You’re standing in a bookshop. In front of you, face out, is a cover with a black background. In the foreground, an apple is cupped in pale hands—offered to you. Don’t take a bite. If you do, you might enter perpetual twilight and miss the truth on the shelf: that some of the best writing around is happening in YA fiction more broadly—much of it from Australian authors; that there are infinite trends, possibilities and other reasons to turn to YA.
Mockingjays are burning up, as Suzanne Collins’ violent dystopia, The Hunger Games trilogy, ends with a bang, or a whimper depending on whether you wanted Katniss to choose Gale or Peeta or herself. The Gallagher Girls spooks-in-training tread a fine, satisfying line between CIA code-cracking and romance. ‘Pink’ books are hot. Black covers are hot. Pretty books are hot, especially if wolves are featured within (Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver and Linger). And angels, and fantasy, as always. So are books set over one night, books with two authors, books told from multiple points of view. Many trends; many possibilities.
YA isn’t segmented in the way that adult books are—fantasy sits alongside crime, pink sits alongside grit—enabling readers to fall into unexpected places. But the thing that is truly smouldering about YA isn’t the lack of category restrictions on the shelf, but the blowing open of genres within the books themselves.
Back to vampires: There was Buffy, then Angel, then Twilight, which added shape-shifter Jacob Black, who assumes the form of a wolf, into the mix. Then 2009's Liar, a psychological thriller by Justine Larbalestier that was already messing with everyone’s heads, further played with the reader by derailing partway through into a werewolf book—seemingly—easily the most innovatively structured werewolf thriller out now, and an extraordinary achievement in terms of story, in anyone’s books. YA like this is the reason that expectations about audience, as well as everything else, is collapsing, why readers are realizing that YA is no longer—not that it ever was—just for teenagers.
Last year, Leanne Hall’s This Is Shyness—winner of the Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing—took what are familiar tropes in YA—a girl, a guy, a chance meeting, a one-night fledgling-romance, in other words a pink book, but then blew the genre away.
In the suburb of Shyness, the sun doesn’t rise and the border has a strange energy. A boy who howls, literally (and suffers from psychosomatic hypertrichosis—look it up)—Wolfboy—meets a stranger at the Diabetic Hotel. She tells him her name is Wildgirl, and she dares him to be her guide through the endless night. But Shyness’s perpetual darkness is filled with gangs of wild Kidds jacked up on sugar. And the book, which we have long known is not exactly pink, morphs into a quest narrative in a familiar-unfamiliar world. But, despite where the story is set, the heart of the book takes place between Wildgirl and Wolfboy. Wildgirl describes the feeling of standing at the top of a building looking out over the city: ‘a sunburst might explode from my chest’. Similarly, getting lost in their conversations leaves you, cocoons you, in a state somewhere between falling in love and freewheeling downhill in the dark on a warm night.
Simultaneously, another writer set her book over one night. The first two lines (as well as the rest) of Cath Crowley’s Graffiti Moon haunt me: ‘Let me make it in time. Let me meet Shadow.’ The night unfolds: a night of seeing painted guys with grass growing from their hearts as, from one paint-strewn wall to the next, Lucy chases the idea of graffer Shadow who turns out to be Ed who might still be in love with his ex. A lyrical urban adventure romance told from the points of view of Ed and Lucy, spliced with their friend Leo’s poetry—sometimes the gritty urban variety; at other times not:
I'd drift through space/
And fall through dreams/
Into dark skies
For the characters these nights are long, with many shifts in mood. For the reader, the nights are much too short as we race downhill in the dark.
So, where to from here with the trend guessing? The truth is, no one knows. And no one should care about the lack of knowing, because a werewolf urban romance told from two points of view, interwoven with poetry, set in a world where the sun doesn’t rise, could easily be next, and alongside so much current Australian YA writing it will be so fresh and stand-alone that you’ve forgotten what’s come before it. In fact, it’s probably already been written.
