One of the reasons I enjoy writing in the young adult genre so much is because I love the intensity and chaos of this particular time in a person’s life. Along with heightened emotions and swirling hormones comes falling in and out of love. Sometimes falling in and out of love happens with the same person and other times it happens with a bunch of different people. While love follows no rules and love-related tropes exist for a reason, I have to admit I’m not personally a fan of the instalove trope. Just so we’re clear, I don’t dislike the instalove trope because I don’t believe it’s possible. 

I know love at first sight is very real. 

I’ve experienced it myself.

I will never forget the first time I saw Cameron, the man I’m now married to. He walked into a room, our gazes locked, and I felt like his blue-grey eyes saw all the way into the depths of my soul (I know, feel free to groan or vomit or stop reading). There was undoubtedly an instant connection, but the timing was completely wrong. I’d just started a rigorous doctorate program, and he was recently divorced with two young children. While we both wished things were different, it was clear the universe had other plans, and we lost touch when I left California and moved to the East Coast for internship. Ten years passed, but I never forgot him. I couldn’t help occasionally wondering, “What if?” even though it was a pointless exercise because that part of my life was over and done with, never to be revisited again. I mean, honestly, who gets a second chance at true love a decade later? This is my life, not a romance novel. 

Or so I thought. 

In 2017 I said goodbye to my tenure-track academic position and moved back to California, determined to address my mental health needs and follow my heart by giving the book I was working on a chance to come to life. I also let those “What if?” thoughts occupy a little more space in my brain and reconnected with Cameron on social media, just to see if perhaps that connection from so long ago was still there.

I’m happy to say the connection was still there, and the timing was finally right for the relationship we both wanted. Cameron and I have been together for six years now, and being with my instalove has taught me a lot about relationships.

So many people think instalove is the end, when really, it’s just the beginning. Yes, it certainly makes things easier when you’re wildly in love with your partner, but being in love doesn’t automatically mean you know how to be in a relationship together. Relationships take time…you need time to get to know your partner, and they need time to get to know you. So, maybe it’s not the instalove trope per se I’m against…it’s the sense that love conquers all and love is enough and all you need is love and once you find your person everything else will magically fall into place.

One of the things I made a point to focus on in my books, “Reign Returned” and “Blood Divided,” was the relationship between my main characters, Kyra and Sebastian. They’re unquestionably fated soulmates, but what next? How do they navigate the individual lives they’ve built now that they’re in a relationship? How do they create new traditions together? How do they allow themselves to be vulnerable and how do they effectively communicate their needs to one another? These are the questions I’m most interested in exploring in my writing (probably due to my psychology background), and I hope it provides readers with ideas for how to make their own present or future relationships stronger. 

This is absolutely not a knock against the instalove trope itself. Plenty of readers love it, and if you’re one of them, good for you! Always read what makes you happy. I just think it’s important to know that love isn’t the end…it’s actually the beginning, and where a relationship goes from there is completely up to the people involved.

 When I was 20, so a bit older than the typical target YA reader, I fell into a mad-love relationship: love at first sight, international borders, nuclear submarines, the Persian Gulf and even an impact from U.S. President Nixon’s death. (Okay, I’m romanticizing my romance: I was a Canadian university student dating an American serving in the U.S. Navy, during which time he was deployed overseas). But though there was no political intrigue, there were hours-long phone calls, cross-border get-aways, helium happiness and utterly, wrenching heartbreak. For all the drama and intensity, what we had was real.

But it wasn’t my happily-ever-after. If I’d been writing a romance, I would have left the story at our run-into-each-other-arms-moment when we’d survived the catastrophes of our young love. Except real life intruded. His needs and mine conflicted. Borders, submarines and the impossibility of making it work won out. 

When we read YA literature—whether it’s about romance or not—we always want the best for our protagonists. Obviously. We’re in their story with them. We feel what they feel. And of course, we so desperately want for them what we want for ourselves: everything working out in the end. 

What I love about YA literature is that often we do get some sort of satisfactory resolution. But what I also love about YA literature is how often we then pick up the sequel (or sequels) and dive right back into the lives of the characters we love so much—only to see them hurt and heal again. 

That’s life. That’s what YA readers understand. We want more and more and more of our favourite characters, but we also know we won’t be getting more and more and more of (boring) bliss, and that helps us better prepare for whatever is around the corner for us. 

 Take The Last Huntress, (2022) written by my friend Lenore Borja. We meet Alice, a teen whose life suddenly takes a drastic, unexpected curve when she learns about magic portals, mirrors, realms, ancient Greek gods and goddesses—and Cithaeron, an ancient soul cursed, yet reincarnated for millennia. Cithaeron appears in the teen body of Colin, and when Alice first meets him, the spark is instantaneous. They are each other’s soulmate. Their story, and that of Alice’s new found sister huntresses, Olivia, Hadley and Soxie, is a wild ride of imagination that pushes and pulls at Alice and Colin’s love. They are destined to be together, but they are the very definition of star-crossed lovers. 

 I won’t spoil the end—buy it, read it!—but I will tell you I’ve had the privilege of a sneak peek at the sequel, The Lost Portal, coming out next year. The focus, this time, is on Hadley’s story, but we still learn what’s happened to Alice and her relationship. Though in book 1 she discovered her soulmate, we see in book 2, that true love, no matter how it looks, is never easy. Lenore writes this brilliantly! 

It’s also why YA literature is so powerful. YA stories let us into all the complexity of growing up, and leaning into an adult life. We want our own fairy tale, but it doesn’t exist. YA authors like Lenore (and Katie and me, too) don’t shy away from that. Yes, we want our readers to appreciate a satisfying resolution, but, more importantly, we want our readers to feel like someone sees them. No matter their flaws, cracks, conflicts and mistakes.            

 As for me, it turned out I did find my soulmate. They do exist. It wasn’t love at first sight (we had actually met in high school), but it was a certainty before our first date (I have the note, my prediction of our relationship, to prove it—which I read out at our wedding!). My own story is long past the YA genre, and life, despite living with and loving my soulmate, still isn’t always easy, but ultimately, I’ll never outgrow YA lit. Because YA readers, no matter their age, know the truth in the intensity and emotions of teen protagonists: live, laugh, love—and when that fails, there’s always a sequel. 😊

Many of you know that before I became an author, I worked as a pediatric neuropsychologist, diagnosing central nervous system disorders in children and young adults. While every case was different, one diagnosis was always a little more personal to me than others—dyslexia. As an avid reader, I can only think of a few things worse than having a difficult time reading. As a child, books were my escape, something I could carry with me to immediately transport me somewhere far, far away from where I actually was.  

Dyslexia is one of the most common learning differences to exist in kids, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) report it has a prevalence rate of 20%, meaning it affects roughly 1 in 5 people. While is there’s no one single treatment that will change the underlying brain differences and “cure” dyslexia, thanks to the dedicated efforts of hard-working scientists and educators, there are now effective interventions that can help children become competent—and happy—readers.

Neurodivergent characters are finally starting to be better represented in YA fiction. When I decided to write a trilogy featuring a deadly, silver-blood assassin who wields fire with his bare hands, I already knew two things about this character (Sebastian):

1. He would love to read
2. He would have a history of dyslexia

While the specific rates vary, research consistently demonstrates that dyslexia is more likely to occur in boys than girls. Since this isn’t a scientific article, I’ll skip the jargon and just say this is due to a lot of reasons, a big one being that male brains mature differently than female brains and this difference in pacing appears to make them more vulnerable to neurodevelopmental factors.

We don’t learn about Sebastian’s dyslexia until the second book in my Felserpent Chronicles series, “Blood Divided.” Sebastian is working on recovering his memories of an ancient language (Shthornan), a language he spoke and read fluently at one time in a previous life. As he’s trying to refamiliarize himself with the letters of the Shthornan alphabet, it takes him back to a painful childhood memory:

I opened the thicker of the two books from LeBehr’s, and at the sight of so many unfamiliar words, my stomach tightened, instantly taking me back to being a child struggling to learn to read. In the dream I’d shared with Kyra, I’d broken my classmate’s arm after he teased me about my reading. I could still hear the boy stuttering in a cruelly accurate imitation of me, and I tightened my grasp around the book as the fire stirred in my veins. I’d eventually mastered reading and even come to love it, but it had taken years of focused practice on my part. I glanced from the book to the rune-covered papers before me. Perhaps this was a bad idea. I hated feeling dumb because I was unable to decipher marks on a page.

Fortunately, Sebastian’s Cypher, Batty, (his assigned life-long animal guide) is familiar with Shthornan and starts helping Sebastian remember it letter by letter. This scene was so important to me that I chose to have it featured in the character art you’ll receive when you preorder “Blood Divided” from Mysterious Galaxy (while supplies last!). 

Every child deserves to love to read, and having a learning difference like dyslexia doesn’t make that impossible…it makes it harder, certainly, but with proper assessment, diagnosis, and intervention, reading can become possible and at some point, it might even become fun. I think back to all the patients I worked with who came into my office crying, feeling like a failure at school, embarrassed at how hard reading was for them. They often had such terrible anxiety about being called on to read out loud that they’d come up with excuses to get out of class for even just a few minutes. 

Dyslexia isn’t a moral failing or short-coming and it has nothing to do with how hard someone is trying. It’s the result of how someone’s brain is wired, and you know what else we see in kids and teens with dyslexia? High levels of creativity. The ability to see something from a different angle. The capacity to think outside of the box. As a successful entrepreneur who established his own business and eventually became the most sought-after assassin in his entire realm, Sebastian is the epitome of creativity and perseverance (even if we can’t endorse his chosen career)…and thanks to those years of focused effort and practice, he overcame his dyslexia and now spends most of the money he makes on books.   

May everyone diagnosed with dyslexia have their own such happy ending.

When I was 16, my mother kicked me out of the house. 

Why? I hadn’t put a glass in the dishwasher. 

If you live under my roof, you live by my rules! 

Mom had determined my incorrigible defiance would come to an end. 

To be fair, I was a dark, bitter, sharp, sarcastic bitch. For good reason. My parents had just split up and, no exaggeration, their separation came completely out of the blue. Not a single hint of marital tension, let alone telling arguments. Dad had moved out. My older sister was at college. It was just me and my mom. And we didn’t get along at the best of times. 

Yet I was incensed that something so trivial (a glass! In the sink, not the dishwasher!) would lead to my banishment. You’re damn right I was dark, bitter, sharp and sarcastic as I stormed out of the house. I didn’t go far, to my best friend’s around the corner. My exile was short-lived when Mom, needing no detective skills, found me the next day and told me to come home. No apology, but she’d softened. I stalked home; we lived in a stormy truce. 

Only years later did it occur to me why Mom had overreacted. She’d never wanted the divorce; she was crumbling, barely able to hold herself together as her one true love walked out on her. I was a handful; she’d come to her breaking point.

Only years later could I summon the empathy for her that maybe I could or should have had as a 16-year-old.

But I didn’t have it. I couldn’t. I was hurting, too, and all I could do was blame my mom. It turns out she was a real person—flawed and stumbling and doing her damndest with a bad situation. It’s incredibly hard for teens to recognize that. But the question is, should they? Eventually, yes, teens grow up and realize their parents are human. But in the moment? 

I don’t know the right answer. What I do know is how YA novels show us the damage—inadvertent or otherwise—that well-meaning parents can do to their kids. It’s impossible to be perfect as a parent (I am one now—I know how hard it can be!) but teen lit isn’t about the parents. It’s about the teens, and, whether their feelings are objectively justified or not, it’s about showing us, the readers, their inner turmoil as a result of complicated parent-child relationships. 

Take Lyra, in my upcoming novel Amaranth. She has unique “phoenix cells” that regenerate no matter the injury or illness. She lives in a world with a tyrannical government that wants to clone her cells to create super-soldiers and decimate their enemies in war. Of course, her cells could also cure the rampaging worldwide plague, but her parents refuse to let her be a pawn. They go on the run—for years. Lyra’s formative years are a lonely, frazzled existence, with only the love of her suffocating parents. As the story progresses, Lyra learns more about her parents’ motivation. She understands them better. But whether she can forgive them is another question. (Pick it up next spring and find out!)

Parents often make decisions for their children based on what they think is best. What to wear outside the house, what university programs to apply to, whom they should date, and more. Their reasons vary—cultural norms, family expectations, societal demands, their own upbringing—but what it comes down to is that sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong. YA lit reminds us of that very fact. Parents aren’t perfect. 

Then again, teens aren’t perfect either. 🙂

As a reader, I can’t count how many times I’ve closed my eyes, clutched a book to my chest, and wailed over the horrors a beloved character is being forced to endure. I dare say we’ve all shouted, seethed, or at least mumbled under our breaths about what kind of an author would do such terrible things to a character who deserves so much better. As a reader, I hate watching characters suffer. As an author, I hate watching my own characters suffer, but I’ve come to (begrudgingly) understand why it’s such an important part of stories, and YA stories in particular. 

In my novel, Reign Returned, the book begins with a tragedy (mild spoiler alert, although I’ve talked and written about this elsewhere so it’s not exactly secret): Kyra’s father is killed during an unprecedented earthquake. She’s holding his hand as he dies, and even though she’s an incredibly gifted healer, there’s nothing she can do to save him. Inevitably whenever someone mentions the book to me, they say something along the lines of, “But how could you do that to Kyra? That just broke my heart for her.” And I nod and agree with them, because it broke my heart to put her through that.

Kyra’s father, Arakiss, is everything I think a father should be like. He’s kind, thoughtful, has a strong relationship with each of his children, expresses pride in their accomplishments, and lets them know he loves them even when he doesn’t condone their choices or agree with their behavior. He can often be found dancing in the kitchen with his wife, and his patients adore him, so much that when he dies, the entire realm goes into mourning. He’s the father I wished I could have had growing up, but since I didn’t, I gave him to Kyra.

And then I killed him and upended her entire world.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist spiritual leader, famously said, “No mud, no lotus.” He even wrote a book entitled, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering. The beautiful lotus flower only grows in one specific location: the mud. Without slimy, gloppy, sticky, crusty mud, there can be no lotus. In the same way, according to Thich Nhat Hahn, without suffering, there can be no understanding or compassion. 

The universe doesn’t ask us what kind of traumas we’d like to experience…things come our way and we face, prepared or not. Suffering is terrible, but whether we welcome it or attempt to escape it, the experience unquestionably provides transformational opportunities.

Kyra’s father was her rock, her anchor, her everything. She needed to lose that in order to discover herself, to see what she was truly capable of, and to have the motivation to move forward doing the right thing no matter the cost. Could she have discovered those parts of herself without losing her father? Possibly, but just like a muscle doesn’t grow stronger without being used, humans rarely leave their comfort zones unless they’re forced to. And by definition, we don’t welcome something that’s forcing us out of where we feel safest and happiest.

So, should we be glad when terrible things happen to us? Of course not. They’re terrible, and there’s no need to sugar-coat or pretend otherwise. I will never be one of those people telling someone to find the good in a gut-wrenching situation. I never told Kyra to look on the bright side or see the positive or trust that everything happens for a reason. I let her grieve and scream and cry. She didn’t know how she would keep going, but just like everyone who experiences tragedy, she found a way…feeling numb, shuffling slowly forward, tears filling her eyes, she kept going even though part of her wished she’d died with her father.

It’s important to show suffering in YA novels because suffering is a part of life. Teens know this, even if adults often (unhelpfully) disagree with them about traumatic a situation really is. By seeing characters endure horrible things, readers realize they aren’t alone in experiencing awful things. But more than that, they see how suffering can transform a character into the realm-uniting, world-saving, fearless leader they ultimately become by the end of the book. It’s this process, this change, this transformation, that gives us hope. If a character can do it, so can we. We, too, can find ways to transform our suffering into strength, allowing a lotus to bloom from the depths of the mud we find ourselves in.

Pop Quiz! (Yes, I hear every teen (and used-to-be-teen) groaning… 😄)

In my YA fantasy novel, Evangeline’s Heaven, which of the follow scenarios can be defined as “trauma”? 

• Evangeline’s mom dies when Evangeline is three and she barely remembers her. 
• Evangeline is whisked all over her world by her father, without the stability of a home.
• Evangeline is ostracized by kids she meets in each new town her father Lucifer drags her.
• Evangeline is bullied—including a physical attack—by her roommate in high school.
• Evangeline’s father disappears.
• Evangeline is detained by authorities.
• Evangeline suffers from the shock of a sudden, violent death of a beloved family member.
• Evangeline is betrayed by someone close to her.
• Evangeline is forced to act in ways that she never believed she was capable of.

Trick question. 

Not because they’re all traumatic scenarios, but because the correct answer is that they all could be traumatic scenarios depending on the individual.

We often think of trauma as something BIG. Something explosive. Something unreal and horrific, like a devastating car crash, an appalling sexual assault, a tour of duty in a war zone. We’ve also come to acknowledge that witnesses to such catastrophes—not just the victims—could also experience trauma. 

And we’re not wrong. These events can be traumatic. We call them “Big T Trauma” because they are singular, anguish-inducing events. 

But that’s not the whole picture. We often forget about “Small T Trauma”, which are less explosive, but no less insidious. They are events or behaviors with a cumulative effect, like ongoing bullying, or emotional neglect. They’re not splashy, they’re not in-your-face, but they are as damaging and dangerous as Big T Trauma events.

Or, they can be. 

Because here’s the other thing we often don’t think about: Everyone experiences trauma differently.

Trauma, simply, is your body and mind’s way of telling you you’re unsafe. It impacts our nervous system and can be activated by triggers that set us off on a flight/fight/freeze/fawn reaction. 

That means that what could make one person feel extraordinarily unsafe—a lifetime of being called names, for example—could roll of another person’s back. Or someone returning from war could readjust without difficulty. In other words, it’s not the event (cumulative or otherwise) but your own body’s reaction to it. 

Often, we dismiss or minimize another person’s traumatic experiences. If we wouldn’t have been affected, we assume others wouldn’t be either. 

We do everyone a disservice with that limited thinking. 

That’s why YA literature is so powerful; we get to read about protagonists who experience trauma, triggers and impacts in a myriad of ways. We see and we feel how they respond, and we learn to understand. 

We learn empathy. 

So let’s return to Evangeline. Any one of the above scenarios could cause trauma to an individual. For Evangeline, she misses her (barely-remembered) mother, but her dad Lucifer gives her all the love she could ask for (well, until he doesn’t…) She has no stable home base, and gets teased as the new kid a lot, but she’s grounded emotionally by her dad, so her early childhood, while unconventional, does not trigger her. There’s no trauma. She feels safe. But when she attends school, when her father leaves her to deal with the bullies on her own, when, later, she learns the truth about the death of her beloved grandfather-figure, when she learns the truth about her own father, she is most definitely traumatized. How can she be safe ever again??

The answer is different for all of us. For Evangeline, she learns to shift her trust, and find new anchors, including trust and faith in herself. 

Overcoming trauma is not easy for anyone; but it is possible. YA books remind us that no matter our trauma, there is hope.

If you were to try and figure out the most popular trope in YA literature, it’s a good guess “falling in love” would be at the top of the list. But, I think there’s a strong probability “grief” would be a very close second because is it really a YA story if the protagonist doesn’t experience some sort of terrible loss? 

After all, what is being a young adult and growing up if not grieving the people, places, pets, and other personal items that have played some role in your formative years but won’t be moving into the next phase of your life with you? We’ve all been desperate to escape something familiar, only to realize we might not have appreciated what we had until we left it behind. Sometimes we grieve the unknown…we grieve the things we didn’t try, the chances we didn’t take, the experiences we didn’t have, the relationships we didn’t value or invest in. Other times, we grieve the choices we made, the lies we told, the things we stole, the kisses we gave, and the hearts we hurt. Especially during the turbulent young adult years, there’s no end to the experiences that can provoke profound, gut-wrenching grief.  

Grief doesn’t have to look a certain way, and as a society, we’ve started to make some positive gains here. We understand people grieve over different things and that doesn’t make their grief any more or less real. We grieve the loss of people who are still alive but not able to be there for us the way we wish they were (Katniss’s mother at the beginning of The Hunger Games). We grieve the loss of loved ones who died before their time (Rudy in The Book Thief). We grieve the loss of who we were or who we might have been (Caeden in The Licanius Trilogy). Other times, what I see as a loss, you might see as a gain, and what I see as tragic, you might view as a welcome relief. We grieve the loss of our parents; we grieve the cruelty of the parents we’re forced to live with. We grieve the loss of a sibling; we grieve growing up alone. We grieve the end of a relationship, wishing it wasn’t over; we grieve within a relationship, wishing we had a way out. While the feeling of loss is universal, the reason that prompts our grief is highly personal and unique to each individual. 

While we’re definitely making progress on allowing people to grieve over whatever upsets them, we still have a long way to go when it comes to how long we think the grieving experience is supposed to last. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote a book in 1969, On Death and Dying, and in it she proposed the “Five Stages of Grief”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This was revolutionary at the time, recognizing that there wasn’t one single response to grief, but it also led people to believe everyone passes through these five stages in a linear, orderly way. We now know that isn’t true, because the truth is far more complicated, and there’s no pre-determined end date to grief:

Expectation: Denial  Anger  Bargaining  Depression  Acceptance

Reality: Denial  Anger  Denial  Depression  Bargaining  Acceptance  Anger  etc.

Prior to becoming an author, I was a pediatric neuropsychologist who worked with children and teens with cancer, specifically brain tumors, and I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about grief. In my personal life, however, I’ve learned something about loss that surprised me: grief is not just a one-time experience. My husband and I use the term “traumaversary” to describe this phenomenon…it’s the anniversary of something terrible, something you’d rather not remember but can’t forget. Sometimes watching a particular date on the calendar creep closer can make you feel like you’re right back in that terrible situation even though months or years have passed. Sometimes you may not consciously realize the importance of a particular date, but you feel it in your body…you feel anxious or frightened or angry without being able to identify why until you stop and think about it for a minute and then go, “Oh…remember this time last year (or five years ago)?” The grief might not come on as strongly as it initially did, or it might come roaring back with a vengeance, but some griefs I’m not sure you ever get over…you simply learn to live with them.

Listen, I’m the queen of happily ever after’s, but that doesn’t mean I want to read (or write) books where nothing bad ever happens. We need books where characters experience loss and have to navigate grief so we can relate to them, so we can live vicariously through them, and so we can heal through or alongside them, learning new, healthy ways to live with the pain or seeing how certain coping mechanisms weren’t effective and actually made things worse. In our moments of deepest despair, stories remind us we’re not alone, and finding comfort in the pages of a book is truly one of the greatest gifts you can receive when it feels like nothing in your life will ever be the same again.