For the past three years I’ve helped judge the romantic novel of the year award, selecting books such as Veronica Henry’s elegant Night on the Orient Express or Jenny Colgan’s delicious Welcome to Rosie Hopkin’s Sweetshop of Dreams – books that could not only be gobbled down in a matter of hours, but also really swept us off our feet.
This year’s winner had the intriguing countenance of some handsome stranger. Despite strong contenders from the adult side – including Lucy Dillon’s A Hundred Pieces of Me, and Lucy-Anne Holmes’s Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy – Julia Golding triumphed with her young adult novel Struck, written under the pen name Joss Stirling.
Now, I am by no means a YA snob – I loved Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy – but these days most of my YA reading is revisiting Diana Wynne Jones, Tamora Pierce or Alan Garner. There are quite enough books written for grown ups for me to get my head around.
But Struck – I just loved it. Set in a posh boarding school, it stars the phenomenally named Raven Stone, a mixed-race teenager who finds herself inexplicably ostracised and bullied by her fellow students, even her former best friend – and all seemingly with the teachers’ approval. The only people who’ll talk to her are the new boys, Joe Masters and Kieran Storm – what names! We soon learn they’re spies, part of the Young Detective Agency, out to discover why the high-powered parents of a number of children at the school appear to be making a series of dangerous decisions, and why kids keep disappearing and coming back with entirely different personalities.
Kieran is socially inept but brilliant. “So you are, what? Sherlock Holmes’s love child?” asks Raven. Raven is funny and tough and vulnerable. An orphan, she wears clothes from Oxfam, and has a lovely grandfather who’s the school caretaker (another reason she’s ostracised). The whole book is bursting with energy – it’s fun and fresh and exuberant and, yes, romantic, as this unlikely pair fall for each other.
So I was thoroughly swept away by it – but it did surprise me that when we went looking for the most romantic novel of the year, we found it in YA.
Golding points to a swing away from the “explicit erotica that is also holding sway over a large part of the market”, citing the more refined appeal of classics such as Pride and Prejudice.
“If characters have no rules they need to obey, there is no mystery, no sensuality, really,” she says. “I think Twilight was popular for a similar reason – Edward was a study in restraint.”
The Joss Stirling novels are aimed at the younger end of the teen market, she explains, so she naturally focuses on the emotional side. “And there is also a playfulness of youth – Raven and Kieran get a lot of contact in dance classes and self-defence lessons – a kind of sneaking off with the boyfriend for a kiss that many of us did as teens, so hopefully it triggers some lovely memories or associations.”
By thinking first of her audience, she managed to almost totally avoid the pressures of genre, Golding adds.
“I was writing a young detective thriller that examines social pressures in an extreme form – it becomes a kind of brainwashing. This is a little satirical, of course, while seriously meant in terms of the plot. As my characters are so young, the logic of the story is not to end with wedding bells, but a modern partnership working together – the kind of guys who will stay together at uni – today’s test of any teen relationship.
“This all sounds a little too overthought. What was really going on was that I was projecting myself back into a teen mind and having the kind of relationship with a young Sherlock type that I would have loved to have had!”
Our own resident YA expert, Imogen Russell Williams, tends to agree. “I’m not surprised to hear that YA novels are now serious contenders for adult prizes, especially when it comes to romance,” she says. “Love in YA is often first love – the stakes high, the participants overwhelmed by unprecedented feeling – and humour, embarrassment and uncynical joy can deliver a knock-out punch.”
Russell Williams says that “standout recent YA love stories include the heartbreaking The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson, Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison’s hilarious Lobsters, and Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park”. Pia Fenton, chair of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, points to the authors Sarra Manning, Keren David, Sarah Dessen and Melissa Marr.
My to-read pile is tottering already, but I can’t wait to find the time for all these authors, as well as Stirling’s follow-up to Struck, Stung. Happy days.
