YA New York

I’m a bit late. Okay, a lot late. The horrible decade that was the 2000s has been over for several weeks now. But I have a lot to say about the really good stuff that happened in that soon-to-be-forgotten decade.

The best thing that happened, if you ask me, is that young adult literature exploded. You can walk into almost any Barnes and Noble now and find a whole section devoted to YA fiction.

I don’t imagine I’ll be able to write this all in one sitting, so I’m just going to start at the beginning, which for me was Gossip Girl.

It was 2003, I think, when I was working at a small daily paper in southern Connecticut, that an editor dropped a stack of Gossip Girl novels on my desk. I worked for the city desk, meaning I mostly wrote obits and covered breaking news stories about important happenings, like the local post office getting its own little postal ATM.

But Jim, the amazing and wonderful features editor, knew I had better things to do with my time. Like read Cecily von Ziegesar’s highly addictive and seriously trashy novels about wealthy teenaged girls on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Cecily, when I met her, took umbrage at my calling her books “trashy.” But I meant it in a good way. What she wrote wasn’t saccharine sweet, like the Sweet Valley High and Babysitters Club books I had grown up reading. No, Cecily ventured into dangerous territory. She wrote about booze and drugs and sex and fashion and the general cattiness of New York’s upper crust. (more…)