Many of you will probably know that as well as being a writer I’m a publisher. One of my tasks it to look at submissions and decide whether we should go ahead and publish a book.
I reject quite a few submitted to The Red Telephone, our YA imprint. Often these are novels of the right length, are well written and have a fabulous premise. And yet they’re still not quite right. And the main reason for that is the voice.
YA will often use a first person narrative but this works slightly different from the way it does in works written for adults or even for slightly younger readers. In these two cases there is far too much of the protagonist having had the growth and talking about it with the full knowledge of what has actually happened.
In many such cases the close third person actually works better.
The first person voice often used in YA is rather that of one friend talking to another. That conversation is an invite to the friend to help figure out what has happened / is happening. Of course present tense often works well for this but it has to be really well done; it mustn’t sound as if someone is walking around with a notepad in their hand.
My PhD thesis identified seven characteristics of the young adult novel. I’m not going to list them here. Go read the thesis. https://research.bangor.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/peace-child--towards-a-global-definition-of-the-young-adult-novel(70c88915-68c2-46a8-925d-2446254dcb3b).html
Is this perhaps an eighth? Or does that voice become necessary in order to render the other seven effective. It may even just be part of number seven: reader control.
Take a look at a few young adult novels and let me know what you think.
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