on the narrative.” Janet graciously joked that I should now blog about how something my editor initially dismissed became a focal point of the first review. (So I did.)

Avoiding made-up dialogue and citing sources are straightforward obligations. A trickier prospect is addressing the authenticity of dialogue not in and of itself but rather with respect to context.

Technically, no nonfiction book is pure nonfiction. Even if every word of every quotation can be corroborated, the bugaboo is the placement of those quotations.

In other words, while a quotation may be “real,” it may not necessarily have been spoken at the chronological moment it appears in the book’s narrative. That makes many lines of dialogue at once true and false. Let’s call them nonfictionesque.

I ran into some nonfictionesque problems in Boys of Steel. Consider this passage about Jerry:

“He had crushes on girls who didn’t know — or didn’t care — that he existed. ‘Some of them look like they hope I don’t exist,’ Jerry thought.”

This is how the statements appeared in the source, a published interview with Jerry:

“I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn’t know I existed or didn’t care I existed. As a matter of fact, some of them looked like they hoped I didn’t exist.”

(Side note: How could a writer read that and not put it in his book?)

I had to change the tense of the original lines, and I tightened them, too. However, that did not change the meaning; while it took a few nonessential words out of Jerry’s mouth, it did not put words in.

Writers of nonfiction must often make such judgment calls. History is heavy with what people did but comparatively scant on precisely what people said. Therefore, when writers do find a lively statement in a primary source, to my mind readers benefit by allowing the writer a pinch of leeway in how he incorporates it. So long as it’s cited, far better to tweak a tense than dispose of a gem altogether for fear of the fury of the fact checker. This further informs a definition of nonfictionesque.

But what of the context? Yes, Jerry did say the quotation above, but it was in an interview decades after the fact, not in the 1930s, which is when I positioned it in my narrative. That is one reason why I used the word thought instead of said. It was my inexact way of accounting for the time discrepancy. What’s more, to quote Jerry in such a case, I must trust Jerry’s recollection — but our memories are notoriously unreliable. What we say can melt from memory faster than an ice cube left in the midday sun.

So, strictly speaking, my lines count as nonfiction only if you accept my functional and stylistic tweaks…and if you tolerate the shift in the timeline…and if you trust that Jerry’s recollection is consistent with how he truly felt all those years earlier.

We weren’t there when Babe Ruth kept hitting or Rosa Parks kept sitting or Betsy Ross allegedly got to sewing. And sometimes the star of a particular true story did not record his or her take for posterity. In cases like that, we must turn to those who were closest to the action, if possible. History is written not only by the winners but also by the witnesses — people who were not famous and who probably never dreamed they’d be quoted in the future. (If only more of them had kept journals — and more of the journals that were kept had survived.)

While any given action can be described in any number of equally passable ways, there’s only one way to accurately transcribe someone’s spoken words. Best-case scenario: it’s done immediately after the words were spoken. And even then it may be a word or two off, even if the speaker himself is the one transcribing — and even if it’s recorded electronically. Did Neil Armstrong say “one small step for man” or “one small step for a man”? Millions were listening, yet the debate has raged for nearly five decades.

When writing nonfiction, my goal is to let my subjects speak for themselves to whatever extent possible and to source every statement — practically every sigh — mercilessly. Pure nonfiction may be unattainable, but writers owe it to readers to come as close as possible.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Eleanor & Park

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Sometimes what makes a love story great is simple and classic, and the plot is exactly what you’d expect. That’s the case in The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, Jennifer E. Smith’s novel about falling in love with a stranger. On her way to London for her dad’s wedding, Hadley meets Oliver, who’s seated next to her on the plane. By the time they touch down at Heathrow, she’s fallen for him, and in possibly the most romantic moment in the least romantic setting ever, they share a passionate kiss at customs. Then Hadley loses Oliver in the crowd, and, without a phone number or e-mail address, she has no way to contact him: “After all those hours, all those moments between them, how could that just be it?” Of course, it isn’t: over the next few hours, at a wedding and a funeral (both emotionally charged), Hadley and Oliver continue to run into each other. Each time, they don’t know if they will see each other again, so their meetings are honest, raw, and immediate — making the happy ending feel both certain and deserved.

But a love story isn’t always so serious. The first time Chelsea meets Dan in Leila Sales’s Past Perfect, she’s a prisoner tied to a chair. Every year, Chelsea works as a colonial interpreter, and every year she and her fellow colonial interpreters wage war against the Civil War re-enactors across the street. As part of the War, the Civil Warriors have kidnapped Chelsea, and Dan has been assigned to guard her. Their first conversation consists of the kind of awesomely sarcastic banter you wish you were capable of in high school. Romance is inevitable once they’ve discussed, for example, soaking uniforms in urine. (Chelsea, in disbelief: “There is a garment which you wear on your body, after first bathing it in bodily fluids.” Dan: “Just the buttons! To give them an authentic patina.” Chelsea: “What the hell is an ‘authentic patina’? Is that a thing?”) Their forbidden, secret romance continues in similarly hilarious fashion, serving as a light counterpart to the novel’s more contemplative reflections on the nature of history and heartbreak.

A discussion of YA love stories wouldn’t be complete without one by Sarah Dessen; her fans know she can deliver a realistic and affecting love story. And though the romance isn’t the central theme in What Happened to Goodbye, it’s an appealing accompaniment. After her parents’ divorce, Mclean chooses to travel around the country with her dad, a consultant in the restaurant business, and reinvents herself each time — Lizbet, the theater geek; Beth, the student-council secretary; Eliza, the cheerleader. But when at the latest stop she meets Dave, the boy next door, she tells him her real name, which leads to everyone in town calling her by it. And from then on, there’s no hiding who she really is. What it takes for Mclean to be herself is having someone in her life who wants her to stay.

It’s important to point out that though love stories with gay couples aren’t exactly crowding the shelves, there are stellar examples out there. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is the story of Ari Mendoza’s confused search for meaning set alongside (and intertwined with) his special friendship with Dante Quintana. The two lonely Mexican American teenagers meet one summer and become inseparable almost immediately; their bond is cemented when Ari saves Dante’s life. Dante eventually comes out as gay — and attracted to Ari — but the reader has already begun to see that these two boys love each other as more than friends. We’re somewhat privy to the truths, “secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart,” that Ari is searching for, and this omniscience heightens our joy when he finally admits to loving Dante back. Theirs is the most coveted kind of love — respectful, loyal, reciprocal, organic — and Benjamin Alire Sáenz develops their relationship with deft subtlety.

Ask the Passengers is as much about the purpose of love and compassion as it is about a relationship. Astrid Jones mentally sends the love inside her to those she has difficulty loving (like her insensitive mother) and also to strangers, specifically passengers on airplanes flying overhead (whose love lives we’re sporadically given snippets of). Even when it’s unreciprocated, Astrid’s ability to love others is remarkable, but she’s tortured by sexual confusion and a lack of love for herself. As with Ari and Dante, readers rejoice when she’s finally able to love her girlfriend Dee openly and receive love in return (“We are a happy couple who are madly in love, and we are kissing the way people kiss on their wedding day. With joy and relief and love…Without shame”). 
A. S. King skillfully and without preaching teaches the reader about love’s true nature: its healing and empowering properties, and the many shapes it can take.

June and Wes’s romance in Pete Hautman’s The Big Crunch starts when they bump into each other, literally: it’s such a hard hit that June gets a black eye. Not an auspicious start, to be sure, but these two have a tough time denying they have a connection. June’s family moves a lot, so when her parents announce they’re leaving Minnesota, she cuts Wes loose and that’s the end — or is it? The straightforward writing style and the fact that these two people are not particularly swoony or romantic builds to an ending that simultaneously recognizes the power of first love and the possibility that it might not last. As June says to Wes, “You will always be the first boy I ever loved…Even if someday we hate each other, I will always love you.”

Like many contemporary YA love stories, The Big Crunch is fairly chaste, but other books are bolder. They address sex as an expression of love, without apology or didacticism. In these stories, sex is often a momentous decision, as it’s usually the first time for one or both of the protagonists, and they discuss it and prepare for it in a mature (but still authentically awkward) way. A good example is My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick, in which Samantha falls for Jase, the completely charming, handsome boy next door, and they decide to be each other’s first time. And it’s uncomfortable, sweet, and most of all, real. The novel doesn’t describe the experience in cringe-inducing detail, but neither does it discreetly look away after just a few sentences. Instead, it acknowledges the wonder, tenderness, and importance of the moment. As Samantha thinks when she and Jase first lie down naked together: “When people talk about sex, it sounds so technical…or scarily out of control. Nothing like this sense of rightness, of being made to fit together.” And then: “I say, the girl who has always guarded her heart — I say, for the first time, ‘I love you. It’s okay.’”

An unfortunate part of life is that not all great love stories are blissful or uplifting. Luckily, there are books that reflect that reality — and are more romantic for it. One example is Jandy Nelson’s perceptive, smart The Sky Is Everywhere, a tremendously poignant novel about love triumphing over loss. Lennie’s older sister, whom she idolized, has just died, and Lennie feels incapable of ever feeling joy again. Enter Joe Fontaine, a new boy in school who will “only ever know this new sisterless me.” Joe’s optimistic outlook is infectious (and his crazy good looks don’t hurt, either), and Lennie feels swept away by him, unencumbered by grief. But Lennie’s also drawn to her sister’s boyfriend, Toby, who shares Lennie’s grief. The intensity of this love triangle is accentuated, set as it is against a backdrop of deep, inexplicable loss.

Known for his excellent love stories from a guy’s perspective (An Abundance of Katherines, Looking for Alaska), John Green switches sexes to spectacular effect in The Fault in Our Stars, a consummate tragic love story told from the point of view of Hazel. Hazel and Augustus have the ideal romance — except for the single sad element of circumstance and the unfairness of the universe. They both have cancer, and they’re both going to die sooner rather than later, but that’s not what makes their love so poignant. Their lives may be ending, but their connection is life-affirming. They are artfully vivid characters: smart, sarcastic, eccentric, and self-assured enough that they’re able to love maturely and completely. This may be more the case with these two than other teens due to their terminal illnesses, but they don’t love each other as patients or fellow cancer warriors. Instead, Augustus separates his love for Hazel from his understanding that he’ll soon die. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things…I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable…and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.” Augustus’s astuteness doesn’t undercut his feelings. It just makes us cry harder.

Hazel and Augustus’s romance is doomed because of circumstance; in Stay with Me, Céce and Mack’s love is doomed due entirely to human fault — but it’s equally devastating. Céce, a gifted student from a loving family, and Mack, a high school dropout with an abusive father, fall fast for each other. They enjoy a mere forty days together before volatile Mack snaps and makes a mistake that changes his fate, and their relationship’s, irrevocably. Alternating narration allows the reader to see both perspectives on their love, their painful separation, and the blowback from the incident. Mack is the rare protagonist who is almost as endearing for his imperfections as he is for his positive traits. To illustrate this, author Paul Griffin incorporates troubled, sensitive Mack’s talent for rehabilitating abused pit bulls: the wounded creatures can be dangerous when provoked, but when shown kindness and love, their capacity to return love is staggering. Mack’s love for Céce proves the goodness of his soul and the immateriality of his actions on it; that he is so flawed makes Céce’s love for him all the more affecting and their separation all the more heartbreaking.

When discussing tragic love stories, there’s none more classic than Shakespeare’s. The Romeo and Juliet–esque tale has been told many, many times before, but Jenny Downham delivers a superb version of star-crossed lovers from warring families in You Against Me. Mikey’s sister is accusing Ellie’s brother of rape, and even after Ellie discovers Mikey’s true identity as the brother of the girl tearing her family apart, they begin an intense clandestine relationship. Their feelings mount to an intoxicating point, made even more so by the complexity of their situation. But the draw here isn’t the prohibited romance alone: Downham’s accomplishment is that she makes the reader step back from the conflict and invest instead in Mikey and Ellie’s united experience in dealing with its effects; despite their opposing familial loyalties she positions them as comrades, so their forbidden love never feels salacious.

An even darker breed of sad love story is the kind in which love just isn’t enough. Recovery Road is a story of first love, but it’s more a story about healing, growing, and loving oneself. Maddie and Stewart meet in the fragile environment of rehab, and their relationship starts out rapidly and lustfully, turning obsessive and dependent. Author Blake Nelson has their flame cool down naturally and shifts the focus of his novel to Maddie’s burgeoning self-reliance and emotional wisdom. Near book’s end, they have a heartbreaking run-in after Stewart has fallen back into addiction, and Maddie realizes that there’s nothing she can do to save him. Nelson uses his characters’ relationship to exemplify that love alone is never enough to save a person from himself, but also reminds us of love’s influence on who we become, even after moving on: “You don’t see those moments coming, you don’t know it when they’re happening, but later…you realize how important they were. You understand who really changed you, who made you what you are.”

Possibly the most important thing to remember about young love is that it doesn’t always last. There are great romances, but there are also great breakups, and Why We Broke Up is in the latter category. Min recounts her whirlwind relationship with Ed by rehashing tiny moments of their love via a box of memorabilia — a protractor, an empty book of matches, a condom wrapper — that she’s returning to him on his doorstep (with a denunciative “thunk”). Min’s perspective on exactly what went wrong is brilliant: we immediately, but increasingly with every chapter, understand why they broke up, and also why the relationship developed and unfolded the way it did. Most important to the success of a breakup story is not only our understanding of the disintegration but also of the love (however flawed) that came first. And of course, in author Daniel Handler’s case, that we’re convinced of the rightness of Min and Ed’s breakup helps, too.

Though these books are very different, they all take place in the world as we know it with characters that could be any of us. As in the real world, love can take on many shapes. A good romance can be ordinary or extraordinary, uplifting or heartbreaking, sexy or innocent, comfortably formulaic or unusual. But it should always be relatable: readers need to recognize their own romances (or tragedies) and find their experiences validated. In presenting these familiar situations, a good love story manages to broach unfamiliar territory and allows readers to view love anew.

Good YA Love Stories

What Happened to Goodbye (Viking, 2011) by Sarah Dessen

You Against Me (Fickling/Random, 2011) by Jenny Downham

My Life Next Door (Dial, 2012) by Huntley Fitzpatrick

The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton, 2012) by John Green

Stay with Me (Dial, 2011) by Paul Griffin

Why We Broke Up (Little, Brown, 2011) by Daniel Handler, illustrated by Maira Kalman

The Big Crunch (Scholastic, 2011) by Pete Hautman

Ask the Passengers (Little, Brown, 2012) by A. S. King

Recovery Road (Scholastic, 2011) by Blake Nelson

The Sky Is Everywhere (Dial, 2010) by Jandy Nelson

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Simon, 2012) by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Past Perfect (Simon Pulse, 2011) by Leila Sales

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight (Poppy/Little, Brown, 2012) by Jennifer E. Smith

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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