Cindy:
Cinder (Feiwel, 2012), the first book in Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series. This futuristic Cinderella story is a mix of fairy tale, sci-fi, and romance — perfect for a wide female readership and certain to spark discussion and anticipation of future installments. Watch your back, Hunger Games, this series could be the next big thing. My second choice for mothers and daughters to read together would be Kekla Magoon’s 37 Things I Love (in no particular order) (Holt, 2012) for its honest first-person portrayal of a teenage girl’s coming of age as she deals with death, hope, love, and friendship.

Elissa:
Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart by Candace Fleming (Random/Schwartz and Wade, 2011). It’s suspenseful, informative, and accessible; readers will come away with a fresh view of the feisty, pioneering woman and the events leading up to — and following — her disappearance.

Kitty:
Libba Bray’s hilarious and sharply observant Beauty Queens (Scholastic, 2011). A planeload of beauty pageant contestants crashes on what looks like a deserted island. The scope of the plot is mind-boggling — the girls are ultimately pawns in a massive global conspiracy — but the quieter message about the power unleashed when teen girls think society isn’t watching will resonate across generations. Bray’s narration of the audiobook edition is a tour-de-force performance.

Katrina:
The mature topics in Girl in the Mirror (Persea, 2013) by Meg Kearney will appeal to older teens (and give mothers a jumping-off point for discussion), but it’s as much about mother-daughter bonds and connection to family — both adopted and birth in this case. Ideal for girls with adopted, single-parent, or other unconventional family backgrounds. Its verse narrative will likely be a new and exciting format for teens and moms to explore together.

Katie:
The women in Wren’s family manifest magical powers when they reach puberty. Wren uses hers to bring her boyfriend Danny back from the dead, but then meets (living) Gabriel, who’s drawn to her gift. Although romance takes center stage in Amy Garvey’s Cold Kiss (HarperTeen, 2011), Garvey weaves female familial relationships as intricately as Wren creates her spell. The complex dynamics between three generations of magical women (think a YA Practical Magic) add depth — and plenty for teen girls and their moms to discuss.

Martha:
How about A. S. King’s Ask the Passengers (Little, Brown, 2012)? Protagonist Astrid is taking a class in the Socratic method at her close-minded, small-town high school, and so she spends the year “asking questions and not rushing to answer them” — an illuminating time for her, and an ideal springboard for book discussion. Is she gay? Or just in love with one particular girl? Once she determines her identity, should she hide it, like her best friend? Astrid makes some pretty crucial choices in the book, and readers will be right there to see why, and how; through the interspersed airplane interludes (Astrid spends a lot of time looking up at the sky and sending questions and love to the passengers on airplanes) readers get glimpses into other lives, just as full of struggle and conflict and not-easy answers as Astrid’s life is. Finally, seeing as this is a mother/teen daughter read-together, Astrid’s relationship with her (nightmare of a) mother would certainly provoke discussion…

Roger:
I think Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity (Hyperion, 2012) would be an excellent choice; it’s the kind of YA book that makes a great adult crossover. While the story — a WWII thriller about two young women — is plenty exciting on its own, the narrative structure is tricky and would be fun to talk about.

Shara:
Pearl (called Bean) and her best friend Henry are comfortable with their respective familial dysfunctional in Pearl (Holt, 2011) by Jo Knowles, but the revelation of long-kept family secrets exposes the corrosive effect that silence can have on relationships. Homosexuality, friendship, and romance are just a few of the topics tackled by this dramatic novel.

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Ask the Passengers

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With Delirium Stories: Hana, Annabel, & Raven (HarperCollins, March 2013), it seems Lauren Oliver anticipated this reader response. Published simultaneously with Requiem, the third book in the Delirium series, Delirium Stories revisits the world of Delirium with a focus on the internal experience of three secondary characters: Hana, Annabel, and Raven.

All three have stories inextricably linked to Lena’s, allowing the reader additional insight into some of the situations in Delirium and Pandemonium while also adding more flesh to the world. Hana, Lena’s best friend from Portland, tells of her seventeenth summer and her flirtation with danger, boys, and amor deliria nervosa — that most dangerous of all diseases, love. The story of Annabel, Lena’s mother, jumps between her youth and the early days of the cure and her present moment, imprisoned in Portland’s Ward Six. And Raven, the tale of the leader of the uncureds Lena finds in the Wilds, explains her beginnings and tells a part of Lena’s story from a very different point of view.

The three voices are much the same — first person, feminine, introspective, and emotional — but their accounts are interesting and they allow the reader to revel in the world of Delirium for a little while longer. This book is lovely but best enjoyed as a companion to the series. An excerpt from Requiem, a list of romantic literature banned in the world of Delirium, and a personality quiz are appended.

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This book is endearing, humorous, believable, sexy, and heart-wrenching, and it embodies nearly all of the qualities we looked for: the characters are crisply realized and wonderfully quirky; their repartee is smart, genuine, and entertaining; their experiences and predicaments are relatable; the vividly alive setting helps us connect with the story; their love for each other develops at an expertly natural pace; and we as readers learn as much about love as Eleanor and Park do.

Ms. Rowell, thank you for underscoring everything Rachel and I learned about what makes a love story great.

Readers, let us know if you feel the same.

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Eleanor & Park

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Queer young adult novels don’t have to be coming-out stories, but coming out is a common theme in many of these books, fitting well with the still-in-progress audience and the relative newness of the genre. But what makes such a book more than just an issue novel? What gives it that special combination of universality and particularity that allows it to reach a wide audience while at the same time speaking to individual readers on a deeply personal level? What makes a coming-out novel good?

A good coming-out novel is about more than just coming out. The best ones weave their coming-out stories into larger dramatic narratives. Brent Hartinger’s Geography Club, Alex Sanchez’s Rainbow trilogy, and Lili Wilkinson’s Stonewall Honor Book Pink all build their plots around the complicated social politics and interpersonal dynamics of high school, with coming out just one thread of potential conflict among many. In Madeleine George’s The Difference Between You and Me, the breaking points in a closeted lesbian relationship revolve around prom: Emily is trying to make her name in student government by getting corporate sponsorship for it, while Jesse is crusading against that same company’s bid to move into town. Hannah Moskowitz’s Gone, Gone, Gone and Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You both draw on the painful post–9/11 urban landscape to externalize their protagonists’ acute sense of being unmoored and under threat. In A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend by Emily Horner, the main character realizes she’s a lesbian over the course of the transformative cross-country bike trip that is her way of dealing with her best friend’s death. In this book (as in all of these titles), the protagonist’s process of coming to terms with her identity, sharing it with her friends and family, and embarking on her first relationship is integral to the book, but it is not all of the book; her life’s borders aren’t defined by this one aspect of her identity.

Coming-out stories don’t unfold in a vacuum, and nor do teens’ own lives. The best books integrate queer teens’ coming-of-age stories into the rich and varied spectrum of human experience.

A corollary of this rule is that a good coming-out novel knows its characters are more than their sexual or gender identity. Queer kids are more than just their designated letter of the alphabet, and their stories—coming out and otherwise—should reflect that. As the protagonist of Cris Beam’s I Am J puts it: “Being trans wasn’t special, and yet it was. It was just good and bad and interesting and…very human, like anything else.” The plot of I Am J hinges on coming-out issues, but J himself struggles with issues of class and race as well as gender, and his fraught family dynamics and longing for a relationship help to flesh out his character. Perry Moore’s Hero, a Watchmen-esque superhero satire, creates neat narrative parallels between its protagonist’s superpowers and his gayness. The eponymous hero must alternately hide and embrace both, and his coming-out story is riddled with superhero team training, epic battles, and secret identities.

Speaking of secret identities, identity in these novels isn’t simple. Take A. S. 
King’s Ask the Passengers, whose introverted protagonist is reluctant to label herself before she’s had the chance to sort through her identity in private. When pressed by her parents to commit, one way or another, to an identity they understand, she argues back that “it’s just not as simple as you’re making it…I don’t think every gay person can be clearly defined and kept in a nifty little box.” Wilkinson’s Pink plays with the idea that for some teens, identity is still in the process of triangulation. Protagonist Ava has a long-term girlfriend and supportive parents and has identified as a lesbian for years, but when she changes schools she uses her newfound anonymity to dress more girly than goth and explore the possibility that she might be bi. The Difference Between You and Me rotates narrative duties among the three very different, but equally compelling, teen girls that make up its central love triangle. They are all queer, but none of them are alike. Similarly using a diverse cast of queer characters, David Levithan’s semi-utopian Boy Meets Boy and Sanchez’s soapy Rainbow trilogy affirm that there is a whole rainbow of ways to be gay.

And because there is no one right way to be (or write) gay, a good coming-out novel isn’t prescriptive; it recognizes that there are infinite paths toward coming out, even if they all share some basic similarities. Almost all of the books named here use diverse ensemble casts to assemble a collective narrative about coming out that contains multitudes. Boy Meets Boy may celebrate the easy outness of main character Paul, but it also throws into stark, sympathetic relief the pain felt by his best friend Tony and ex-boyfriend Kyle, whose coming-out paths are much more fraught with danger and doubt. The Difference Between You and Me urges readers to admire Jesse’s determination to be true to herself, but it also paints a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of closeted, perpetually on-edge Emily, who could have easily been a one-note villain.

These ensemble casts are also notable because a good coming-out novel celebrates the importance of friendship and belonging. Coming out is about community as much as romance. The best books capture the exhilaration and relief of finding a place in the world where you can be all of yourself. Geography Club is one of the earliest and most enduring examples of this rule, with its plot hinging on the formation of a secret school club (its members assume no one else will look into something that purports to be about geography) where queer students meet and share their experiences. Main character Russel explains the importance of this safe space: “There’s a difference between being alone and being lonely; I may not have been completely alone in life, but I was definitely lonely. My secret mission—four years in an American high school—had been an involuntary one, and now I desperately wanted to be somewhere where I could be honest about who I was and what I wanted.” Even though the romance between Russel and closeted, popular Kevin ultimately proves untenable, the book ends on a hopeful, happy note because Russel has found a group of friends who know and accept him, and in turn he’s gained the courage to take a stand on things like reaching out to the school’s more obvious outsiders.

Laura Goode’s recent Sister Mischief takes a similar approach, building plot around the formation of a hip-hop GSA in a small Midwestern town. In this book, queerness is just one kind of difference that unites outsiders of all stripes in a town that values conformity. And King’s Ask the Passengers includes a joyful scene of Astrid patronizing a gay club for the first time, in which an older woman

smiles at me. It’s not a creepy smile or a flirtatious smile. I can’t describe it. It’s like a supportive smile. Friendly and happy for me…I smile, and the biker lady smiles back and blows her whistle and then starts a victory lap around the bar.

All the people at the bar put out their hands for high fives…and some duck down and kiss her. It occurs to me, as I stand on the edge of the dance floor out of breath, that people here are nice to each other.

That said, if there is a romance, it should be electric. One reason that Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind is still read today, despite its dated social landscape and unfashionably earnest tone, is the timeless luminosity of its love story. If a story hinges on a romance, then it had better make readers believe in the power of that relationship. A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend draws on a classic rom-com setup when it makes Cass’s love interest a former nemesis with whom she must now work, delivering sparkling banter and a snappily romantic love-hate relationship. Moskowitz’s Gone, Gone, Gone and Moore’s Hero both feature budding relationships that are breathless and exhilarating, with a tense romanticism that even Twilight fans should be able to appreciate.

A good coming-out novel can be a window or a mirror. According to Rudine Sims Bishop,

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange…When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

Coming-out novels have an important role as cultural educators, allowing some readers to walk in the shoes of those unlike them and develop empathy and understanding. However, these books’ role as mirrors is equally important; they may offer affirmation, guidance, and hope for young readers who are challenged to find those things outside the world of words.

The best books have something to give any reader, queer, straight, or questioning; they celebrate and sympathize with the experiences of the readers their protagonists reflect, but their narrative power isn’t based on insider knowledge. Beam’s I Am J is a great example of this quality: Beam conveys eye-opening information about the challenges and cruelties J faces as he navigates daily life that provides an accessible, engaging education in trans issues for readers learning about them for the first time. At the same time, the level of detail and emotional intensity contained in the book make it more than just a learning experience; it’s a story, one that reflects this one aspect of their lives in a way that other books do not.

Finally, a good coming-out novel is, first and last, a good book. It’s not enough for a book to offer a respectful and realistic representation of queer life, or be the first to show a particular kind of character. Those things are important, but they should be a baseline, not markers of rare quality. Like any other story, a good coming-out novel needs some combination of beautiful writing, propulsive pacing, engaging plot, fully developed characters, vivid setting, compelling theme, and emotional depth. Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You features delicate, beautifully nuanced writing and an understated but devastating portrait of one disaffected teen’s pain and striving. Shyam Selvadurai’s Swimming in the Monsoon Sea powerfully evokes a 1980s Sri Lankan setting and uses the protagonist’s involvement in a production of Othello to draw readers’ attention to the Shakespearean scale of the drama.

And let’s not forget genre fiction. It’s hardly fair to hand over a few fraught, issue-driven books to readers looking for queer characters and leave the Nancy Drews and Harry Potters and, yes, even the Gossip Girls and Twilights of the literary world to the domain of straight characters. It’s still difficult to find gay or lesbian protagonists (and near impossible to find bisexual or transgender characters) starring in anything that’s not realistic fiction. Romance and soapy drama are decently represented in the canon of coming-out stories, but mystery/suspense, historical fiction, fantasy, and sci-fi can be more challenging to find. When mysteries or thrillers feature queer characters, they often appear as victims or villains (as in Kevin Brooks’s Black Rabbit Summer and Lauren Myracle’s Shine). Historical fiction has made some inroads (see Pat Lowery Collins’s Hidden Voices), but given how small the perceived audience is for historical fiction in general, the relative dearth of representation here isn’t surprising. Speculative fiction has seen a boom of positively portrayed queer supporting characters (though with an unfortunate tendency toward martyrdom) in books such as Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go and Sarah Crossan’s Breathe. Malinda Lo’s Ash, Huntress, and Adaptation are not precisely coming-out stories, but they incorporate lesbian and bisexual protagonists seamlessly into their respective fantastical universes. Hero remains the standard for a coming-out story that is equally successful as speculative fiction.

There is ground yet to travel. Coming-out stories featuring teens of color are still few and far between, and representations of gay and lesbian teens far outpace depictions of bisexual and transgendered protagonists. Still, the last few years have seen a number of debut authors (including Laura Goode, Emily Horner, Martin Wilson, Tonya Cherie Hegamin, and Cris Beam) whose first novels have featured queer protagonists, and the future is bright. Good coming-out novels have so much to offer readers, from affirmation to education to iconic characters—and there’s much more to come. We’re getting there. It’ll be worth the trip.

*Throughout this column I use queer as a blanket term for people who are gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, or questioning. While historically a derogatory label, it has been reclaimed as an inclusive term that acknowledges the limits of labels and acronyms in describing the pantheon of sexual and gender identities. I use it here in deference to 
that diversity.

Good YA Coming-Out Novels

I Am J (Little, Brown, 2011) by Cris Beam

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You (Foster/Farrar, 2007) by Peter Cameron

The Difference Between You and Me (Viking, 2012) by Madeleine George

Sister Mischief (Candlewick, 2011) by Laura Goode

Geography Club (HarperTempest, 2003) by Brent Hartinger

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (Dial, 2010) by Emily Horner

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

Boy Meets Boy (Knopf, 2003) by David Levithan

Hero (Hyperion, 2007) by Perry Moore

Gone, Gone, Gone (Simon Pulse, 2012) by Hannah Moskowitz

Rainbow trilogy: Rainbow Boys (Simon, 2001), Rainbow High (2003), and Rainbow Road (2005) by Alex Sanchez

Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (Tundra, 2005) by Shyam Selvadurai

Pink (HarperTeen, 2011) by Lili Wilkinson

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Fast-forward forty years, and novels for black teens now claim their share of the market. Comedy. Drama. Romance. Poetry. Historical. Literary. Popular. From Monster by Walter Dean Myers to Coe Booth’s Kendra to the Drama High books by L. Divine to the lyrical novels of Jacqueline Woodson and Angela Johnson, there is a wide spectrum of books written for, or about, black teens. And yet as a teenager growing up in this era of increased visibility, I had the same experience as the young black girl Walker described — the one who never saw herself in books.

When I was a teenager in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was into Sailor Moon, the Spice Girls, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but most of all I loved to read. I didn’t normally read African American children’s or young adult novels. I found those too gloomy. Instead I primarily read romance novels from Harlequin’s black romance imprint, Kimani Arabesque.

The reason I chose to read these books was not for the plots, which, let’s face it, were in most cases convoluted and predictable. Nor did I choose to read them for the sex, although that was a bonus. I read these books because they were the only ones I could find with regular middle-class black people leading lives to which I could relate and aspire.

I had a relatively typical middle-class upbringing. I lived in urban Minneapolis in a Tudor home that needed a lot of work but had potential. Sometimes I rode my bike to visit my best friend two blocks up, but I spent the majority of my days with my nose in a book. I went to a college preparatory school for middle and upper school, which I appreciated because all of the other kids there were as energized about learning as I was. In other words, I was a geek.

I spent a lot of time in the library, where I found plenty of novels about black teen girls — black teen girls getting abused, black teen girls getting pregnant, black teen girls getting exploited. (The best-known example of the books I was finding is probably Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push, made into the film Precious.) Like The Friends, each of these books tells an authentically African American story. But though I was supposed to be able to relate to these books because the characters looked like me, they did not tell my story.

With a few exceptions, the existing body of African American young adult literature focuses on the urban poor and the issues they face. In All the Right Stuff by Walter Dean Myers, a drug lord attempts to recruit the protagonist into a life of crime. I can’t relate to that. The title character in Coe Booth’s Kendra is a fourteen-year-old girl who fears teenage pregnancy so instead has oral sex around school with her best friend’s love interest — a guy she does not particularly like or care about. I can’t relate to that. In Broken China by Lori Aurelia Williams, the title character is a thirteen-year-old single mother who loses her baby to a fluke infection and is pressured by a predatory funeral home owner into beginning a career as a 
stripper. I can’t relate to that, either.

My aim is not to suggest that these types of books should not exist. Many of these books are beautiful and sensitively written, and they tell stories that need to be told. I also don’t want to suggest there are not books that break this pattern. One of my favorite books of all time, The Road to Memphis by Mildred Taylor, concerns a landowning black family in the 1950s. More recently 37 Things I Love (in no particular order) by Kekla Magoon tells the story of middle-class Ellis, whose major conflict is coming to terms with the idea that her father is in a coma and may never wake up, but also deals with more universal issues such as friendship and identity.

Still, it seems as if books written for black teenagers disproportionately feature poor families and their struggles to achieve fundamental needs. So even forty years after Walker’s review of The Friends, there are still black girls and boys who have spent the first twenty years of their lives without reading novels featuring characters like themselves.

The conflation of blackness with urban poverty is not something that occurs only in literature. In Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America, John L. Jackson Jr. discusses the “performative” nature of blackness. Jackson argues that though black Americans are from a variety of different backgrounds, they perform the culture of “Harlemworld,” which ascribes blackness overall to the culture of impoverished urban blacks. This conception of homogenous blackness has worked itself into depictions of African Americans to the point that it’s hard to find images that don’t conform to this idea. As a teenager I searched for books that dealt with the isolation I felt as one of the only black students at my school. What I found instead were stories about teenage mothers who could barely read. My inability to relate to the black protagonists in the books made me feel like I wasn’t black enough, and in the deepest parts of me I even wondered if this image was all I was expected to be. Now I know there is not just one way to be black.

So…

Can we please see more black geeks in African American young adult literature? More protagonists who are so worried they’ll never date that pregnancy isn’t even an issue? More black teens living mundane middle-class lives? Just because urban ghetto life is one black story, it doesn’t mean that it’s the only story. As groundbreaking a novel as it was, can we move beyond The Friends?

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Reviewer Christine Hepperman asks author and editor David Levithan about writing gender (and the lack thereof) in his YA novel Every Day. Read the full review of Every Day here.

Christine Hepperman: Were there specific challenges in writing a character who is both genders and neither?

David Levithan: When you think of a character as purely a voice, purely a self, purely as words, it’s easy to defy gender. I had never noticed before how largely genderless English is, lending itself well to this neutrality. The foreign translations, I imagine, are going to be more of a challenge, since other languages unfortunately gender language much more.

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