YA Guy Talks about What He Means by "Boy Books"

In the past several months, there's been a lot of online activity concerning gender issues in YA literature. There have been attacks on "strong female characters," as well as critiques of the concept of "boy books" versus "girl books." Seems like every time I check the Twitter feed, there's a new piece on gender in YA.

If you're YA Guy (which I am), you're cheered by all of this activity. I founded this blog because I believe we need to be talking not only about how and why teenage boys and girls read, but about gender stereotypes in YA, industry pressures to market books as "boy" or "girl" books, and so on. These issues are important for those who read and write YA, and they're important for those trying to construct a more just society.

But I also believe that we need to be careful in our discussion of these issues. It's too easy to react in a knee-jerk fashion, to produce stereotypes of our own in our quest to attack the stereotypes of others. For every essay concluding that "boys don't read 'girl books' because they inherently don't like 'girl stuff'" (i.e., they're hardwired not to), there's an essay arguing that when we talk about "boy books," "what we really mean are books that make women second-class characters: love interests for male MCs or damsels to be rescued or the unattainable object of attraction." The first blogger argues with unabashedly circular logic that "girl books" can't be enjoyed by boys because, well, they're girl books.  The second blogger caricatures "boy books" (and those who read, write, and write about them) as hopeless troglodytes.

In my view, neither of these approaches will get us far.

For the record, when I talk about "boy books"--and when I write them myself--I don't mean any of the above. I don't mean books that appeal to the unique wiring of boy brains, and neither do I mean books that teach boys to demean and brutalize women. I mean, simply, books that can be read and enjoyed by boys. Such books, I believe, can and do have male as well as female protagonists; they can and do involve both hetero- and homosexual love stories (or no love story at all); they can and do have female characters who are as complex, flawed, and capable of growth and empowerment as the male characters.

When I talk about boy books, in other words, I'm asking why books such as I've described above are typically not thought of as boy books.

The question of whether teenage boys lag behind girls in how much they read has been debated and hyped endlessly, and we're probably no closer to answering that question than we ever were.  (A fairly recent study concludes that boys are reading at the same difficulty level as girls, though this says nothing about whether they're reading at the same rates as girls.) But will we break gender stereotypes by producing new stereotypes? Will we encourage boys to read by portraying those who write books with boys in mind as cavemen? Will we truly open the field of YA literature in gender-inclusive ways if we assume that only gender-exclusive books are being written and marketed for boys?

YA Guy doesn't think so, anyway.

YA Guy Weighs in on "Strong Female Characters"

In a brilliant post from the New Statesman, “I Hate Strong Female Characters,” Sophia McDougall analyzes the sexist implications of all the “strong” female protagonists inhabiting contemporary fantasy literature and film. Her argument--that confining women to “strength” (typically measured by their ability to kick some serious ass) deprives them of their full humanity--strikes me as convincing.

Being YA Guy, I’d like to extend her analysis to some of the “strong” female protagonists in current YA literature.

We have to start, of course, with the one who started it all: Suzanne Collins’s Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. She’s strong, no doubt, both physically and emotionally: she holds her family together through her mother’s depression, sacrifices herself for her younger sister, fights for her life and the lives of others (particularly Peeta and Rue) during the Games. Eventually, if unwittingly, she starts a revolution.

And it’s that “unwittingly” part that bothers me.

Strong as she is, Katniss both relies on and is manipulated by the male characters who surround her: Haymitch, Peeta, Cinna, Seneca Crane, President Snow. While she’s running around kicking butt, acting mostly on impulse (as in her deservedly famous William Tell moment), it’s the men who are plotting behind the scenes, whether they’re coaching her through her televised interview, figuring out a strategy to survive the Games, or attempting to double-cross her.

She’s strong. But they’re smart.

If Collins’s novel inspired a trend in YA dystopian literature, those who've followed her have tended to reproduce the dichotomy between physically active women and mentally active men. Consider, for example, C. J. Redwine’s Deception. The book boasts twin narrators: Rachel and Logan. She wields a sword. He builds machines.

Or look at Veronica Roth’s wildly popular Divergent series. In the first book, the narrator Beatrice (Tris) jumps off roofs, fights in the ring, and faces down a government-inspired revolution. But it’s her boyfriend, Tobias (Four), who calculates, figures, plans. They’re both Dauntless--but Tris is the only one who’s basically Clueless.

I’m exaggerating somewhat to make a point, of course. Still, I think this is worth noting: that while the authors of these books may believe they’re bucking convention by attributing physical strength to young women, ultimately they may be reinforcing the association of women with physicality, men with intellect. Even the notion (adopted from Collins's book) that female impulse can defeat male scheming seems to me to fall into problematic sexual stereotypes.

Why couldn’t it be the female protagonist Pia from Jessica Khoury’s Origin who’s the brilliant (if misguided) scientist? Why does the hybrid narrator Addie/Eva from Kat Zhang’s What’s Left of Me require the services of a male technophile to begin the process of liberation? Why can’t female narrator Zoe from Heather Anastasiu’s Glitch go to the surface, uncover the true history of her world, or foresee the future on her own, without needing her boyfriend, Adrien, to do much of the thinking for her?

Why, for that matter, did I feel the need to craft the female narrator of my own work-in-progress as a kick-butt action hero, while her male companion is the scientific, reflective type?

I hasten to add that I like all of these books (including my own!). Unlike McDougall, I don’t unanimously hate strong female characters. But as the father of a teenage daughter, I do hate the message the barrage of SFCs may be sending her.

And as YA Guy, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this issue, and your suggestions for books that fight against the trend.

YA Guy Interviews... Erin Bowman!

The thing YA Guy loves about Erin Bowman is....

Well, there's really nothing I don't love about Erin Bowman.

She wrote a killer debut, Taken. She's incredibly generous with her time even under a grueling schedule. She writes fun and funny tweets. When I had a chance to meet her, at the Young Authors tour attended by my aspiring-writer daughter, I found Erin as delightful IRL as she is online. My daughter's two-word review: "Erin rocks!"

So I'm absolutely thrilled to have her on YA Guy for an interview. Here we go....

YA Guy: Taken has such an amazingly cool concept--a town where all the males disappear at the age of eighteen.  How’d you come up with the concept for this book?

Erin Bowman: Taken’s protagonist actually came to me before the full concept did. I was working on another manuscript when Gray started walking around in my head. He was fearing his eighteenth birthday, which I thought was very odd; turning eighteen is a great milestone in our world! I started asking why--why was he so afraid, what happened at eighteen?--and the greater story formed.

YAG: And a great(er) story it is!  Taken is science fiction, and so we’d expect it to extrapolate from current technology, events, or issues.  Was there any particular aspect of today’s world that inspired or fed into Taken?

EB: I’ve always been fascinated by technological advancement--specifically how exponential its growth rate seems, and how its goal is always to make our lives easier. I love my iPhone, I do. It has certainly made it easier to check in on the go, answer emails while traveling, etc. But I don’t know if that’s necessarily made my life easier. If anything, it’s complicated things; I’m now accessible 24-7 and feel like I should respond to everything immediately.

I wanted to play with this concept a bit in Taken--how advancements may originally have our best interests at heart but perhaps tailspin into something more detrimental. Furthermore, I really wanted to look at an advanced world through naive eyes. We take so much for granted.

YAG: That brings us to the narrator of Taken: Gray Weathersby, a young male.  How did you make the decision to adopt a male voice?  Did you face any special challenges as a female author with a young male narrator?

EB: Simply put, it was Gray’s tale and it had to be told through his eyes. I was subconsciously writing in first-person--with a few chapters already captured--before I even paused to reflect on my narrative lens. By then, I couldn’t imagine the story being told any other way.

As a female, I didn’t have too much trouble writing Gray because his voice was so darn clear for me. (This, of course, is not always the case. I have a WIP with a female MC and it took me forever to find her voice. Sometimes you just get lucky.)

YAG: Along the same lines, were you trying to tap into a male YA audience when you were working on Taken?  Do you think Taken is a “guy book”?  Do you think there’s any such thing in YA as “guy” or “girl” books?

EB: I think boys will enjoy Taken, but I think girls will too. In fact, I hate the idea that a book is a “boy book” or a “girl book.” Books are books, populated with many characters, themes, subject matter, and so on. A contemporary YA about soccer set in a small town will likely be boring to a boy if he hates soccer and loves high fantasy and action and new worlds. But a girl who digs realistic fiction and just scored her first goal at her very first soccer game? She might love that book. Regardless of whether the MC is male or female.

I think we need to spend less time labeling things boy or girl books, and more time asking WHAT and WHO the reader likes to read. For example, if a reader flew through Dashner’s The Maze Runner series and loves fast-paced action and adventure, I think he or she will love Taken.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I need to take a moment and point everyone to Marie Lu’s “Writing a Book for Boys” piece (Huffington Post). Her points are spot-on, and she covers this topic far more eloquently than I did here.

YAG: Final question: I know the sequel to Taken is coming out soon, and I know many readers would like to hear about the experience of writing the second book in a planned trilogy.  What were the challenges, the joys, and the discoveries for you, a debut author, as you worked on the sequel to Taken?

EB: I loved being back with my characters. They never cease to surprise me, and one of my favorite parts of writing Frozen was discovering new things about them simply by listening. (I’ve learned to not ignore them when they want to deviate from my outline.) Challenges? Tuning out external voices. I wrote Taken in a vacuum, but with Frozen, I heard my editor, fans, reviewers, you name it rattling off advice and critiques. Once I figured out how to block those voices out and just draft, everything came easier.

YAG: Thanks, Erin! We're all looking forward to Frozen and wish you continued success in your writing career!

Twitter: @erin_bowman

Website: ebowman.com

YA Guy Hosts... Erin Albert!

Hi folks!  I'm fortunate today to have a guest post by the amazing Erin Albert, who's been following the blog from day one and whose own YA fantasy novel THE PROPHECY comes out this fall.  Erin's going to talk about her own experience with YA "guy books," past and present.  And so, without further ado, here's Erin!

Thank you so much for having me here, Josh!  I can officially vouch for this blog.  It’s not a He-Man Woman Hater’s Club, though I would gladly accept the title She-ra, Princess of Power!  J

I’ve been curious about the presentation of gender roles in books and movies for quite some time.  My college senior thesis related to this very topic.  For my final “exam,” I presented a paper tracking the evolving role of women in Disney movies.  Think about it…the earlier Disney films featured helpless damsels in distress saved by dashing, strong princes (usually by his kiss--for example, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White).  Fast forward a few decades to find Mulan kicking butt and taking names while saving the male lead or Merida in Brave without a male counterpart at all.  I personally prefer the ones where the male and female help one another like Beauty and the Beast or Rapunzel. 

Interestingly, I think the role of boys in books has gone the opposite direction--from main characters to supports for the main female characters.  When I think back on the MG and YA classics I read, most had male leads (sometimes male animal leads).  I enjoyed Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Super Fudge (and all the related Fudge books), Charlotte’s Web, Ralph S. Mouse, The Outsiders, The Hobbit, How To Eat Fried Worms, Shiloh, Stuart Little, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches… I could go on, but you get the picture.  Side note:  Many of these books were written by women though they contained male main characters.

I wonder if people freaked out because girls appeared underrepresented and sought to create more female main characters.  In trying to create a balance, the pendulum swung back the whole other way.  For a while, female main characters dominated MG and YA and, for the most part, still do.  Boys went from being the heroes of the tale to the love interests helping to facilitate the story.

I applaud the efforts of writers like Rick Riordan who are bringing back the strong male lead while including an equally strong female lead as his complement.  Like Beauty and the Beast and Rapunzel, the Percy Jackson series seeks to strike a delicate balance, engaging and uplifting both males and females. 

I’m curious to hear your thoughts.  What books do you think strike a good male/female balance?  Do you prefer male main characters to be written by males, or do you think females can write from a male perspective just as convincingly?

For those interested in knowing more about me and my upcoming novel, The Prophecy, please like me on FB (Erin Albert Books), follow me on Twitter (@ErinAlbertBooks), and/or subscribe to my website (www.erinalbertbooks.com). 

Thank you again, Josh! 

Until next time,

Erin

YA Guy Interviews… YA Guy!

If all goes according to plan, in the not-so-distant future I’ll be interviewing YA writers, agents, editors, bloggers, and others on this site!

But for now, since I’m just starting out, I decided to interview myself.  You know, so you could get to know me better.

And so, without further ado....

YA Guy: So, YA Guy, tell us a bit about yourself and your path to publication.

YA Guy: Gosh, this is so awkward.

YAG: Just relax and pretend you’re talking to yourself.

YAG: Okay.  (Deep breath.)  Well, I’m a guy who writes YA fiction.  But it was not always thus.

I got a Ph.D. in American literature almost twenty years ago, and for a really long time I wrote academic books, full of citations and convoluted syntax and multisyllabic words.  I loved it, too: very stimulating intellectually, very exciting to participate in a field of knowledge.  But several years back, I decided I’d done enough in that vein, and it was time to move on.  I wanted to get back to the kind of writing I’d loved ever since I was a kid: fiction!  And so that’s exactly what I did.

YAG: You make it sound so easy.  Was it really?

YAG: Well, no.  I had a serious crisis of confidence when I made the switch: you know, “Can I really write fiction anymore, it’s been so long, etc., etc.”  I took a summer class at a local college to brush up my skills, then I started writing literary fiction and some sci-fi.  Got some stuff published, mostly in online journals, which gave me the needed confidence boost to attempt a novel.  Started to write one based on my life as an academic, but it sucked.  Stopped it after about 100 pages and started to think of writing something else.

YAG: Do you think it was because the novel was too similar to your real life that it sucked?

YAG: Boy, you ask leading questions, don’t you?  Of course that’s why it sucked!  I had no distance, man.  So I started thinking about other genres I enjoyed as a reader, and fantasy popped to the top of the list (I’m a lifelong fan of Tolkien, Zelazny, Donaldson, and others).  I wrote a fantasy novel that pleased me, but I guess it didn’t please anyone else, because it’s still sitting in a virtual drawer.  Then, one day, while reading to my kids, I said, “Young Adult!  I love Young Adult!  Why don’t I try that?”  And the rest is history.

YAG: Oh, come on, there had to be more to it than that.

YAG: Okay, you got me again.  The first thing I did was ask my daughter to read the first few tentative pages I wrote, and she liked them--I mean, really liked them, not “I’m lying to my old man so he’ll buy me a new MP3 player liked them.”  I plodded on, working nights and weekends and summers (when I wasn’t teaching and the kids were asleep and/or at camp), and I finally had a complete draft of my futuristic YA novel, Survival Colony Nine.

YAG: And then what?

YAG: Then I got an agent who acted totally excited about the book at first but ended up telling me it stank and I’d need a professional editor to whip it into shape.  I got really depressed, fired my agent, revised the manuscript, and searched again.  This time I found the amazing Liza Fleissig of Liza Royce Agency, who loved the book and got ready to send it out.  A few months later, acceptance came from Karen Wojtyla of Margaret K. McElderry Books.

YAG: So roughly how long was it from first word to acceptance?

YAG: Almost two years, from summer 2011 to spring 2013.  And it won’t be out until fall 2014.

YAG: Wow!  That’s a long time!

YAG: Tell me about it, bro.  But I’m cool with the time spent, because I know it made the book better.  The manuscript went through five complete revisions, and I’m sure my editor will want even more, and in the end, it’ll all be worth it when I turn out a kick-ass book!

YAG: I notice you refer to Survival Colony Nine as “futuristic.”  Explain, please.

YAG: Publishing is very niche-driven these days, which means very genre-driven.  Everything has to be labeled.  Is it paranormal, urban fantasy, dystopian, romance, chick lit, high fantasy. . . ?  But I don’t think Survival Colony Nine can easily be stuffed into a single genre.  It has elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror, dystopian, literary, family drama, and so on and so forth.  And I don’t think that’s a bad thing; I think that’s what makes the book interesting.  My feeling is that the best YA books, like the best books in general, don’t fit neatly into little boxes.  In fact, that’s one of my frustrations with the YA genre: too many Harry Potter clones, or Hunger Games clones, or whatever clones.  With Survival Colony Nine, I wanted to write a book that couldn’t easily be cloned.

YAG: Very ambitious of you.  So with that introduction, why don’t you tell us some more about the book?

YAG: You know, you could get the answers to a lot of these questions if you’d just read my other blog, “Bell’s Yells.”

YAG: Humor me.

YAG: If I must.  Survival Colony Nine tells the story of Querry Genn, a fourteen-year-old boy living in a future world that’s been devastated by war and environmental catastrophe.  Human civilization has virtually collapsed, and what’s left are small, mobile units of a hundred or so people called Survival Colonies.  The climate is hostile, water supplies are low, modern technology is mostly gone.  To make matters worse, so many people died in the years before the book starts that there’s been a huge loss of cultural memory: things like snow, amusement parks, and marshmallows are just words, with no connection to anything anyone can remember.  And to make matters even worse, at the end of the wars of destruction, a new species appeared on the planet: creatures called the Skaldi, monsters with the ability to infect and mimic human hosts.  No one knows what they are or where they came from, but the Survival Colonies are trying desperately to stay one step ahead of them.

YAG: Whoa!  That sounds pretty intense.

YAG: It is.  And here’s the thing: Querry, my narrator, can’t remember anything either.  He was in an accident six months before the book starts, and his past beyond that point is completely erased.  So you’ve got a narrator thrown into a dire situation without the background knowledge or history that might help him deal with it.  And the commander of Survival Colony Nine--Querry’s father, Laman Genn--doesn’t make life one bit easier for him.

YAG: Okay, that’s enough to go on.  So tell me this: is it a “guy book”?  You’re YA Guy, after all.

YAG: Technically, so are you.

YAG: Let’s not get cute.

YAG: Fine.  When I started writing the book, I didn’t think about its “guy-ness.”  It has a male protagonist, and there’s a father-son relationship at its heart, but Querry’s conflict, his struggle to know who he is, seemed to me to be a universal one.  As I said, my daughter was the first to read it, and she never made a peep about it being too guy-ish or whatever.  I’ve written short stories with female narrators, and I’ve always prided myself on creating strong, well-rounded female characters.  (Survival Colony Nine has a bunch of them, including Laman’s second-in-command Aleka, the scout Petra, and the teenage girl Querry crushes on, Korah.)  It was only when my agent’s reader praised me as a “guy writer for guys” that I started to think about myself and my book that way.  But I still believe the book will appeal to all kinds of readers, whether they’re guys or not.  I don’t believe there are pure “guy books” any more than there are pure “gal books.”

YAG: Great.  I think that wraps it up, unless you have more to say.

YAG: I always have more to say, but this blog isn’t going anywhere, so I’ll save it for later.

YAG: Thank you for agreeing to this interview.  We’ve been talking to YA Guy, host of the blog YA Guy.

YAG: Your fly is unzipped.

YAG: You just couldn’t resist, could you?

YA Guy Yaks About... Boy Books

Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

In a previous life, before I became YA Guy, I was a scholar of American literature.  I had a Ph.D. and everything!  (Still do; they haven't taken it away from me yet.)  And as a scholar of American literature, I wrote scholarly books and articles, most of them about my sub-specialization, antebellum American literature, or my sub-sub-specialization, antebellum Native American literature.

One of the things I learned as a scholar is that, during the nineteenth century, boy books--adventure stories written by men and aimed at preteen-to-teen male readers--were big business.  It's a little known fact that Herman Melville was famous in his own day not for Moby-Dick (which actually killed his popularity) but for boy books based on his experiences as a sailor.  His first two books were titled Typee and Omoo, and they were pure boy books, full of high seas adventure, male camaraderie, sexual innuendo, and howling savages.  They were the precursors, in fact, to the wildly popular genre of boy book that would arrive with the next century: the Western.

Other male authors of the time built their reputations on boy books as well.  Mark Twain, for example, did a booming business with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn--the latter famous for its experiments with vernacular and first-person narration, but still a boy book through and through.  James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, and Zane Grey were all boy-book specialists, as were Richard Henry Dana, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, John Neal, William Gilmore Simms, and others.  Nathaniel Hawthorne was a bit of an outlier, but many of his short stories are boy-bookish at the core: "Young Goodman Brown," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," and others all tell the tale of young men confronting a hostile wilderness, both outside and within their own hearts.

And then of course there's Poe, who....  Well, Poe is Poe.  The less said there, the better.

But it's worth mentioning that his one novel, the wildly unpopular Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, was an undisputed attempt to cash in on the boy-book craze, marred by the breakneck speed with which the cash-strapped Poe composed it and by his inability to resist parodying the very genre he was copying.

Native American authors did a pretty brisk business in the boy-book market too.  George Copway (Ojibwa), Charles Eastman (Sioux), and Luther Standing Bear (Sioux) all capitalized on the public fascination with stories of young men--in their case, young Native men--braving and triumphing over the wild.

So what happened?  If boy books were such hot properties then, where are they now?

Well, first, they're still here.  Never went away, really.  The Hardy Boys stories were the boy books of my own youth.  The Harry Potter series, female author notwithstanding, certainly follow in the boy-book tradition.  So do the books of Roland Smith, Christopher Paul Curtis, Rick Riordan, and others.

But in the nineteenth century, the dawn of the boy book, another literary development was set in motion that would ultimately eclipse the boy-book phenomenon: the appearance of the girl book.

These consisted principally of romance stories written by women for middle-class teenage girls and young housewives, and they sold like hotcakes.  They sold in the hundreds of thousands--in some cases, in the millions--which are mind-boggling numbers when you factor in the relatively small size of the population, the lack of universal literacy, and the relatively high cost of books.  Their authors were people you've probably never heard of: Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Mary Eastman, and (one you certainly have heard of) Harriet Beecher Stowe.  For all their popularity, boy books couldn't compete with girl books.  They were trounced.

There are two main reasons why.  First, with middle-class females less well represented in the workforce than males, they had more time for leisure reading, and they gravitated toward books that reflected their own experience.  Second, with authorship being one of the only professions in which women could hope to make a good, independent living, women of talent were drawn to writing in greater numbers than were men.

These two factors are less prevalent today, but they laid the groundwork for the modern publishing industry's predisposition toward female-authored and female-centered YA.  The audience and the authorship were prepared over a hundred years ago, so why mess with a good thing?

Now remember, I'm writing this not as a means of railing against the current trends.  I'm simply trying to provide some literary-historical perspective as part of my project to validate and celebrate YA of all stripes, whether it be male-authored and male-centered or not.  Our reading habits have histories, and those histories help us understand who we are today.

Okay, class dismissed.