YA Power Hour
Look. Listen. LOOK.
Look. I’ve told you about some good books so far in this newsletter’s brief history, right? I’ve proven I have some kind of taste, right? Just, like, remember that as I take this brief but extremely indulgent pit stop at Nostalgia Station.
I have completely lost track of where in the Art discourse we are but I feel like as a society we have accepted that art is not about the medium but the use of that medium. Comics are art now. Video games are art now. And YES SOME YA IS ART.
I think about Uglies all the time. In my opinion it deserves the same blockbuster treatment that Hunger Games received and my theory is the reason it hasn’t is because the central premise of the book is that every citizen of a civilization built post-ecological collapse receives an operation at age 16 that makes them look absolutely perfect and I think up until and possibly including now all attempts at generating CGI for this purpose have only generated nightmare fuel.
This book has a lot of meat on its bones for a premise that’s basically “15 year old wants to be hot.” After her friend runs away in search of a community that lives outside of city control and eschews The Operation, Tally’s precious pretty-making procedure is held hostage unless she’s willing to go on the run herself and bring her friend back, ratting out the troublemakers in the process. Through the book, and its follow-ups, Pretties and Specials, we watch Tally time and again grapple with questions about the world as it’s presented to her, reprogramming herself as she walks in the woods and for the first time considers what things like freedom, identity, and beauty really mean. It always amazes me how Westerfeld is able to ask questions about safety versus freedom, cultural programming, and how much faith in humanity is justified, all while characters are riding around on MagLifts and eating rehydrated SpagBol.
Look. I have my qualms with Meg Cabot, chief among them the fact that if you pick up something of hers you are going to see the “I mean” construction that she alone appears to employ. E.g.:
It had been a while since I’d seen them.
My parents, I mean.
I’m not kidding when I say this appears at least six times in every Meg Cabot book I’ve ever read. BUT she’s at least partially responsible for Anne Hathaway’s career and also she wrote The Mediator series, so I’m fine with it. The overusing “I mean” thing, I mean. (Fucking do you see how annoying this is?)
The protagonist of The Mediator is a teenage girl who can see ghosts and has been charged by The Universe with helping them solve their unfinished business so they can move on. Um, SOLD. There are six of these, each featuring a real Veronica Mars type having to solve ghost-related issues around her Carmel, California, high school.
But where Cabot truly earns her laurels is in the big-arc love story. She gives us a love interest who’s a old (sexy) Wild West ghost that only she can see and after six books she STICKS THE LANDING. How does she do that, you wonder? Does she resign herself to a wedding ceremony with an invisible groom? Maybe she opts to die and become a ghost bride? I’m certainly not going to spoil it but it’s neither of those things.
I first read Bad Kitty when I was maybe 15 and I’m convinced that I got at least 85% of my personality from it. It’s where I got the title for this newsletter issue, just to start with. It’s where I learned how funny the word “snaggletooth” is and honestly probably where I learned narrative fiction could actually be very funny at all. Jas is an amateur sleuth (very against her certified genius father’s wishes) trying to avoid being Embroiled in Mystery while her family stays at the Venetian Hotel in Vegas but you can probably guess how that goes. It’s time for me to confess that I have a secondary motive for mentioning it here which is that this was supposed to be a trilogy but the third one never came out, leaving me with a thousand burning questions for Michele Jaffe about the fate of these characters and I'll probably need you, gentle reader, to sign a petition at some point.
In my humble opinion, Heir Apparent belongs in the pantheon of Groundhog Day media worth studying. Giannine is a teenager in the not-too-distant future cashing in a gift card from her deadbeat dad at the local VR arcade. On a whim she choses a game about a deadly succession struggle and royal intrigue where she has to survive to be crowned King. The bad news: It’s frustrating and she sucks at it. The worse news: An activist group has vandalized the machine, leaving Giannine trapped in the game, dying and restarting over and over again until her brain gets fried, unless she can win her way out. I am not exaggerating when I say this remains one of the more original things I’ve read and I still come back to the waterlogged paperback I dropped in the ocean on vacation in probably 2007 every once in a while.
I really consider Vivian Vande Velde and Gail Carson Levine to be the twin queens of the YA fantasy set. Their books are so well crafted with interesting angles and rich characterization. Levine, being the author of Ella Enchanted, was also a part of the Hathaway Supremacy and deserves credit too. Levine is a big fairy tale guy and can’t seem to stop retelling, inverting, and twisting the classic forms in on themselves. If I ever were responsible for a girl child, I would definitely pack these books in a “Sorry you’re a girl but you’re here now so let’s make the best of it” gift basket because they do wonderful jobs letting these characters face struggles and be brave and cunning in a way that feels more real than some pat “what matters is on the inside” moralizing.
Fairest is about a girl who’s Born Ugly (her words) and whose talent for mimicry lands her in the entourage of a beautiful but awful queen, and without spoiling there’s also potions and prophecies and gnomes and stuff. Two Princesses of Bamarre is about a girl whose much braver sister comes down with a plague and she has to go on a quest to fulfill a prophecy to save her, even though they’d always thought those roles would be reversed. And also there’s ogres and sorcerers and a bitchy dragon.
This one is a little further off the beaten path and it’s only on this list because like six months ago I had a recollection of it and couldn’t remember if it was a dream or what. Please maintain eye contact while I tell you the premise of this series DONT LOOK AWAY. LOOK RIGHT HERE. I’m clutching your face now.
Wuthering High is about a boarding school for Bad Kids on an island that is entirely staffed by the ghosts of famous authors and where the creations of those authors can sometimes also come to life. Okay, big exhale. Despite the bonkers proposition this book is making (that you can see it occasionally struggling with… like I think at the beginning the ghosts were supposed to be authors who killed themselves (I don’t really want to debate the ethics of making these real dead people fun ghost characters for the purposes of this YA-themed Substack post) but had to expand to the much easier and bendier concept of authors who died “before their time") these books really do hit a sweet spot in terms of adventure, teen drama, and wish fulfillment (Oh no, I’m kind of an outcast but now I’m on this cool island defeating literal Emily Bronte with my new friends and also a version of Heathcliff whose personality has been severely sanitized to remove the stank ass elements!). Running around the woods on an island off the coast of Maine and facing off against various villains from literature while everyone yells at you to stop making out with Heathcliff probably gets old at some point but that point is not three books in (and also a secret fourth book you can only read On The Computer), I can tell you that.
And now I must go and submit to the quiet shame of this being the first one of these that has gotten the “over 1500 words” compression warning.
If you’ve got a weirdly specific trope to request or have a book you think should’ve been included in this bundle, let me know at tropemachine@substack.com.