UK YA - not hiding in the shadows any more!

I was visiting the Absolute Vanilla blog, and I read this post about a brand new website for and about UK YA writers and readers. It's called www.ukyabooks.wordpress.com and it is made of awesome. And I also think it's important, because when I looked at my bookshelves, about 90% of the YA was American.

I think this is because US YA is so well-developed as a genre, and the characters are usually older, and hey, they can go on road trips! In the UK, you can travel from Land's End in Cornwall to John O'Groats in Scotland in about seven hours. Great road trip, right? Hardly enough time to fall in love and discover meaningful self-truths or whatever it is road-trippers do.

Oh, and there's a #UKYA hash tag thingie on twitter, which means nothing to me but might to others of you. Get tweeting, peeps!

Next post is going to be about a UK YA book that I've just read, which freaked me out and made me think and I'm going to review it for you all to check out.

First, though, because I can and because it's British, here are some funny Harry Potter pictures for you all!

Forget the Hero - I want the Best Friend!

True fact: Best friends are always more interesting (and no, this wasn't an excuse to show a funny HP photo that didn't even relate to the post topic). It seems to be that the author wants their main characters/love interests to be consumed with each other, only thinking of rudies with the other person, and in doing so, they LOST THEIR PERSONALITIES. Or, the main character has some serious plot to get through (fighting Voldie, ahem) so the author doesn't have as much time to let their MC's personality grow. Instead, the funny one, the brainy one, the pretty one, the quirky one - they're all best friends.

Picture this: A brooding, smouldering, posing hero - 17yrs old but writing poetry, playing kick-ass guitar, and saving the world becoause of some prophecy. He's mysterious, but his best friend - bit of a lad, likes throwing paper aeroplanes and smuggling in bacon sandwiches to his maths lesson, and borrows his sister's hair spray for a night out because next to smouldering, brooding hero he seems a bit inadequate - he is the realistic one. He's the type of boy that teen YA readers are more likely to meet, and the type of boy that would probably be a lot more fun as a date because he's not really tired after staying up to watch the heroine sleep...

The best thing about Best Friends - they're not perfect. And that means that they are instantly more interesting.