7 Awesome YAs that Defy the Tropes

The Rest of Us Just Live Here, by Patrick Ness
In 1999, Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired a surprisingly touching episode, “The Zeppo,” about Xander Harris’s experience as the extraneous, non-Slayer/witch/vampire/werewolf friend. Almost a generation later, Ness, already a fan of metafiction, has built a novel around the same idea: Mikey and his friends are the normal and seemingly boring kids, not part of the “indie kids'” adventures falling in love with ghosts or averting the apocalypse. No, Mikey’s problems are much more dire. That’s not facetious—while his life isn’t touched by supernatural elements, it is filled with OCD, eating disorder recovery, absent parents, car accidents, and more. By contrasting the quotidian dramas of Mikey, his sisters, his best friend, and his unrequited love, Henna, with chapter openings catching readers up on what the indie kids are up to, Ness highlights (as Whedon did) the seemingly small struggles and triumphs of adolescence.

Still Waters, by Ash Parson
Like supernatural tales, noir is chock full of recognizable tropes, mostly in the form of archetypal characters: the damsel in distress, the femme fatale, the tough guy, the hero. For her debut novel, a contemporary, high school–set noir, Parson decided to cut, paste, and mash up these labels to make more nuanced protagonists and antagonists. While the plot centers on strong-and-silent-type Jason, what unites all three characters (as Parson explains) is that they’re all the damsel in distress in some way: put down and even threatened by the adults in their lives, they must rescue themselves instead of waiting for a savior to come along.

The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner
A great thief is finally caught, and must steal a precious stone that grants its user incredible power from one of several warring countries in an alternate-history ancient Greece. But as Gen takes you on his greatest heist yet—which will land him back in jail, if he fails—you begin to realize that you should never trust the word of a thief. There’s a reason every character sounds like a classical archetype: it’s more likely you’ll underestimate them that way.

The Friday Society, by Adrienne Kress
Starting with stock characters provides shorthand for readers to sketch out expected characteristics…and it also allows authors to subvert expectations. In her steampunk mystery, Kress introduces readers to the kind of trio you might have seen before: the tomboy, the blonde bombshell, and the silent and deadly killing machine. But by starting with familiar (and overused) tropes, Kress gets to dig beneath the surface and take each of these archetypes to emotional places they’ve never been before: vulnerability, mockery, and ultimately catharsis.

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green
Nearly half of Green’s body of work is focused on deconstructing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype: the quirky girl who brings a guy out of his shell, only to conveniently die once her work is done. While his early novels Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns examine how putting anyone on a pedestal dehumanizes them, his work really crystallized in The Fault in Our Stars, in which he introduced us to one of pop culture’s first Manic Pixie Dream Boys. Augustus Waters smokes a cigarette ironically, insists on calling our protagonist “Hazel Grace,” whisks her away to Amsterdam to track down her favorite author, and pushes her to not see herself and her illness as a ticking time bomb.

The Iron Trial, by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare
Thanks to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and other fantasy series, you know what to expect from a wizarding school…but what about a dark wizarding school? Black and Clare’s collaboration follows Callum Hunt, who is dying to fail the Iron Trial—otherwise, he’ll be accepted into the Magisterium and wrapped up in the kind of magic his father warned him to avoid. It’s one thing to subvert a “Chosen One” plot, but it’s another thing to take us through a would-be villain’s origin story.

Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
An enduring fairy tale sees a humble town sending its prettiest, worthiest young women to a bloodthirsty dragon as a sacrifice. But what if the village’s bravest, most revered girl is passed over for her homelier, less humble best friend? And what if the dragon isn’t a creature but a wizard called the Dragon? Novik’s fantasy is celebrated for the unique subtle moments and narrative heights its plot achieves following this premise, but you can’t deny that the setup immediately lets readers know they have to stay sharp.