YA Heroines and the Discovery of Sexuality

I love reading YA. And I love YA heroines. I’ve been seeing them much more in the past few years than I have when I was younger, which is really heartening—it means hopefully the publishing industry is becoming more comfortable with publishing YA novels with female protagonists.

I’ve understood that in the past, publishers avoided female protagonists for YA because while girls will read about girls and boys, boys only want to read about boys—so sales are better for male protagonists. Which I think is a huge shame—because I remember as a child (I grew up in the 80’s) absolutely hungering for strong female characters I could relate to. My favorite character in Lord of the Rings was Eowyn—a minor character to many readers, but to me, she was crucial.

But now, you see a lot of YA with female protagonists—and a lot of it has a romantic slant, which is what draws those big female audiences in. Some people may have reservations about mixing romance and YA—but I think it’s great. I’m an avid romance fan myself. And there’s so much about the early teen years when romance is new that makes everything so vivid, so intense, so terrifying and electrifying at the same time. If you can capture that well, you’ll have an enormous audience. I think, for all its faults, Twilight did this really well in the first book.

But some books I’ve been reading lately have been frustrating me with the way they’ve been introducing their protagonists—usually around the ages of 14 to 16—to boys and romance. Here are a few things that bother me.

The too-casual encounter. In some YA books, the girl’s first romantic encounter isn’t this momentous occurrence to her. It’s too casual. Maybe the girl (if she's a bit older) goes so far as to sleep with someone to get back at someone else, or just not to be lonely—a host of reasons older, more experienced women sleep with men that have nothing to do with love. But unless there’s a very careful buildup, I feel that as a reader I’m not convinced an inexperienced heroine would actually do that.

The emotionless encounter. I’ve seen this in two recent YA’s I’ve read with very strong, butt-kicking heroines. These girls are young teens, and they have a lot to worry about—of the saving-the-world variety. But when it comes to romance, they’re too tough. When a first kiss comes, there’s no feeling of vulnerability, no moment of introspection. It just doesn't seem to be a "big deal" moment to them. As a writer, there’s an excellent opportunity in this moment to introduce a moment of frailty to what may be an otherwise impenetrably-strong heroine.

The blasé. Sometimes I just get frustrated that there’s no sense of newness from the character—there’s a feeling she’s done this before, even if it’s specifically stated that she hasn’t. I keep looking for a sense of wondrous newness, of maybe-I’m-doing-it-wrong, of ew-I-didn’t-expect-it-to-feel-this-way. This is an inexperienced girl, but the reaction to first love-sex-romance is old hat.

Writing YA romance is so different than writing it for an adult audience. You have to remember what it was like for you in your first romantic encounters. What it was like when it went wrong, and the first time it felt right, too. I struggle with this as well—the novel I’m writing now is also a YA with a romance element. I’m trying to be very aware of this, because I know there’s a fine balance to getting it right—to capturing the voice and perspective of a precocious, intelligent teen character teetering at the cusp of a first romance.