Half of the Young Adult books avail­able make me lit­er­ally want to bash my head in out of empa­thetic embarass­ment for the author. Obvi­ously, I’m not a writer — but I am the tar­get audi­ence, so my opin­ions are half rel­e­vant. So, I’ve writ­ten a list of nine (of the many) things that seper­ate a good YA novel from a bad YA novel.

The writing

Excel­lent exam­ples of how not to write a YA novel are (pre­dictably) Twi­light and Eragon.

Inter­tex­tu­al­ity

Ref­er­ences to mod­ern cul­ture. Eg. “I lis­tened to Lady Gaga’s lat­est song”. You never know, Lady Gaga might do a Char­lie Sheen in the next two years. No one will take that line seri­ously then. Plus, it makes the 40ish-year-old author look like they’re try­ing to be ‘hip’ and relate to teenagers.

Unnec­es­sary Descriptions

Indepth para­graphs about a char­ac­ters cloth­ing. For exam­ple, in Dark­fever (Karen Marie Mon­ing).

“What I had on was a lus­cious gauzy skirt of nearly every pas­tel hue on the color wheel that hugged my hips and kicked frothiliy at my ankles, a form-fitting rose sweater with silk trimmed cap sleeves and a plung­ing silk edged neck­line that made much of my bust and dainty pink high heels that laced around my ankles. The color went stun­ningly with my sun-kissed skin and dark curls.”

To me, that out­fit sounds ridicu­lous — which is the first rea­son why authors shouldn’t explain out­fits. Also, no one wants to read an extremely descrip­tive para­graph about what a char­ac­ter is wear­ing. It’s bor­ing unless it’s some­how related to the plot. “a fit­ted black dress” would be enough to sat­isfy my imaginination.

Bor­ing Characters

No one likes, or can relate to a Mary sue. Flaws are what make a char­ac­ter interesting!

Awk­ward Talents

I dont know if this only applies to me, but main char­ac­ters that write ‘poetry’ or oth­er­wise mean­ing­ful pieces of text, make me want to kill myself. Espe­cially if the poetry’s bad. Eg. Gen­er­a­tion Dead.

Sex, Drugs and Alcohol

Teenagers being sucked in to the party scene with reper­cus­sions such as; death, gen­eral tragedy, men­tal asy­lums, pros­ti­tu­tion, etc are over­done. Some­one who doesn’t read often might find the story inter­est­ing, but any avid teenage reader will have read at least 3–4 books with a very sim­i­lar sto­ry­line. Eg. Go Ask Alice (I get that this book is writ­ten by Beat­rice Sparks, and isn’t ‘an anony­mous auto­bi­og­ra­phy’, but it was still aimed at young readers)

Bad end­ings

Stu­pid end­ings are stu­pid. An author needs to tie up all loose ends, and answer every ques­tion orig­i­nally asked before end­ing a book. If any­one has read the Wake series by Lisa Mcmann, (Don’t read the next few sen­te­ces if you haven’t, spoil­ers) the way Mcmann let us grow attached to the main char­ac­ter, only to find out that (in the end) she’s faced with a future of poten­tial blindness/disabilities and doesn’t find any cure, seems point­less. It just leaft us unful­filled, with way too many ques­tions about the future of the characters.

Ten­sion

Build­ing ten­sion between char­ac­ters needs to be done right for the whole rela­tion­ship to not look petty. No intel­li­gent teenager is going to accept pro­fes­sions of love between char­ac­ters after a week of meeting.

Book Genre

No more books should be writ­ten about vam­pires in the near future, unless they’re com­pletely unre­cy­cled and have no rela­tion to twi­light in any sense. Same applies to books about angels. Angel books are nearly always too reli­gious, lame, white and fluffy, etc.