Why I Love Dark Contemporaries

When I was a teen, I scorned most of the teen fiction offerings of the time, preferring a steady diet of Jane Austen and adult chick lit, as well as some romance novels sneaked from my mom's collection. Basically, I judged most of them, because they were almost all either failing to be funny or Nicholas Sparks-level sap fests, about poor, good-hearted girls dying of cancer.

The teen books from my teenage years hit pretty much that one note, at least in my experience. Basically, I assumed that all realistic fiction was like Lurlene McDaniel's stuff, which, admittedly, I never read, but I had the plot described to me and I said Oh HELL to the NO. As such, when I finally came back to young adult novels in college, I found my niche in science fiction and fantasy, scrupulously avoiding the weep-fests.

In the last year, I've finall overcome this fear of dark, depressing contemporaries, sometimes referred to as 'issues' books. The thought of reading a book about abuse, drug use, rape, or cancer used to send me running, and, admittedly, my first instinct when I read synopses like that is still to pass the book by, but now I don't, because I am growing as a person and a reader.

It's a process.

As I'm doing preliminary work drawing up a list of my favorite reads of the year, a huge portion of them are contemporaries, even though I've always professed myself to be more of a fantasy reader. This really made me take a step back and evaluate why I always avoided them. There are two basic reasons:

1. As mentioned above, they tended to melodrama.
2. The writing tended not to be stellar, since teens were not a popular audience at the time.
3. I HATED reading unhappy books, like these and dystopias.

Yup, I have made a complete 360 on most of my reading tastes. The books that used to give me the most joy (chick lit), I now can scarcely stand to read, because I'm like THIS SHIT ISN'T REALISTIC. Here's a PSA, folks: Life sucks. A lot. I like my realistic fiction to reflect real life, warts and all, thus my new love for dystopias and depressing contemporary novels. Book should reflect life and just punch you right in the guts while simultaneously tearing out your heart and stomping on it.

Aside from the changes in my personal tastes, I also just think that these novels really are the most original being written right now, and the most emotionally powerful. They have the least idealized teenagers, and tend to involve really well-developed characters. What makes them most exciting in my opinion, though, is that I never know for sure what will happen in the end. Sometimes there's a happy ending, sometimes everyone dies like in a Shakespearean tragedy, and generally it's somewhere in between. As a reader who tends to know exactly where the book is headed, these novels are so refreshing, and they make me feel so much, because I know that anything could happen. It's like Joss Whedon, really, in that anyone could die at any time.

My Top 10 for 2012:

Catalyst - Laurie Halse Anderson
Drowning Instinct - Ilsa J. Bick
Something Like Normal - Trish Doller
Just One Day - Gayle Forman

The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
Kiss the Morning Star - Elissa Janine Hoole
Never Enough - Denise Jaden
The Opposite of Hallelujah - Anna Jarzab 

A Midsummer's Nightmare - Kody Keplinger
Breaking Beautiful - Jenna Shaw Wolf