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Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature by Sara K. Day (review)

the formulaic texts through which adolescence typically is constructed, and introduce potential alternative scripts that confound normative narratives that define coming-of-age exclusively as coming-to-know/sexuality. Kokkola organizes her findings thematically, and this lends itself to interesting comparisons across time periods and national borders. The segments include anywhere from six to ten smaller sections and subsections, however, and such lengthy elaborations make it difficult to follow the thread of Kokkola’s central theses. Readers may find themselves overwhelmed by descriptions of plots and characters as they navigate Kokkola’s nuanced readings. Regardless, Kokkola’s study makes an important contribution to theorizing adolescence, sexuality, and desire within narratives produced for youth. In Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants, Kokkola challenges a linear developmental narrative for the genre of young adult fiction and resists the idea that conservative representations of adolescent sexuality have given way for more progressive variations. To this end, she cites Norma Klein’s 1997 It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me and Aidan Chambers’ 1978 Breaktime as novels that would fit her of criteria for radical texts that avoid scolding or suggesting deviance and “that accept that adolescent desires are no less significant than adult desires” (214). Kokkola offers refreshing insights as she refuses simple generalizations and insightfully analyzes long-held adult investments in representations of sexually active and/or carnal teenage characters as either sexy sinners or delinquent deviants.