Kate’s had a crush on him for forever, but she hasn’t seen him lately. Richard is kind, charming, and good-looking. There’s the hero, Richard, who is her older brother Bjorn’s best friend. Kate’s got the perfect cast of characters to work with. The resulting novel is both hilarious and touching. She thinks they are “disgusting, with kisses that last three paragraphs and make you want to put your finger down your throat to induce projectile vomiting.” But she has her own little romantic story to tell, something wonderful that happened to her last Christmas, so she sits down with a copy of The Romance Writer’s Phrase Book to try and draft something that will be a little more like “real life.” High-school senior Kate Bjorkman doesn’t like romance novels. The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman meets all of these criteria, and is a darn good read as well. And, finally, YA fiction almost always ends on a hopeful note not necessarily happily-ever-after, but definitely hopeful. It often deals with serious subjects or issues, but these issues are always resolved with the characters having learned something about both life and themselves. It’s quite often well written, but almost never pretentious. I am, of course, a children’s librarian, so that’s not surprising, but I don’t think that you have to be a young adult or a young adult librarian to enjoy YA literature. I’m extremely partial to young adult fiction.
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