ANNOUNCEMENT: YA Interrobang is now closed.
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by Nicole Brinkley
3y ago
YA Interrobang is now closed. Thank you, dear reader, for coming along for the ride. It started as just a YA newsletter with a blog component; it quickly expanded into a website that updated almost every day of the week, covering news and events alongside resourceful lists and author features. More than one person teased that we weren’t running a blog–we were running a magazine. And it felt like we were. We took it seriously; we wanted our work to be the best that it could be. We wrote thousand-word pieces about the authors and books we loved; we covered news as it broke; we generated a collec ..read more
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I will fight until the day I die for fat people to see their value.
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by Julie Daly
3y ago
I’ve thought and written and talked a lot about the representation of fat characters in YA. So when Nicole approached Sarah Hollowell and me about moderating a round table, I was all in. Sarah and I were thrilled to host Becky Albertalli, Julie Murphy, Elle McKinney, Angel Cruz, Amy Spalding, and Sandhya Menon and talk with them about fatness, how we see ourselves, and how we can do better in the future. Let’s talk about the words for fat—or, rather, the words that aren’t “fat.” AMY SPALDING: Once I embraced “fat”, I myself have mostly done away with the other euphemisms. I use plus-size somet ..read more
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What is the value of pre-order incentives for authors?
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by Julie Daly
3y ago
Earlier this year, somewhat on a whim, I decided to make a survey about book buying habits – specifically, pre-orders and how effective pre-order incentives are. I kept the answers on the form pretty basic and an option to leaves comments or notes, along with age range to determine what teens specifically liked best. There were 545 responses. According to this survey, most people don’t pre-order books. Incentives are unlikely to sway a person who wasn’t going to pre-order to do so; most people reported it’s only happened a couple of times. Teens are slightly more likely to be swayed by incenti ..read more
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Every book starts with a little marble of an idea.
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by Amanda Searcy
3y ago
Every book starts with a little marble of an idea. A place, a character, a concept—a “hmm” in the back of the mind. That marble is poised on top of a hill, and it starts to roll. Sometimes the hill is a gentle slope and it takes the marble a long, long time to make it down. Sometimes that hill is as steep as a cliff side and the marble plummets to the ground quickly. That marble picks up stuff as it rolls. Mud, some chewed gum, a glob of hair, maybe some shiny stickers. Twigs and pebbles. These are the things that make the idea marble into a story. Some of it’s pretty, some of it isn’t. That’s ..read more
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Our society doesn’t do a great job allowing disabled voices to be fully heard.
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by Jason Walz
3y ago
When writing guest blog posts, I often find it difficult to remember to mention my own book since I usually have something else that I’m interested in saying at that time. So here’s how I’m going to remedy that.  In this post, I will mention my book exactly three times. It will come out of nowhere, and it will be an awkward “surprise” each time. All of a sudden you’ll just be reading along and then… BAM! And just like that, I will have shamelessly plugged my own book. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dive in. In many ways, YA continues to lead the pack when it comes to diverse repres ..read more
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Malinda Lo does so much more.
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by Rebecca Wells
3y ago
I’ve been obsessed with fairy tales since I was a child, and for a long time, the magic words that would make me pick up a book—any book—were “fairy tale retelling.” I’ve read hundreds of them over the years, but there are only a few from my childhood that stick in the back of my mind, recalled in an instant. Robin McKinley’s Beauty. Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted. Donna Jo Napoli’s Zel. Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl. And Malinda Lo’s Ash. What distinguishes a great fairy tale retelling from its more mundane counterparts? Originality of concept, for one. Compelling characters, beautiful p ..read more
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List of the Week: 4 Reasons We Love YA Retellings
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by Emily Roberson
3y ago
Retellings – writers love writing them, readers love reading them, but why? Why do we return to the same stories again and again? Whether they are fairy tales, myths or classic literature, what is it about these stories that keep us coming back? As the writer of Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters, a retelling of the ancient Greek Minotaur myth with a reality TV setting, I have some theories. Retellings can give us a familiar story in a new setting. Think about Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles. Fairy tales with cyborgs? Colonies on the moon? It’s all amazing and new and crazy, but because it’s a r ..read more
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Misogyny poisons all the waters.
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by Alison Ng
3y ago
A dragon. A damsel. A knight in shining armor. Many of us have grown up with the story of a gallant man that comes to the aid of a distressed maiden, with many  tales and fables and modern romances centered around this theme. Elana K. Arnold’s Damsel begins with the same story: To claim the throne, Prince Emory must venture into a far away land, slay a dragon, and rescue a damsel to be his bride, as all the kings before him have done. When Ama wakes up in Prince Emory’s arms, she has no memory of her life before and realizes her new life in the kingdom may be direr than what she’s already ..read more
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EXCLUSIVE: Read the first chapter of The Disasters by M.K. England!
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by YA Interrobang
3y ago
We love Illuminae and Heart of Iron. We bet you do, too, which means your next read should be The Disasters by M.K. England! It’s no surprise trouble-making, hotshot pilot Nax Hall is kicked out of the elite Ellis Station Academy in just one day. But Nax’s one-way trip back to Earth is cut short when a terrorist group attacks the Academy. Nax and three other washouts escape—barely—but they’re also the sole witnesses to the biggest crime in the history of space colonization. And the perfect scapegoats. They may not even get along, but they’re the only ones who know the truth… and the only ..read more
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I am in love with love.
YA Interrobang | Your source for all things YA lit
by Karen Rivers
3y ago
I am in love with love. I think a lot of people who know me well might raise their eyebrows if they heard me say that out loud. I’m not sure they would believe it about me, being as fiercely and determinedly single as I am, but it’s true. The kind of love, specifically, that I love the most is the yearning that prefaces the fall. I yearn to yearn. The other day, my daughter, who is eleven, told me about a boy who she has realized that she likes. Or, as we call it, like-likes.  “I don’t want anything to happen,” she said.  “I just like liking him.” We hiked through the forest as we ta ..read more
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