Monday, October 12, 2015

Romance in YA Novels


If you haven’t realized it by now, the main theme in the majority of Young Adult novels is romance. There’s always a couple or a love triangle or a crush around which the story is centered around. Without this, the plot is pointless. Which I find pointless.

Why is it that all of these books need to have love? There is an abundance of adult books without it; it’s just adventure and mystery and an actual story. The characters interact with each other to solve a problem and save themselves. It’s logical, but not emotionless. The emotion just isn’t love all the time.

I believe that the reason love is so prevalent in these novels is because it’s the emotion we’re the most familiar with at our young age. Everyone is loved by someone and everyone loves someone, and I think this is the age we begin to discover that. Authors can use that new life experience to draw us in, perhaps in hope of learning how to love right; how not to hurt people.

Every human being is capable of love, and so much of it is just a spiritual connection with another person, whether it be platonic or not. But because that’s so difficult to find- or better yet, keep- we want to savor it at a young age. We throw the word “love” around a lot. “I love my boyfriend! We’ve been dating for a whole two weeks!” We’re trying to grow up so fast.

Maybe that’s just because there’s so much pressure to be in a relationship it’s inevitable that we want to learn how to really be in one.  And really, whatever is in our lives is in our books. We want to read about ourselves and something we can relate to; something we can understand.

We haven’t grown up yet, but maybe that’s the point. At this time in our lives, we need to be immersed in any kind of love in preparation for adulthood. We’ll be loving till the end of time because that’s what makes the human species special. So we start not with our own loves, or own lives, but isn’t that the whole reason we read in the first place? To live someone else’s life?


Maja (Teen Blogger)

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