Recommends: The Death of Courtship and the Rise of Instantaneous Love in Modern YA

A good friend (and fellow blogger) of mine has been following the Twilight posts and recently asked me if I didn't want to blog about a disturbing trend she had noticed in YA literature lately, that is, the tendency for the main character (usually female) to fall in love with the designated love interest (usually male) with almost no time passing, very little courtship, and sometimes entirely 'off camera'. I had noticed this rather recently in "Wither", but what I hadn't realized was how endemic the phenomena is becoming.

I'm not sure how I feel about this phenomenon. On the one hand, I'm not a big romance genre fan, so I sometimes don't mind it so much when a book signals HERE IS HER MAN. SHE LOVES HIM BECAUSE HE IS THE ONLY PERSON IN THE NOVEL WHO ISN'T A JERK. LET'S MOVE ON NOW. Indeed, I could have done with a little more of that in Twilight (although, of course, the "jerk" qualifier would have to be excised) and a little more actual plot. On the other hand, I thought the love triangle in "The Hunger Games" was supremely well-done and absolutely vital to the characterization of the main characters because it felt so real and messy and genuine.

I encourage everyone to head over to J.D.'s blog and check out her thoughts on modern literary courtship (or lack thereof) in a lot of recent YA novels. She's decided to split the post into a couple of parts, so also stay tuned for her follow-up post as the novel in question gets closer to publication.