III. NOVEL GENRES AND TRENDS

What’s the outlook on youth novel trends?

I think there will always be trends, because any time one topic or style becomes a big hit, many other authors try to emulate it. That’s why we have so many vampire stories, fallen angel stories, werewolf stories, etc. People have been predicting the end of vampire stories for years, but they continue to sell and sell. That’s not to say some of them aren’t great, and they do manage to do something fresh with the topic.

But those books are also just one part of the market—and there’s certainly room for more than one type of book. Books such as Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls, Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian are also hitting the bestseller lists and finding a huge audience, based on their strong voices, intense subject matters, and great hooks. And those books will probably still be around 25 years from now, that parents will be handing down to their kids.

Common teen-novel plots include the quest or journey, adventure and survival, coming of age, the underdog and bullied, romance, and mysteries—interwoven with themes of friendship and family. Are these elements are timeless? Any others?

Absolutely timeless. A good coming-of-age story never gets old, because it’s something every one of us experiences, and there are so many different ways to do it. Adventure and survival novels are great because they take your characters out of their comfort zone and give insight into who they are deep down.

And who doesn’t love romance? All of these elements are great precisely because there are so many ways of doing them in a fresh way. These are the very things teenagers are thinking about most, the things most personal to them.

In Writing for Young Adults, Sherry Garland notes a paradox: “The more unique and controversial your story and characters, the more likely the book will be acclaimed. Yet... the more difficult it will be to find a publisher, given the risk of censorship and resistance by schools.” Which kinds of controversial books, if any, will you represent?

I don’t shy away from controversial books, but...the controversial aspect must have a purpose and feel organic to the story, not just be there for shock value. I recently published The Orange Houses by Paul Griffin, for instance, that is sometimes violent and gritty. In some novels the violence would feel gratuitous, but in The Orange Houses it was just real life in the neighborhood where the story takes place. Not every market is going to take a book like that, but it’s an incredibly important book to have available to kids.

Schools often have to be more conservative in what they purchase, but that doesn’t mean the book couldn’t find a wide audience—it could find a big place in the retail market instead. So I would be completely open to publishing a book about a difficult topic, so long as it’s done in an accessible way and is, at its heart, just a good story.

How do you judge if a novel with a teen protagonist is best suited for the adult or YA market? Should a writer decide this before submitting it to you?

Sometimes it’s a fuzzy line, because some adult novels do have a young protagonist. But in general a YA novel covers a more compressed time period, addresses a universal teen experience, moves at a faster pace, and has a clearer resolution. A writer should definitely decide this before submitting to an editor! Read, read, read... not just books that you loved as a teenager—read what’s out there now.

 IV. PERSONALLY SPEAKING...

Name some favorite realistic youth novels, both classic and contemporary. What do you love about them?

Oh, it’s so hard to pick! One of my all-time favorites is Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. This one is timeless—published in 1948, but still feels modern today. I love Cassandra’s voice and get to know her so well through her thoughts and journal entries—she’s so funny, so self-deprecating, and just feels like someone I’d want to be friends with. It’s almost Jane Austen-esque for a slightly younger crowd. And, of course, I’m a sucker for romance like this.

A more recent favorite is Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls. It’s not easy to get inside the head of someone suffering from an illness like anorexia, but she does it in such smart, subtle ways that are ingrained in the writing, like listing the number of calories behind every piece of food Lia has in front of her. It’s a wrenching story about anorexia, but also a larger story about friendship and guilt and complications of family life and figuring out who you are.

I love John Green’s Looking for Alaska, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, and Deborah Wiles’s Each Little Bird that Sings. All of these books have characters that feel so real, so engaging. I knew exactly who they were from the first page of the book, and I couldn’t wait to find out what they’d do next.

What do you like most about your job?

The part I like most is looking for incredible new manuscripts and then doing the actual editing, helping an author find the heart of her story. I wish I could edit all day! But there’s much more to being an editor—you have be a sales person, negotiate contracts, help with marketing, manage authors’ schedules, take care of all the little clerical details….the list goes on! Often when I tell people that I edit children’s books, they think I either remove curse words from manuscripts or sit around and have story hour. If only!

What would you like writers to know about you, the individual who scrutinizes (and sometimes rejects) their literary labors of love?

Look, we’re all just people wanting a good—no, make that great!—story. I promise we’re actually very nice! What a writer writes and what an editor responds to is intensely personal. Just because one editor rejects something doesn’t mean another editor won’t love it. Lots of books that I turned down were acquired by another editor and went on to be very successful. It doesn’t mean I was wrong to turn it down—it just means I didn’t have the right vision for it, but that another editor did. So, don’t let a rejection get you down! I honestly believe that a really good story always finds its place in the world—like cream rising to the top, as they say.

  Read testimonials from this editor’s authors.

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