In which I share many novel ideas that you should probably use. This is my fourteenth Top Ten Tuesday post, but yet again it’s Wednesday as it took me a while to finish the list! Top Ten Tuesday was created and is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.
Top Ten Settings I’d Like To See More Of (Or At All)
- British Boarding Schools – I eat boarding school stories up, well, like Girl Meets Cake. (See also: Night School)
- London – I live in London, but that doesn’t stop me loving stories set here. From Sarra Manning’s Pretty Things/Adorkable to Luisa Plaja’s Extreme Kissing to Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy – if the characters spend time in London, I’m having fun.
- Subcultures – I really enjoyed Jo Brand’s It’s Different For Girls, and won’t somebody who was around at the time write a book set during the heyday of goth? Pretty please with a black eyeliner pencil on top?
- Spaceships – specifically, I’d like to read more YA about girls who live on spaceships. I’m brewing up a novel like this myself but there’s plenty of room at this party – come on in, the space water’s lovely.
- British secondary schools – I haven’t read many great UKYA books largely set at school and this is a shame, because there is so much potential there to be explored.
- Arts schools – E. Lockhart has covered performing arts with Dramarama and visual arts with Fly on the Wall, while Sophie Flack’s Bunheads reminded me how much I loved ballet stories as a kid, but I want more!
- Paris – To be fair, there are probably loads of YA books set in Paris, but only Diary of a Crush:French Kiss and Nobody’s Girl spring to my mind immediately. Sarra Manning just makes Paris sound so good, I have to be careful not to read any of her books in the same week that I watch an episode of Rachel Khoo’s The Little Paris Kitchen or I’ll find myself packing my bags and grabbing my passport.
- Less well-known countries – Admittedly, there are scores of popular YA books set in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and all the most tourist-doused European countries. Even India gets a fair bit of teen-literary attention, though almost always with an American or British protagonist. I would like to read more stories about teens in other countries that are actually growing up in those countries.
- Universities – Young Adult or New Adult or literary fiction, I’d like to read more books set in universities. Especially if those universities are NOT Oxbridge.
- Libraries – because they’re not just for sitting in and reading or collecting books from!
Have you read any books with these settings that you’d recommend to me?
