Young adult books: a celebration of diversity

These recent releases in young adult books show the voice of the straight white male is not the genre’s only one.

Another Day

Diversity and difference are strong themes in recent books for young adults. Authors from Australia and overseas are highlighting characters from various ethnic backgrounds and with different sexual orientations. Some also integrate disability and, occasionally, religious belief.

In Green Valentine (Allen & Unwin, 288pp, $16.99) Melbourne-based Lili Wilkinson writes from the viewpoint of a “Missolini … those alpha popular girls at school who think they’re better than everyone else”. Astrid is a “gold ten” in the rating-dating system she and her best friends, Queen Bee Paige and gay Indian Dev, devised. How could Astrid’s relationship with a “brown six”, the “anti-establishment” Japanese-Italian Hiro, possibly work? It’s an archetypal nice girl meets bad boy story.

When Hiro is assigned to work in Astrid’s school kitchen garden for detention, he doesn’t realise she is the girl he likes but has only seen dressed up in a lobster suit saving the Margaret River hairy marron. Astrid doesn’t admit who she is and things become more complicated and laugh-out-loud funny when Hiro asks her for dating advice. The date’s an epic fail.

Their first real date is as unconventional and magical as a mismatched couple with similar environmental beliefs could have. Their summer evenings become a surreal surfeit of planting and growing, “bewildering” and beautifying their ugly suburb of Valentine into an urban Eden. Others notice their guerilla gardening. Some copy, others misappropriate it.

Astrid changes. She realises her methods may have been alienating and that “I’d spent so long trying to save the world, [I] hadn’t paid any attention to the people around me”. She’s less Romeo and Juliet and more Pride and Prejudice.

Joking about superheroes and their secret identities accentuates the truth of Astrid and Hiro’s relationship. Even though Hiro “sees” her, it’s hard to be a superhero with a mask.

American writer David Levithan also explores a hidden relationship in Another Day (Text, 330pp, $19.99). This is the companion volume to The New York Times bestseller Every Day. One protagonist, who names himself “A”, wakes up in a different 16-year-old body every day. It may belong to a male, female, transgender or other person. The story is told from A’s point-of-view in Every Day; in Another Day it’s told from the point of view of Rhiannon, the girl with whom A falls in love and has a secret relationship after inhabiting her exploitative boyfriend’s body for a day.

The story is almost the same in each book: incidents and characters reappear, but the different viewpoints create fascinating alternative perspectives. It’s worth reading the books back-to-back.

Rhiannon is a quiet girl living in Justin’s shadow who does whatever he wants to keep him happy. She connects with A. Like Hiro in Green Valentine, A “sees” who Rhiannon really is. He convinces her of his core identity by his kindness and integrity: he has a rule of “do no damage” to the lives and bodies he occupies.

A’s different bodies seem to make it impossible for him to be with Rhiannon. One day he is footballer; another day he is a geek, or a suicidal girl, or a gay, or a beautiful mixed-race guy, or a Beyonce lookalike. Rhiannon is influenced by his physical appearance. She knows people make assumptions about her and others because of their appearance.

The heart, mind and spirit of a person should be far more important than their appearance. Brisbane writer Robert Hoge has learned and expressed this in his memoir for adults, which has now been adapted for younger readers: Ugly (Hachette, 186pp, $16.99).

Hoge is a bright spirit. He is resilient and intelligent, and has worked as a journalist, speechwriter and CSIRO science communicator. He has appeared on ABC TV’s Australian Story and carried the Olympic torch in 2000.

He describes his appearance as clay, asking readers to imagine they sculpt a perfect face, which is then ruined by a clay ball spreading the perfect nose across the face, pushing the eyes too far apart and spoiling the head shape.

When he was born his mother distanced herself but soon became his fiercest advocate, along with his supportive older siblings and father. He realised early he would have to “work smart” and that, despite being caned for messy writing, “what my words meant and said were more important than how they looked”.

Hoge’s writing is strewn with interesting anecdotes told matter-of-factly. Some are humorous, such as having his artificial leg welded at the service station when it snapped. The words of others, though, could be scarring. Some nicknames were malicious and one principal sullies Hoge’s memories of schoolteachers.

Hoge is realistic about people’s frailties and shortcomings: “Some of the best talks … started with someone asking, ‘This might seem rude, but can I ask about your face / nose / scars / bumps?’ Acknowledging someone’s differences can be about saying you’re not scared to talk ...”

He grew up in hospital recognising that all the kids there were diverse, and surely has been able to write such a heart-wrenching yet heart-lifting and empowering memoir because of his attitude towards difference.

Hoge has artificial legs. Walking is difficult. The title of James Moloney’s new novel, The Beauty is in the Walking(Angus & Robertson, 248pp, $16.99), encompasses Hoge’s story as well as that of Moloney’s protagonist, Jacob.

Jacob has cerebral palsy. He’s unsteady on his feet and spits sometimes when he speaks. His older brother advises him on how to treat girls well but Jacob knows they look at him differently and is surprised when Amy seems to like him and suggests a secret relationship. Hidden romance is a trend in the books reviewed here but Amy’s attitude may not be as genuine as Astrid or Rhiannon’s.

Brisbane-based Moloney has crafted a mystery in Jacob’s regional district. Animals are being killed. Jacob tries to find the perpetrator but the locals blame a Muslim boy. This leads to victimisation of his family, fanned by social media and then the print media: “What’s printed in the paper is what people believe.” Whether or not that’s true, other texts also come into play.

The Year 12 English class is studying Arthur Miler’s The Crucible, a pivotal text about persecution; and a Muslim girl likens Jacob to Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Jacob also feels restless like Truman in The Truman Show. He needs to escape. The English teacher champions Jacob when he recognises his increasing aptitude. The teacher’s clarity of language is also a feature of Moloney’s writing.

And so while the voice of the straight white male does live on, the authors reviewed here have also intrinsically included the physically disabled; the non-Anglo character; the straight, gay or other person; and the girl as well as the boy. YA literature is recognising diversity.