Stevens, Elizabeth. Keeping Up Appearances.

Adelaide, South Australia: Sleeping Dragon Books, 2018.

I discovered Stevens a few months ago via her most recent YA rom-coms, The Roommate Mistake and The Art of Breaking Up, and I was sufficiently impressed by them that I went looking for her earlier work. This one isn’t as sophisticated as the later two, and it depends on the somewhat cliched trope of fake dating, but even there, the author handles it in an original way. She also digs deep into the personalities of the two protagonists and makes them come alive in a way that not many YA novelists can pull off.

Mosqueda, Andrea. Just Your Local Bisexual Disaster.

NY: Macmillan, 2022.

The author is a Chicana and a native of Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, which is also the setting of this beautifully written YA novel. She’s also some variety of non-straight, and she now lives in NYC, which starts out being the protagonist’s target college destination, so she’s writing very much from experience. She’s an assistant editor somewhere in the publishing world, so she also knows her way around words, but given that this is her first published work of fiction, it’s amazingly well written, with often striking prose, multidimensional characters, and a sophisticated eye for the look and social feel of the Valley, especially as experienced by its younger inhabitants.

Stevens, Elizabeth. The Art of Breaking Up.

Tranmere, South Australia: Sleeping Dragon Books, 2021.

I recently read The Roommate Mistake by Stevens and quite enjoyed it. Both that one and this one are YA rom-coms set in South Australia (where Stevens hails from) and both delve far deeper into the characters’ lives and thoughts and the context of the social world in which they move than most romantic novels written for teenagers. So, there are two principal players, Norah Lincoln and Wade Phillips, both high school seniors, plus Lisa, Norah’s longtime best friend and the largely unwitting catalyst for most of the plot. There was a time when they were younger when the three of them were close friends. Then romance blossomed and Wade and Lisa became A Thing. For a while.

Oh, Axie. XOXO.

NY: HarperCollins, 2021.

When, as an American, you read a YA rom-com (or any other contemporary novel, really) set in another country, it usually works much better when the author is very familiar with that place as well as with the U.S. That’s the case here and the result is rather above the average. Axie Oh is first-generation Korean-American, a native of New York City with an MFA and now living in Las Vegas, and she’s also passionate about K-pop, which is the focus of the plot. The extremely successful Korean version of popular music is quite different from what’s produced for younger fans in the West, with talented adolescent singers and dancers being recruited, educated, and trained for years by big music corporations before they’re organized into carefully balanced groups and sent out onto the public stage to make money.

Stevens, Elizabeth. The Roommate Mistake.

Adelaide, South Australia: Sleeping Dragon Books, 2018.

This author, who is new to me, but who has written a couple dozen YA rom-coms before this one, is a native of Adelaide, Australia’s fifth-largest city, and the Acacia Academy, a fictitious boarding school where this one is set, is somewhere in the Outback a five-hour drive from there. Elliott Hopkins is seventeen and has spent two years in a perfectly good public high school, but then her father (for whom she was named) died and her grandparents insisted on paying for her to attend Acadia, his alma mater. She’s an introverted, rather nerdish kid (she plans to be a swamp witch when she grows up), and she loves learning, and Acacia is regarded as one of the best schools in the country, so off she goes.

Jean, Emiko. Ever After / Tokyo Dreaming.

NY: Flatiron Books, 2021.

NY: Flatiron Books, 2022.

I’ve read a couple of YA rom-coms in which an American teenager gets involved with a young male royal — the younger son of the Crown Prince of Scotland, or the heir to some tiny Alpine princedom, or whatever — and I had a lot of trouble getting into them because of the whole fictitious country thing. It just kind of kills my suspension of disbelief right off the bat. At first glance, these two — the original and its sequel — seem to be in the same ball park, but they’re actually pretty good, and also a lot more credible. (Really.) The primary character is Izumi Tanaka, born and raised in the shadow of Mount Shasta by her single mother (a college biology professor), and now in her senior year of high school. On her mother’s side,’s she’s sansei — third-generation Japanese-American — but on her father’s side? She has no idea, because her mother refuses to say anything about Dad, except that he was a Japanese exchange student and they were both seniors at Harvard together, and they had a one-night stand, and then he was gone again before her mother found out she was pregnant. And Izumi has always been told it doesn’t matter anyway, but of course she really wants to know who her father is.

Castle, Jennifer. Together at Midnight.

NY: HarperCollins, 2018.

A large number of YA rom-coms are on the fluffy side, recycling the standard tropes — falling for your best friend, fake dating, competing for the cheer squad — and that’s okay. Everyone needs a little fluff. But some authors prefer to get into deeper emotional issues, and Castle is good at that. The young people she writes about and the situations and problems they are forced to deal with will stay with you long after you’re finished the book. She does this quite subtly, too, and without slighting the romance factor.

Hiaasen, Carl. Hoot.

NY: Knopf, 2002.

Hiaasen is known for his darkly funny crime capers, but it turns out he also is capable of equally funny yarns for adolescent readers, and he’s done half a dozen of them now. I recently read Wrecker, his latest one, and that drove me to go back and re-read this one, his first, which won him a Newberry Medal. Like all his books, it’s set in his native Florida, though Roy, the main character, is a recent transplant from Montana, and he really misses the mountains. (South Florida is just so flat.)

Halpin, Brendan. Donorboy.

NY: Open Road, 2004.

Halpin has several adult and YA novels to his credit, a couple of which have won awards, but I had previously only read Notes from the Blender (with Trisha Cook), which I really liked. This one is also a “teens with problems” story (because “teens whose life is perfect” would make for a pretty boring story), the focus being fourteen-year-old Rosalind Butterfield of Boston, who suddenly finds herself a semi-orphan. Her two gay moms were killed when a truck loaded with turduckens rolled on their car, and now she’s living with Sean Cassidy, a lawyer in his mid-thirties, who was the sperm donor (he was a close friend of both women, even though they were rather older) and therefore, technically, her father, though she’s never seen him before. But his name was on her birth certificate, so there she is.

Lenoir, Axelle. Camp Spirit.

San Diego: Top Shelf Productions, 2020.

This is one of the weirder graphic novels I’ve read in a while, but it’s also one of the most original and best written, and the art’s pretty good, too. The setting is a summer camp on a forested lake some whee in the wilds of Quebec (where the author lives), and the main character is Elodie Lariviere, whose mother is making her work there as a counselor for six weeks. (For the discipline, and also to earn some money for college next year.) Elodie is not an outdoorsy sort of person, and she’s not that that crazy about young kids, either, and the other counselors are mostly losers, also from her school, including Catherine (“little Miss Perfect”), who will be important to the story. Elodie ends up with a group of six young redheaded girls who turn out to be a handful, but her untutored methods of keeping them all in line and out of trouble earns their admiration and loyalty.