Austin Teen Book Festival & Ally Condie

Yesterday I attended the Austin Teen Book Festival, which is an AMAZING festival that is put on by Book People (an independent bookstore in Austin) and the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation. They bring in tons of young adult authors--meaning they write books for teens--who are organized into panels by genre, and the authors talk about everything ranging from their books to their writing processes to the challenges of today's teens. I have loved YA fiction ever since I read Twilight took a class on YA literature at BYU, so obviously this festival was kind of a big deal for me. I went to the panels on the fantasy, romance, sci-fi, and thriller genres. 

I really liked something that Ally Condie said. She wrote the books Matched and Crossed and was on the romance panel. She is also LDS (Mormon). Before I get to what she said, I need to give some background. For those of you who may not be familiar with the romance genre, I should tell you that a common trope in this genre is the bad boy (shocking, right?). Usually the bad boy secretly has a heart of gold (though he may not know it yet), but he has had hardships in life that cause him to go down the wrong path. The heroine then helps the bad boy see the error of his ways, he turns good (or at least better), and they live happily ever after. In other genres as well as romance, a deeply flawed character can actually make for a really compelling read—at least in my opinion. (I mean, have you ever heard of Severus Snape?)

Anyway, back on the panel there was another author who had been talking throughout the session about the bad boy love interests in her books and what she likes about them being bad boys. When Ally Condie was asked about her books, she said something I really liked. She said that she has always really wanted to write about good people, which is why her three main characters—Cassia, Xander, and Ky—are all good people. She thinks it’s a misconception that good people in literature cannot be interesting. Good people aren’t just automatically good; they have to decide over and over again that they want to be good, that they want to do the right thing. Good people aren’t perfect, and they often make mistakes, but they also often do really hard things in their pursuit of goodness. All these things make for the possibility that good people be just as compelling to read about as not-good people. While her books aren’t my favorite (though I certainly like them), I admire her for trying to show people that characters who are good are interesting and that we can be as fascinated by them as we are by deeply flawed characters.

Here’s an unrelated extra tidbit for Ally Condie fans: She said that though the whole trilogy belongs to Cassia, Crossed also belongs to Ky and Reached will also belong to Xander. Does this mean that Cassia and Xander will end up together in Reached? One can only hope. Actually, I’m only sort of on Team Xander, so I wouldn’t mind terribly if she ended up with Ky, but wouldn’t it be kind of weird to have half the narration be by Xander and then to have him not be chosen?

 Quote of the Day: “I can do hard things.”—Elaine S. Dalton