Things seen too often in Young Adult books, apparently

[UnquietDad]

Interesting for readers and writers! This is
© Joëlle Anthony, 2007 and originally published in the Society of Children?s Book Writers and Illustrators Bulletin, July/Aug. 2007

A countdown of 25 things that show up repeatedly in young adult fiction:

#25 ? Vegetarian teens with unsympathetic meat-eating parents

#24 ? Shy or withdrawn characters that take refuge in the school?s art room/ compassionate art teachers

#23 ? A token black friend among a group of white friends - usually it?s a girl, and she?s always gorgeous

#22 ? A tiny scar through the eyebrow, sometimes accompanied by an embarrassing story

21 ? Using the word ?rents for parents, but not using any other slang

# 20 ? A beautiful best friend who gets all the guys but doesn?t want them

#19 ? The wicked stepmother who turns out to be simply misunderstood and it?s all cleared up in the climax

#18 ? Authors showing their age by naming characters names they grew up with (i.e. Debbie, Lisa, Kimberly, Alice, Linda, etc.)

#17 ? Parents who are professional writers or book illustrators

#16 ? Using coffee, cappuccino, and café latte to describe black people?s skin

#15 ? Main characters named Hannah and making a note of it being a palindrome

#14 ? Younger siblings who are geniuses, adored by everyone, and usually run away during the book?s climax, causing dramatic tension

#13 ? The mean-spirited cheerleader (and her gang) as the story?s antagonist

# 12 ? A dead mother

# 11 ? Heroines who can?t carry a tune, even if it were in a bucket

# 10 ? Guys with extraordinarily long eyelashes

# 9 ? The popular boy dating the dorky heroine to make his former girlfriend jealous, and then breaking the heroine?s heart

# 8 ? The diary, either as the entire format, or the occasional entry

# 7 ? Fingernail biting

# 6 ? Characters who chew on their lip or tongue in times of stress ? usually until they taste blood

# 5 ? Raising one eyebrow

# 4 ? Main characters who want to be writers

# 3 ? Calling parents by their first names

# 2 ? Best friends with red hair*

And the number one thing found in YA novels?
#1 ? Lists

*While lists rule in teen fiction, red-haired best friends are amazingly predominant in both MG and YA, and certainly gave ?lists? a run for its money. It might be an easy way to quickly identify a secondary character, but it?s a lot more common in books than red hair actually is!

Article and comments here

[UnquietDad]

eek, don't know why all the apostrophes turned into big ugly question-marks. They weren't like that when I Previewed. sorry!

[BettySpaghetti]

Its a long time since I read a young adult book but I don't remember that much teenage angst in them.

Who'd be a teenager eh?

Please tell me theres another list of positive things that crop up equally as often.

[UnquietDad]

I think the idea was that this was the list not of "bad" things necessarily, but things writers feel they are being "unique" by putting in, but are not.

Thing is, some of these are realistic. It's quite reasonable to think that, if you had a gang of kids from DD's school, there might be one with red hair and one with black skin. And some teenagers do keep diaries...