Just Contemporary Month: Why I Love Contemporary

Basically Amazing Books & Chick Loves Lit are hosting Just Contemporary in the month of November. What that means is that all month long, they’ll be discussion, reviewing and having all kind of fun with the Contemporary YA genre.

I’m a total fan girl for Contemporary YA books so I definitely had to get in there and participate.

Each week, Ashley and Shanyn will be posting topics and will be dedicating each week (for the month of November) to those topics and I couldn’t be more excited. They’ll also be reviewing fabulous contemporary titles and interviewing fantastic contemporary YA authors. This is so my kind of party.

Here’s the schedule for the topics for each week:

So this week, we’re going to tackle the whole Why I Love Contemporary YA and for me, there’s a million reasons.

I’m one of those readers that loves to connect with the characters in a story. You want me to love your books then make me love your characters. Write characters that I either want to be or want to be best friends with. If you can hook me with your characters than I’m a loyal fan through and through.

For the most part, contemporary YA’s are character based. Most of the characters are going through something and throughout the book, you really get to know the characters in that book. In The Truth about Forever by Sarah Dessen, I adored Macy. I thought she was such a great main character. She wasn’t perfect, she did a lot of things that made me want to smack her a good one but at the end of the book, I wanted to be best friends with her. I wanted to steal her man too but mostly, I wanted to be her friend.

In Where She Went by Gayle Forman, I wanted to marry Adam. Where She Went is the follow up novel to If I Stay and is told through Adam’s (the main character from If I Stay’s boyfriend) POV. I thought I adored Adam when I first met him in If I Stay but I outright loved the heck out of him when I read Where She Went because I got to really see the kind of guy that Mia fell in love with. I got to go through what he was going through after we leave him in If I Stay. Everything he went through, everything he felt- I felt it all and I wanted to cuddle him close and be there for him, I loved him so.

In Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour, I got really close to both Amy and Roger (that sounds weird, but if you’re a reader then you understand what I mean). The author did such a great job of putting me right smack in the middle of everything going on in the story that I felt like I was sitting in the back seat. I was anxious for Roger and I was worried about Amy. Both of their characters were so real to me and I wanted to be apart of their lives, the way that they were a part of mine. Morgan Matson did such a bang up job of writing characters that I loved that it wasn’t hard for me to fall into the world she created for these characters.

And that’s another thing that I love about Contemporary YA. The world that each character inhabits is a world that I’m familiar with. Even if I’m not familiar with the setting, I’m familiar with everything else. Driving cars, shopping at the mall, meeting girlfriends for coffee at Starbucks, all of those things are real to me and they’re real to these characters and it’s always nice to have something in common with the characters in my favorite books. I can connect with these characters more because they’re just like me. We like a lot of the same things and even if we don’t, I can still understand and that makes me happy.

Physically, I haven’t traveled all that much. I’ve been to a few states like Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada. I’ve traveled up and down California but not very many other places. Through stories like Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins and There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones, I’ve been to Paris, France and Ireland. I went with Ginny all of the UK in Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson and if it weren’t for these books, I would have never gone to those places.

I’m telling you, I could go on and on about the many reasons I love Contemporary YA books but I’ll end with this reason, reading about these characters falling in love takes me back to my high school days when I fell in love for the first time (or so I thought, haha). They take me back to carefree times when I didn’t have to worry about car payments and health insurance. How could you not love that stuff? I’m a fan because this genre has introduced me to some amazing characters like Wes from The Truth about Forever, Adam from Where She Went, Etienne St. Clair from Anna and the French Kiss, Cricket Bell from Lola and the Boy Next Door, Roger from Amy & Roger…really, the list goes on and on.

So there you have it, some of the many reasons I’m such a huge fan of Contemporary YA books. All of these reasons and more are why I’m so excited about participating in Just Contemporary this month.

It’s your turn, why do YOU love Contemporary YA?

..and that’s your scoop!

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