It's nice to see that we're on the high end of the see-saw at the moment*.
As Kelly said, there's little in the article that YA readers won't already know, but I did find this interesting:
"I don't want any distinguishing characteristics on my covers, no pictures of girls, not even hair color, because I want the readers to feel that they could be the girls in my stories," says Dessen, who has fought about this issue with her publisher because "with the kind of books I write, readers can hopefully read them and think, 'this book is my school, this is me, these are my friends, this is our lives.' In our popular culture now there is so little that real people can actually relate to. Maybe that's the draw with books that movies don't have: with a book you can lose yourself in it, you can really put yourself in the story."
*As opposed to last year (or was it before that?) when every article about teen novels focused on the horrors or Gossip Girl. (Sex! Gasp! Drugs! Shock! Consumerism! Hand-wringing! Etc.!)
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