051: I'm Publishing a Book! + Some Thoughts on YA Romance

Or, I read a thing and I have feelings about it! Again!

Hi everyone,

First things first, I have a huge announcement that I can finally make: I’m publishing a book! 🎉

Late last year, an editor from PA Press in New York approached me to write a book based on the Unruly Figures podcast. It will include several profiles of historical rule-breakers and revolutionaries that I’ve never talked about on the podcast. I’m so excited to finally be able to announce this; it’s a life-long dream finally come true.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to the Unruly Figures substack to get more book updates:

I’m so close to 500 subscribers there that I can taste it. I’m going to do some kind of celebration when I get to 500, but I haven’t decided what that will be yet. If you have ideas, drop them in the comments or hit reply to send me an email.

Usually, I would post an interview today, but I’m pushing things back a week because in the chaos of the last few weeks I haven’t had time to transcribe the most recent interview I’ve done. Posts will be back to regularly scheduled programming starting next week.

I’m in Dallas as I write this; I have been for almost a week and will be for a week more. I haven’t spent this much time here since I moved away in 2016, and it feels strange to me to spend so much time here. On the one hand, I forgot how unbearably hot it is in the summer; I can’t believe I grew up running around outside all day in these temperatures. Now I step out and it feels like the reflection of the sun from the pavement is scorching my skin. Truthfully, I’ve spent most of my time here hiding inside, reading and writing.

Normally I don’t make book reviews the entirety of an entry here, but today I really really want to talk about a trend in YA fiction that I’m wondering if you’ve all noticed.

Really quickly, I’m going to define YA fiction as books written for and marketed to people aged 14-21. The standard definition is like 12-18, but that was set in stone a while ago and the trend has seen this genre of books getting darker and darker, which I think tilts it a little older today. Okay, let’s hop in!

Image credit.

I have been reading A LOT lately, including the entire Grisha universe created by Leigh Bardugo.

The seven novels (plus two short stories) are set in a world that seems to resemble turn-of-the-20th century Russia but with ~magic~ that has radically changed the region’s culture from what we know. And yet… A terrifying and self-serving priest has too much influence over the royal family, the impoverished serfs are ready to rebel, and Pseudo-China and pseudo-Scandinavia nearby are ready to invade at a moment’s notice.

Against that backdrop is your classic YA struggle: Some youths must save the world from one corrupt monster and all the adults around them are incompetent. This time it starts in Shadow and Bone with 17-year-old Alina Starkov, a girl who once suppressed her magic to stay near her best friend (who she is in love with but who doesn’t see her that way). When her magic is revealed—she has the power to create light—she is worshipped as the Sun Saint, the perfect foil to the Darkling, a man who can create darkness. What looks like a triumph at the end of the initial trilogy is revealed to be a Pyrrhic victory, and the characters in the next two duologies have to go on to continue the war Alina gave up everything for.

It’s fantastic. I mean it. The author, Leigh Bardugo, is a mesmerizing storyteller and the characters feel so real. In the seven novels, she manages to bring to life an enormous cast of characters and three (ish) kingdoms with distinct cultures. When they go to war, I completely believe everyone is genuinely invested, and the many geopolitical decisions being made each ring true. In a series of seven books, there isn’t a misstep that renders things unbelievable (that I can remember, at least).

My only gripe with the series is that, once again, a young girl must pick between two boys (or three) that she’s attracted to on her path to saving the world. And of course, whichever boy she picks is symbolically the life she’s picking; her future hinges on this choice. Naturally, she will also remain with the boy she picks at 17 for the rest of her life! Very normal! Such usual!

On the one hand, I can get on board with a girl in her late teens flitting from love interest to love interest like a bee among flowers. So often that behavior is seen as the province of boys, who are “safer” having lots of flirtations and sexual exploits before settling down. I don’t have the patience today to break down the long and problematic history of this, but the ingredients in the recipe include purity culture, pregnancy fears, the old misogynistic belief that women don’t enjoy sex or experience attraction the same way men do, and tried-and-boring romance tropes of being the “perfect girl” who “gets” the guy to settle down. So it’s kind of nice to see a 17-year-old who is entering that stage of her life lean into it a little, kissing whoever she wants whenever she wants. If this happened in real life, Alina would be called “boy crazy” (at best), but think about it: We never call boys “girl crazy.”

On the other hand, the way it’s played out here still diminishes a girl’s entire life to who she marries. It is the most important choice Alina makes: Will she choose the bad guy, who she has intense chemistry with, or will she choose the good guy, who she’s loved since childhood? Which one she chooses literally chooses the fate of the entire world. (There’s also a third option: To marry the very hot king guy who will give her security and power, but it’s the most quickly dismissed.) In the end, Alina still only ever has sex with the boy she ends up marrying, and still only on the eve of their final battle, and still they are both punished for it the next day! (And we all know how I feel about that trope.) Even here, where there’s no Christian purity culture to explain this behavior, the story is still hemmed in by those values.

Why? To what end?

Here’s why it drives me crazy: Stories about boys don’t have this trope.

In His Dark Materials, the male protagonist Will Parry doesn’t fall victim to this trope.

In The Kingkiller Chronicles, the male protagonist Kvothe doesn’t fall victim to this trope.

In Harry Potter, the male protagonist Harry Potter (ha) doesn’t fall victim to this trope.

In fact, the King of Scars duology in this very universe doesn’t fall victim to this trope! King Nikolai Lantsov (the aforementioned king Alina was attracted to) is the main character of these two books, and though he has to deal with loving a woman he can’t be with because of their respective ranks, there’s no one else he’s attracted to, no one else he wants to be with. He doesn’t have to choose between anyone. Instead, because he’s a king he knows he’ll probably have to marry some anonymous princess for political reasons, and the romantic tension comes from watching him and his love interest pine after each other because they can’t be together. His life—his country, the universe—does not rest on his decision of who to marry.

I have several theories about why, but I don’t like any of them. The saddest of them all is that YA authors still haven’t figured out how to write a girl who has bigger concerns than who she marries. The fabric of the actual dang universe is tearing around Alina and the answer lies in who she wants to sleep with for the rest of her life? Come on.

Another theory is a little more complicated. I think this trope, consciously written or unconsciously, speaks to what YA fantasy authors think their audience—mostly teen girls—want to read. Normal, yes? But I wonder if YA fantasy authors think this is the only way girls want to read about girls experiencing crushes. Teen girls do, as I mentioned earlier, flit from crush to crush like a bee among flowers. In YA fantasy, they get to watch a heroine be attracted to two (or three) boys and pick between them. It plays on their nascent vanity—who doesn’t want to have their pick of the litter, this trope seems to ask. Because it’s never just anyone that the female protagonists are picking between, right? Alina literally picks between the most unique boy in the universe (it’s a long story), the most powerful Grisha (magician) on earth, and an actual king who moonlights as a pirate. Also, they’re all ridiculously hot (but Alina is average and her ~specialness~ comes from her ~power~).

Netfliix’s adaptation still has Alina (middle) picking between Mal (left) and the Darkling (right). Photo source.

I need to pause for a big sigh here.

What these stories, consciously or unconsciously, are saying is that even “plain” girls get to have their Bachelorette moment. I think it might be coming from a place of assuring girls, “Boys will like you too. And even if they don’t see it now, because you’re “plain,” they’ll see your power (insert: intelligence, compassion, personality, strength, whatever) eventually and love you then. Any boy would be lucky to have you and someday you’ll get to pick between them all!”

And hey, I think there’s something good buried in there. Beauty isn’t everything (for the girls), and everyone finds their person.

But also? I’m gagging. Because the same audience exists for YA books featuring male protagonists. (Seriously—girls are the ones reading books about boys, especially YA, and especially fantasy. Deloitte did a big study about this. Boys simply don’t read in the same numbers that girls do. Obviously, none of these studies take into account non-binaries, so please take all of this with that in mind.) And so we can look at the fact that male protagonists don’t fall victim to this trope as a referendum on how YA authors (mostly women) think their young female audiences want boys to behave.

I think that we don’t see boys pick between several love interests in YA fantasy books because authors think (correctly or incorrectly) that girls won’t want to read that. They think that girls want the fantasy of the boy who falls in love with them and holds onto that love come hell or high water. Boys picking between two (or three) girls would look a little too like boys juggling multiple dates, like the old belief that boys can sow their wild oats while girls need to wait patiently for marriage. Boys flitting from crush to crush, boys having their pick of the litter, boys getting to be plain and end up with any of three amazing girls is all too close to reality. This is escapist fiction, dammit! The girls have to win!

It’s a weird double-standard and reversal of real life, right?

I’m not sure what “the solution” is here, if there even is one. Should more YA fantasy have the fate of the world rest on whether a boy decides he wants to be with x blonde or y brunette? Should more YA fantasy allow a girl to have bigger problems than which of the cute boys around her she wants to flirt with? Should we in the real world do away with tired gender stereotypes about the relative romantic and sexual freedoms of boys versus girls?

Probably all of that, yeah. Also, I wouldn’t mind if we just did away with this trope entirely. As I mentioned, I would be okay never reading another story of a teenager who spends their life with whoever they were dating at 17. Maybe that’s just me?

Another tired sigh for the writer, please.

Okay, I know I just spent eleventy thousand paragraphs (but only 2000 words, you do the math) complaining about a facet of this series, but it’s actually very good! I only get this worked up about something if I love it; if I hate a thing I just ignore it. So if you’re into YA fantasy, check out all of Leigh Bardugo’s work. There’s also a Netflix adaptation that I’ve heard good things about, though I haven’t watched it yet.

I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat. 

I’ve been writing a TON lately, including several pieces I’m pretty proud of. In Fresh Cup, you can read about the beguiling promise of a 1 euro espresso. In ROADBOOK, the first issue of my new column about queer travel will be coming out later this week. Check back here for more.

Finally, I’m planning to start up the fiction prompts again which fell to the wayside back in April. You can check out some of the past ones still!

If you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links! That just means if you click through a buy a book, I’ll get a few cents of profit but it won’t cost any more for you.