The Definition of Dessenesque

Dessenesque (verb)

Coined from the prolific and talented young adult novelist Sarah Dessen, who happens to be super good at writing her brand of what she writes. A novel, usually of the young adult variety, with certain yet general defining characteristics that may include:

a. a cute, attractive, smart but not nerdy, sensitive, sometimes overlooked, middle class teenage girl who serves as our main character

b. a cute, attractive, possibly charming, likely insightful, perhaps brooding teenage boy who is sure to teach our main character something she didn't know before

c. our main character must overcome one heavy issue and in the process of doing so undergoes a thoughtful, contemplative, introspective personal journey with the assistance of the teenage boy

d. our main character falls for the teenage boy

e. the novel must contain healthy doses of flirting, romance and contemplation

f. while certainly dealing with a heavy issue or two, the novel will never resort to explicit language or graphic situations

Examples of a Dessenesque novel:
The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, Jennifer E. Smith
The Promise of Amazing, Robin Constantine
Roomies, Sara Zarr
If I Stay, Gayle Forman

A Book Review Starring "The Miseducation of Cameron Post" by Emily Danforth

The Short Version:
Set in the late 1980s and early 1990s in rural Montana, Cameron Post grows up with the weight of thinking her attraction to her best friend made her responsible for her parents' death. When beautiful Coley Taylor joins her church group and school, Cameron finds herself falling in love with her new friend and must deal with the consequences of being outed as a result.

The Long Version:
Given the evocative sense of detail, the specificity of time and place (and that it was set in a period that looks to align with when the author would have been that age) you may get the sense this is a thinly disguised narrative that may resemble autobiography. Not that it's a bad thing. The highly evocative feel actually gives the story and characters a depth and richness that involves you in the story.

Danforth does a great job of providing complexity and detail to her characters, even the secondary characters who might otherwise have come off as one dimensional or just plain awful, are given a nice sense of humanity. But it's her main character Cameron Post who carries the story, particularly through the dense, wordy parts that can make the read a bit slow.

And there are a lot of words in those 470 pages. While it's great that Danforth has a wealth of knowledge and detail from which to draw, I'm not sure it needed to be this long and, at times, this dense. It's one of those books that you sometimes ask yourself where was the editor.

The book can be split into two parts, the romance and it's aftermath. If I were a teenage lesbian, or recommending the book to a teenage lesbian, I'd want her to stop right before the first part ends, when the book is chock full of emotional and sexual tension that I'd crave at that age and find in satisfying doses here. The second half of the book, the aftermath lets call it, is a harder read. It may ring true (particularly for certain populations or areas of the country), it may even be semi-autobiographical, but it's not as much fun or as interesting as the first half.

A Book Review Starring "The Difference Between You and Me" by Madeleine George

The Short Version:
Sophomore activist Jesse is in love with preppy junior Emily, who she meets on Tuesdays for secret make out sessions because Emily is closeted and has a boyfriend. But their secret world collides with their public ones when they find themselves on opposite sides when a Walmart-esque corporation sponsors school activities to curry favor in the town they want to build their next superstore in.

The Long Version:
Kind of a messy story: it wanted to be three or so stories at once and never seemed to fulfill on any of them. For some inexplicable reason the main character's chapters were in the third person while the other two supporting characters chapters were in the first person. The story meandered a lot and what I gathered was the main plot didn't get started until halfway into it.

Kind of messy characters: they were cute and potentially endearing, but you could tell they were supposed to be over the top in an entertaining way, lots of old hippie protester types, the gay best friend who's into Ayn Rand, the prissy Tracy Flick overachiever, but they weren't over the top enough or developed enough. The main character was slightly more endearing, but also lacking in the development department.

Kind of a messy tone: Because the girls were on the younger side of high school, and given how the story started I expected a lighter tone, something that would be great for a younger lesbian or curious reader, which would have been great considering how few Lesbian YA books there are out there for the younger side of readers. But then there came the flip joke about roofies early on and a few other things that seemed out of place tonally with the tonal direction this story was taking me.

I'd still recommend this book for a younger high school reader, given the dearth of books that approach lesbian topics without being explicit, but I'm not sure how jazzed my booktalk would be.

The Case For Labeling Young Adult Books with an L, G, B, T or Q

I just recently took on the task of creating the Young Adult LGBTQ book lists for my library system.

All of a sudden I'm reading with a mission. Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Bisexual, (Is there any Queer YA?), Fiction or Non-Fiction. I'm reading and annotating with a mission like I've never had before. Reading all this LGBTQ Young Adult prompted me to compile lists, naturally I turned to the wealth of booklists on the web, specifically public library websites.

What most all of the booklists I found have in common is a tendency to group together books with all kinds of themes: gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, as opposed to creating separate lists for each of them.

New York Public Library:

http://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/06/25/pride-book-suggestions-teens
 

Skokie, Illinois Public Library:

http://www.skokielibrary.info/s_teens/tn_books/tn_booklists/glbtq.asp

Patchogie-Medford (NY) Public Library:

http://www.pmlib.org/teenglbt

 

The Librarian in me might first think it's irrelevant to distinguish. LGBTQ in some order has been a constant, collective acronym since the days of LGB, before the T and the Q. Or the Librarian in me would say as readers and advocates or readers we ought to strive to encourage reading about everyone's experiences.

But the thing is, when you're a thirteen year old girl just beginning to question her sexual identity, you want to find characters and stories that you identify with personally. Unlike readers in general who often read in order to identify with a main character who isn't like themselves. That's less so the case with those younger readers who seek out LGBTQ literature that might provide them with a framework for an identity or an example of coming out or a potential future lifestyle.

Which is why I love, love, love San Francisco's Young Adult Library's GLBTQ page:

http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000679501

It looks cool, they use book covers but most importantly, they break up their teen booklist according to sexual, gender or political identity. I do wish they'd annotated their book list, as we're fortunately today to have a wide spectrum between books of the I'm-Coming-Out variety and the Now-That-I'm-Out variety and I'd imagine most readers would appreciate a little elaboration. Plus, if there are any younger readers reluctant to ask a librarian for book recommendations and rely on a book list or the internet for direction, these would be them.

And yes, to answer my own question, according to the San Francisco Public Library's GLBTQ Experience page there's quite a few Young Adult books with queer themes.

Thank you San Francisco, for affirming my thoughts on this subject.

A Book Review Starring "If You Could Be Mine" by Sara Farizan

The Short Version:
Set in Tehran, Iran, seventeen year old Sahar is in love with her best friend Nasrin. When she learns that Nasrin is going to be married, she discovers the answer to her problem in an obscure Iranian law in which the government will pay for gender reassignment surgery if someone is truly declared transgender, not born into the body of the gender they identify with.

The Long Version:
The long, convoluted version being that Sahar magically decides to get gender reassignment surgery so she can be with Nasrin. Even though it's plain as day that Nasrin, nor her middle class, aspiring family would ever go along with such a deal. And she comes upon this magical solve to her problem because she just happens to meet a friend of her shady cousin's who is transgender at the perfect moment when all this is coming to fruition. And this person, whose name I forget, just happens to take Sahar under her wing and along to her support group where she discovers this great law that she thinks she's magically going use to her advantage. Oh, and the wedding is in a few weeks.

You get the sense the author learned about this (albeit fascinating) law in Iran, which sounds totally antithetical to an oppressive Islamic regime, and then decided to build a story about it. Even though the story never made sense. It's a fascinating law, and someone could make a fascinating story based on it. But this wasn't it.

I had a hard time believing much about this story, from the characters' choices to the convenient plot developments. Sahar was likeable and sympathetic enough, but she never felt real.

What I found equally problematic, having nothing directly to do with the novel, was that this book is on plenty of Transgender YA booklists and Sahar is not a transgender person. She only wants gender reassignment surgery so that she can marry her best friend, she never identifies as a man either before or during the story. Nor did I find any of the transgender-related elements that are in the story very authentic, from the supporting transgender woman who takes Sahar under her wing to the other transgender person in the support group. I'd file this under Lesbian YA.

And I will.

A Book Review Starring "The Bermudez Triangle" by Maureen Johnson

The Short Version:
Avery, Nina and Mel have always been best friends. But everything changes when Avery and Mel start dating the summer before senior year while Nina is away at Stanford for a pre-college program.

The Long Version:
File Under "Dessenesque." As in Sarah and that subgenre of YA Girl Fiction composed of cute middle class girls who delve into issues of adulthood in pleasant prose, that reveal contemplative characters and relatively subtle relationships.

The writing was nice and breezy, making it easy to turn a page and get going. The characters all had some flaws, though they could have benefited with more. There were a number of YA-Boys-Written-By-Adult-Women, very sensitive types that don't necessarily sound like real boys, which comes with the territory of a lot of YA Girl Fiction.

Despite all three girls having their own major sub-plots, what really sells the book is how this surprising romance between two best friends changes them both in different ways. The third subplot involving Nina and her long-distance boyfriend was the least involving, though it served adequately as a counterpoint to her friends' relationship, and how one of them treats the other.

In all, a pleasant, satisfying Coming-Out story of the Dessenesque variety, which isn't a bad thing at all to be.

A Book Review Starring "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe" by Benjamin Alire Saenz

The Short Version:
Two El Paso, Texas teens, sensitive boy types who don't feel like they fit among the Male Mexican Man types they see around them, form a special friendship over the course of one year.

The Long Version:
Beautifully written story about what it means to be a young man. In the sea of girl YA books, I so love to stumble on a novel that portrays boys with substance and depth and honors the substance of their experience. Aristotle and Dante are so alike but also so different, which makes for a subtle ebb and flow of their relationship. The supporting characters, mostly their parents, are so interesting and realistic, you can see how these boys became who they are, in part, by who their parents are. Saenz's writing was gorgeous, both in its spare moments as well as the lyrical and funny ones.

If You Loved:
Will Grayson, Will Grayson, David Levithan and John Green
The Short, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Where Things Come Back, John Corey Whaley
It's Kind of a Funny Story, Ned Vizzini
Eleanor and Park, Rainbow Rowell