Not Writing Romance, a guest post by Tracy Badua

Taylor and Travis.
Zendaya and Tom.
Priyanka and Nick.
You don’t have to watch twenty-four-hour news coverage to know the hottest celebrity pairings, who’s broken up, or who’s rumored to be even remotely making eye contact. Now, I inhale these tidbits of celebrity gossip as much as the next bored scroller, and I truly love a good romance novel. But when I was trying to come up with ideas for my contemporary young adult books, I found myself gravitating toward stories that didn’t necessarily center romance.
Part of me was worried that these ideas wouldn’t find traction in today’s young adult market. A quick peek at book-focused social media reveals strong shipping camps in favor of one partner or the other or hundreds of posts of fans swooning over the latest literary it-couple. But saying that contemporary YA books are required to have romance is like saying everyone is required to be paired up: it’s not true, and literature—and life—is all the richer and more colorful for it.
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My first young adult book, This is Not a Personal Statement, focuses on Perla, a girl who doesn’t get into her dream college, photoshops an acceptance letter, then moves on campus anyway. It’s about the toxicity of academic pressure and the lofty expectations we aim at young people. Then my next novel, We’re Never Getting Home, follows Jana, who gets stranded at a music festival with her ex-best friend and must find the keys to their ride home before curfew. While there are some whispers of crushes in each book, neither Perla nor Jana’s journeys hinge on the romance staple of a partnered-up happily ever after. By the end of this year, I’ll have six books out in the world, and I don’t think I’ve written a single kiss into any of them (to be fair, four are middle grade, and younger readers tend to find kisses icky).
I—and sometimes my readers—ask why I don’t write stronger romance plots in my YA books. My easy answer is that I am a coward. I somehow unfortunately ended up with an almost Victorian-level sense of propriety and can barely sit through a steamy make-out scene in a movie I’m watching with older relatives. I also try to retain a strong boundary between my children’s literature life and my lawyer life, which tend to be two very different crowds with very different sensibilities and priorities. All of this to say that the idea of having my grandmother or work colleagues asking me about a sex scene I’ve written makes me want to run the other direction.
The real and trickier answer is that when I think back to my own experience in high school, my day-to-day life and major obstacles didn’t necessarily center on romance either. Yes, hormones and crushes and prom dates are all often huge, stressful features of American teen life. But for me, so were AP exams, passing the behind-the-wheel test for my driver’s license (I failed the first time), applying for part-time jobs, and wondering how I managed to still look like I was twelve years old when some of my classmates were CW-star-level glamorous. I remember agonizing about why I was having such a hard time with chemistry and whether it was worse to switch to a non-honors class to learn at a more reasonable pace or fight through and take the hit to my GPA. This may seem like a silly stumbling block to some, but the stress and the blow to my confidence were very real.
All of my reflection boiled down to this: there’s more to us than who we date.

We are writers, book nerds, math geeks, state champions, singers, actors, people who have full lives over and above who we may or may not be paired up with. People likely don’t introduce Taylor Swift first as Travis Kelce’s girlfriend, and Priyanka Chopra certainly shouldn’t just be credited as a Jonas Brothers’ wife. It’s an exciting time for us in children’s literature as we begin to see the full breadth of who we are reflected in the books we read.
In the contemporary YA space that This is Not a Personal Statement and We’re Never Getting Home inhabit, so many wonderful novels show the complex sides of teen life. In Shannon C.F. Rogers’ I’d Rather Burn than Bloom, Marisol struggles to pull herself up from the depths she’d sunk to after her mother’s sudden death, and the book beautifully explores the messiness of grief. Ellie in Gretchen Schreiber’s Ellie Haycock is Totally Normal may find herself falling for a fellow patient while still trying to make things work with her boyfriend back home, but the real gut-punches of the story are her navigating her friends, family, and medical institutions from a place of wariness and justified mistrust. Then there’s the more serious exploration of restorative justice and race in Charlene Allen’s Play the Game, which follows VZ as he tries to finish coding his dead best friend’s game and solve the murder of that friend’s killer.
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These stories showcase teens in such beautifully different journeys. Yes, YA can be romance, but it can also be grief, friendship, self-acceptance, and so much more. I’m thankful that there’s room on our bookshelves for the vast array of teen-centered stories we have to tell, whether romantic or not. After all, there’s no better pairing than an eager reader and a good book.
Meet the author

Tracy Badua is an award-winning Filipino American author of books about young people with sunny hearts in a sometimes stormy world. By day, she is an attorney who works in national housing policy and programs, and by night, she squeezes in writing, family time, and bites of her secret candy stash. She lives in San Diego, California, with her family.
Links:
Website: www.tracybadua.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tracybaduawrites
About We’re Never Getting Home
HBO’s Insecure meets Dazed and Confused in this messy, tender YA novel about a friendship breakup, set against the backdrop of a chaotic night at a music festival, from rising talent Tracy Badua.
Jana Rubio and her best friend, Maddy Parsons, have an epic senior year finale queued up: catching their favorite band at the Orchards, an outdoor music festival a two-hour drive away. When a blowup over Maddy’s time-sucking boyfriend exposes a rift that may have already been growing between them, Jana calls off their joint trip and gets a lift to the festival from her church friend Nathan…only to realize Maddy and her boyfriend are along for the ride, too.
All Jana wants is to enjoy the concert and get home as soon as possible. But then Nathan loses his car keys crowd-surfing, and it’s up to Jana and Maddy to find them. As they navigate stolen phones and missing friends, scale Ferris wheels and crash parties, the two of them are forced to reckon with the biggest obstacle of all: repairing their friendship.
Will Jana and Maddy find their way home—and also back to each other?
ISBN-13: 9780063217805
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 04/16/2024
Age Range: 13-17 Years
Filed under: Guest Post

About Amanda MacGregor
Amanda MacGregor works in an elementary library, loves dogs, and can be found on BlueSky at @amandamacgregor.bsky.social.
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