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Corey Ann Haydu Continues to Explore the Complexity of Girlhood in The Careful Undressing of Love
It’s one thing to get yourself on my instabuy list; it’s quite another to leap to the top with your debut and never, ever budge an inch. From the moment I got into Bea’s complicated, messy, anxiety-filled head in OCD Love Story back when Corey Ann Haydu entered YA in 2013, I knew this was a writer I had to experience as long and as often as humanly possible. And up to and including her brand-new release, The Careful Undressing of Love, she has never failed to not only entertain me but to make me think—hard—about what it means to be a girl in modern society, and the nuanced pressures, hardships, and ugliness that can come with it, as well as every beautiful bit that is to be celebrated, appreciated, and adored. If you haven’t read Haydu until now, here’s a refresher on what you’ve missed in her YA catalog.
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OCD Love Story
I categorize Haydu’s first three books in three different ways, and this one was “The one I needed to put down.” It shouldn’t surprise you from my gushing intro that this was one of my favorite books of 2013, but it delves so deeply and masterfully into the mind of a girl (Bea) struggling with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that I needed to take breaks for my own mental health. Those who underestimate the power of anxiety (and/or misuse “OCD” as an adjective to mean you like things a little neater) would do well to get a fuller picture here, raw and unfiltered but never feeling like Bea’s whole self. Indeed, though it doesn’t feel quite like a traditional capital-R romance despite the title, it is in fact the story of a girl falling in love, that acknowledges how, while other people can’t “fix” us, they can inspire us to work on ourselves in order to make space for someone we want to keep close. This is true not just about love interest Beck but Bea’s best friend, Lish, who is wonderful and loyal but at times struggles with the consuming nature of being so close to someone whose mental workings she cannot quite fathom.
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Life By Committee
Haydu’s sophomore was “The one I couldn’t put down,” not when I was desperate to see where the winding roads of leaving her fate in the hands of an internet forum would leave Tabitha. See, Tab has had a seriously rough time of adolescence and wearing the new skin of her more adult body, and as her friends abandon her and her young parents still have plenty of their own stuff to work out, she’s stuck with nowhere to go to discuss her budding romance with Joe…especially since he’s already taken. Enter Life By Committee, an online forum that lets you spill your guts and have total strangers decide your next move, whether you like it or not. For increasingly isolated Tabitha, LBC is a breath of fresh air that gets her moving again. But what to do when the challenges start pushing her further than she really wants to go?
Making Pretty
AKA, “The one I never wanted to put down.” Haydu’s third novel was a beautiful amalgam of my favorite things: an homage to New York City, an exploration of toxic friendship, the complexity of sisterhood and other familial dynamics, and what it means to love and be satisfied by yourself. It stars a girl named Montana, just as she’s losing the constants in her life—most notably her sister, Arizona, who’s off to college—and is spreading her wings a bit with Karissa, the new friend who helps her move on. But then Arizona comes home for the summer and Montana realizes things have changed more than she ever dreamed, and it doesn’t help when Karissa’s role in her life changes, too. Everyone in Montana’s life has moved on in unexpected ways Montana doesn’t understand. But when she meets Bernardo, she may find in him her own way to shake up her life and move forward too.
The Careful Undressing of Love
While Haydu has been one of my favorite contemporary authors from the start, her newest veers a little from the world we know (while keeping her trademark feminist themes front and center). The girls of Devonairre Street are well known to be cursed in this dreamy, slightly alternate Brooklyn circa 2008, in which everyone’s still feeling the aftereffects of an unnamed tragedy that occurred seven years earlier. In this world, the focus is on the Afflicted, i.e. the relatives of the survivors, rather than the perpetrators of the attack, and Devonairre Street is peopled with survivors. It’s said that if a Devonairre girl falls for you, you’ll die, and when Lorna and her friends witness the curse in effect firsthand, their grief-stricken group splinters into those who believe the rules and those who flout them. The pressure placed on the girls to be who and what everyone wants, needs, and expects of them—including abstinent and loveless—is palpable, but for Lorna, it’s asking the impossible: her heart is already gone.
Want even more Corey Ann Haydu? Check out her Middle Grade books, Rules for Stealing Stars and the upcoming The Someday Suitcase!