I just read The Finishing Touches by Hester Browne. It’s solid English chick lit of the best kind, but as I read it I couldn’t help thinking about how many YA themes it touched upon.
The story centers around London’s last remaining finishing school, tracking girls from the 1980s and girls from the present, when the school is basically crumbling with an all-time enrollment low.
Finishing school is supposed to take place during a young woman’s “gap year,” the year she takes off between high school and college. Which means many of the characters are in their teens. Others, of course, are in their mid to late twenties, which seems these days to be the barrier between YA and non-YA.
The thing is, I think a lot of women in their late twenties go through a second adolescence of sorts. We have careers, learn how to cook and clean for ourselves, pay bills. But, at least in my social circle, suddenly everyone is pairing off (for life!), and there tends to be a lot of jealousy. Also a lot of “Who am I?” sort of questioning. When you’re twenty-five to thirty, if you aren’t sure of your career yet, that’s when you go back to school or start a new job. That’s when you say, “Forget it! I’m joining a book club so I can make some new friends!”
This particular novel deals with the “Who am I?” question more than most, because one of the main story lines centers around a twenty-seven-year-old woman trying to find out who her birth parents are.
But the other day I was reading a YA novel that wasn’t about high school, and I realized the line has blurred. Nowadays I keep wanting to say that good literature is for teens, and so all good books should go on the YA shelves. (Obviously not quite fair for the adults, but my reaction is one of, “Oh, you’re stuck in the plain old fiction and literature section, eh? How do you expect anyone to find you there?”)
Right. So there are books for teens that aren’t necessarily about teens. What do you define as YA? What are some books that are close, but don’t quite fit the bill?
Want to hear something gross? Of course you do. So there’s this book Gentlemen, which has been sitting next to my bathtub for … quite awhile now. I’ve read it three or four times, (generally in the tub) and I was planning to do something big when I reviewed it.
Alas, I did not get to the NYC teen author reading last night, due to getting caught up in other work.
Liam Geller is handsome. Well-dressed. Popular. Also: a perennial troublemaker. Always saying something that upsets his father, or getting himself into a scrape. Like hooking up with a girl on his father’s desk.