Book Chat

It’s the final day of Diary of a Crush week. The books are out in shiny new print editions today, and you can also get the trilogy plus the Diary of a Grace novella in e-book form, should you prefer. Yay!

Today I shall be mostly talking about myself, and using the word ‘cool’ a ridiculous number of times. I hope you enjoy it!

Warning: this post contains massive spoilers for the Diary of a Crush trilogy. I read the ending before the beginning, you don’t have to. Stop right now and go read the books, if you want to and haven’t already!

 

I’ve always been a magazine fiend. I’ve still got my hoards of Girl Talk and Art Attack from childhood, though I’ll be sorting through them soon. Last year I threw out several editions of Safeway (yes, the freebie from the supermarket that got taken over by Morrisons), and tore out the pages that I wanted to keep from countless other store magazines – though it took me until this year to tackle my piles of Spirit, the Superdrug magazine, because I could hardly bear to dismantle all those beautiful make-up photos. In my teens I read Mizz, and then Sugar, and then Sugar and J-17, and then finally just J-17.

To explain my love, we must rewind to Guide camp in the early Noughties. One of the girls in my tent had a copy of J-17 that we flicked through, and it seemed so much cooler than any other magazine I’d read. It seemed to be aimed at a slightly older audience than Sugar, but without being completely boy-obsessed like Bliss, which I never could stand. The photoshoots were edgier and the articles meatier and I wanted it.
One essential fact about my teenage self: I desperately wanted to be cool. I was lanky and bony, with glasses and flat hair, and one proper friend. All I wanted to do all day was read books, write stories, sing along to music, and occasionally play my keyboard. I liked Guide camp because I didn’t go to school with anyone there, so nobody knew that they had to ignore me if they wanted to be cool, and most of them would happily chat to me and even invite me to games.

To be honest, I wasn’t even sure what cool was. I caught a whiff of it every now and then, when an interesting song was played on the radio, or a woman walked past with a quirkier outfit than I usually got to see. I muddled my way through popular culture, listening to whatever everybody else was playing, and wearing pedal pushers and karma beads that year everybody else did. But J-17 was cool. I just knew it.

A month or two or three later, after I’d finally plucked up the courage to buy a magazine that I was sure was for girls that were much cooler than me (ie. any degree of cool at all), I was delighted. I’ve also always loved make-up. And there, in the first copy of J-17 that I bought, was an article about how to do punk-style make-up, with actual intructions and impressive photos. Other magazines’ beauty editorials were vague and uninspiring compared with this riot of colour. There was also an article about kissing, and reviews of music by bands that I had never heard of, and fashion pages that were actually interesting, and it was all so incredibly cool.

Finally, on the back page, I read the Diary of a Crush column for the first time. It didn’t make much sense, being one entry in an ongoing series, but as the months passed I fell in love, because Edie Wheeler was the coolest of all cool girls. Let’s summon my teenage self from the depths of my mind and look at the evidence:

1. She was 18. I was only 13, which meant that Edie was basically the same as God to me.
2. She was named after Edie Sedgwick and Tim Wheeler, of Ash fame
3. She was a WAITRESS (seriously, height of cool)
4. She was in a band (NO WAIT THIS IS THE HEIGHT OF COOL)
5. She was dating an artboy (I only discovered what an artboy was because of J-17, and thank God, I mean Edie, for that)
6. Who was two years older than her! (*swoons from all the cool*)
7. And she didn’t live with her parents, in my first issue she’d just moved out! (WARNING: COOL OVERLOAD)

Sadly, after 22 months of excitingly looking forward to J-17 release day each month, the Diary of a Crush column was cancelled without prior warning and J-17 got a new look and editorial direction and started featuring articles about Gareth Gates, so I stopped buying it.

Eventually, I realised that all those things I thought were ‘cool’ are just things that I really liked, and that’s what I missed, still miss, about J-17. The catalogue of discoveries. Finding new things to like each month. Even with the internet, I miss having a reliable guide, and I think that J-17 would have been even better if the internet had been around. I was terrified of record shops, obviously, because they’re full of cool people. If I’d been able to Google the bands on their lists of new artists to check out, I might have managed to actually listen to some of them!

But back to the world’s coolest girl. Edie. I only started reading J-17 at the tail end of her story, so you can only dream of imagining how thrilled I was when two years later, I was wandering in Waterstone’s, and spotted the books on a shelf. I bought them immediately and took them home, where I fell upon my bed and read and read and read, blissfully happy to find out how it all happened at last.

It was comforting to discover that Edie wasn’t always as cool as she ended up becoming. At the start of the story, she was 16, which by 2004 was slightly younger than me (and not so cool), and in her first year of college. I was in sixth form myself at the time, and was making new friends, so I could relate to the excitement and anxiety of meeting new people. Edie wasn’t a waitress or in a band, she lived with her parents, and of course the artboy was just a crush. She still wore cool clothes and attracted cool friends, but her beginners-cool seemed a lot more attainable.

So I could be cool too, if I was brave enough. It took a few more years, but eventually I started actually speaking to people, going to events that I thought sounded interesting, and buying clothes that I actively enjoyed wearing and then putting them on regularly, even just to go to uni or the shops. I’m not sure if anyone would consider me cool, but I’m happy, and have been for several years now. I hope that would impress my teenage self, but honestly? She’d probably be more impressed with the fact that I own copies of all the Diary of a Crush columns in book form, to refer to for knowledge of ‘cool’ at any time. 

Comments will be much appreciated. I can’t have been the only one that was in love with the idea of being cool…

Previously: I reviewed the final book in the trilogy, Sealed with a Kiss.

Today’s post is going to be a little different, as it’s not directly about Diary of a Crush, but is a discussion post about a topic familiar to all DoaC-loving hearts. If you want to skip to the Top Ten, just scroll down until you see the bold and centred heading!

Bad boys and girls! The drama! The suspense! The muscles! The sardonically raised eyebrows! So many of us love them, so many of us hate them. I think that there are, broadly speaking, three types of “bad” love interest in YA literature, though plenty of characters belong to multiple categories.

Type one is the love with a dangerous lifestyle. They may be strong, they may be a good fighter, but they’re always getting into fights, and could drag you into them. You are supposed to swoon over their bulging muscles and readiness to defend your honour. Vampires and other supernatural creatures almost always fit this type.

Type two is controlling, and perhaps manipulative and stalkerish, though they claim to love the narrator and have their best interests at heart. If you read popular books or listen to other people talk about them, you know who I’m talking about!

Type three is the one who claims not to be romantic. This is more of an emotional danger. They don’t do serious relationships. Until they meet the narrator, who appeals to the softer side that they had all along. Any further drama is caused by their fear that they aren’t good enough, due to their history and/or background.

The thing that I think unites all these characters is the danger. Not the danger-in-narrative, that type one could break your heart by getting killed or could get you hurt in the crossfire, but the danger that you’ll romanticise the situation when you meet a potential partner who is actually bad for you.

There are people with dangerous lifestyles who won’t consider your safety first, or who will lose in fights and get seriously injured, or get you seriously injured. There are people who use love as a method of control, and consciously or not, hope that you will do what they want because you depend on them emotionally.

There are people who are not romantically inclined. While some of them might act as if they have romantic thoughts sometimes, because they think it’s a good way to get people to spend time with them, there are others who are completely upfront about their aromanticism and are good people. But even when someone says outright that they don’t imagine themselves having a romantic relationship ever, it can be difficult to believe them. We see so many fictional characters who claim these feelings and then change their minds that many of us think it’s the natural, inevitable course of events. We assume that everybody has the same definition of love that we do, and that ultimately they will choose to have a long-term romantic relationship, if they meet the right person in the right circumstances (ie. if we love them enough). It’s not scientific fact, or destiny. It’s just an assumption.

I know that some people reading this will say that everyone with a brain should know the difference between fantasy and reality, but sometimes it’s not very easy, when you grow up surrounded by these stories.
I’m not against “bad” boy or girl characters. I don’t find violence attractive, so pure type ones often leave me cold, yet I love a coming of age story in which the characters become better people and learn to accept themselves and the love of another (sigh…where was I?). I just prefer books in which either the narrator avoids a genuinely bad love interest and chooses to roll solo or couple up with someone else, or the author shows us both the romance and the danger. This could be by making the bad love interest a narrator, by including another character with similar traits who doesn’t redeem themselves, or by giving the story a tragic ending. Cue list –

1. In the Diary of a Crush series, Dylan, a type three, is contrasted with Carter, another boy (or maybe man, as he’s 23) who acts caring one minute and callous the next. Unlike Dylan, however, he turns out to be a right nasty piece of work in the end and always appears to be a bit creepy, as he’s TWENTY-THREE (Edie is 17).

2. In Let’s Get Lost, by the same author, the narrator is a bad girl, who tries to hide the truth (including her age) from her love interest.

3. In Spellbound, Emma and Brandon’s (a combo of type one and three), arch-nemesis is another bad boy at school – controlling, egotisical and truly frightening.

4. In The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, Frankie’s boyfriend Matthew wants to control what kind of girl she gets to be, and what she is allowed to know about him.

5. Jackson, from the Ruby Oliver series, flits from girl to girl and back again, before and after dating Ruby. She struggles with her feelings for him until book three, when she delivers a withering, straight-to-the-heart-of-the-matter put down that made me punch the air in joy.

6. Cal, from Cate Tiernan’s Wicca/Sweep series, is Morgan’s first boyfriend. He introduces her to the world of magic and tries to convince her that he loves her, but only succeeds until his ulterior motive begins to show and Morgan meets Hunter, who lacks Cal’s easy charisma, but is ultimately a much better boyfriend.

7. Noah is a narrator in Pushing the Limits, so we get to see his thought process and can hypothesise freely about why he’s attracted to Echo. The ending is a bit neat and tidy but I loved the characterisation.

8. In Bright Young Things, Cordelia’s romance with the boy she’s been warned away from has terrible consequences.

9. Surrounded by boys and men who don’t respect girls and women, Jack has to decide whether to join in or opt out, in Leader of the Pack.

10. In Night School, Allie thinks that Sylvain is charming and perfect, until an incident that changes her opinion of him. I’m a bit afraid that this series is heading towards redeeming him, though.

How do you feel about ‘bad’ love interests? What are your favourite books about them?

Further reading/inspiration: Wondrous Reads: Guest Blog: Sarra Manning on Toxic Boys

Writing this post has put this song in my head.

Previously: My review of Kiss and Make Up!
Up next: I review the last book in the Diary of a Crush series, Sealed with a Kiss!