Last year an unusual thing happened. A prominent YA editor, familiar with the books I’d published up to that point, contacted me, asking if I’d consider writing a YA book for her. She wanted it to be like The Gossip Girls—certainly, she wanted the same sales—but she was hoping for something with a little more substance. Since I’m always eager to learn a new writing trick and YA was not a field I’d delved into before, I jumped in, reading examples of the more prominent commercial series as well as more thoughtful volumes.

And then I started writing.

The book—a-misfit-at-private-school seriocomic piece plus mystery—was going along fine when it was interrupted by a visit from the Idea Fairy who pays a visit a few times a year. The Idea Fairy stays just long enough to deposit in my brain compelling plots and commanding characters. In this instance, she showed up with an idea for a more serious book than I had intended, derailing my plans for successfully penning the next best-selling frothy offering. I was to write the least funny book I have written to date, a book with a dead-serious theme, and, since the Idea Fairy was kind enough to arrive with the plot almost fully developed, I shut up and listened.

The book that came out of all of that is called Angel’s Choice, an earnest novel for older teens about the eponymous Angel Hansen, a smart girl on track for Yale who, on the eve of her senior year, does a very stupid thing. She goes to an end-of-summer party where she sees Danny Stanton, the boy she’s been in love with forever. She tells herself, as she often has, that this is the night Danny will see her clearly and realize he is in love with her too. But when Danny goes off with someone else, Angel gets drunk and in turn goes off with another guy. She winds up having sex for the first time in her life, in an act she can’t even recall clearly later, an act that has a consequential result: pregnancy. What will she do? Will she follow in the footsteps of her best friend who had an abortion six months earlier? Or will she do what no one, including her parents and guidance counselor, want her to do: have the baby, thereby complicating if not destroying her carefully laid life plans? Everything that follows is Angel’s Choice.

It is, perhaps, foolish, or at least counterintuitive, to publish such a serious issues-oriented book in a publishing climate where publishers are constantly looking for the next hot young teen chick fix. And yet that is exactly what I’m doing, supported by an editor who refers to the book as “important,” an adjective I’d never imagined anyone attaching to one of my books.

Will readers be interested in my quiet, thoughtful novel? I don’t know. I do, however, think that the pro-life and pro-choice camps will have something to say about it, and  I can envision both sides holding it up as supporting their stances or reviling it as going against their beliefs or even one of each.
 
Reviewers and critics often talk about “listening to the silences” in individual works. I think the same can be true of publishing in general, and when I go into the YA sections of bookstores there is a cacophony of fashionable books that are to literature what Dynasty and Dallas were to more serious television and film in the ‘80s. I have no objection to the plethora of party books, but I do think there’s enough room on the shelves for a book about a girl who wants to make an important choice, choosing not for the rest of the world, but for herself.


Lauren Baratz-Logsted lives in Connecticut with her husband Greg and their daughter Jackie. She is the author of The Thin Pink Line, Crossing the Line, A Little Change of Face, and the forthcoming How Nancy Drew Saved My Life, all dark comedies; the forthcoming Vertigo, a literary novel set in the Victorian era with erotic and suspense undertones; and the forthcoming young adult novel Angel’s Choice. Lauren also has an essay in BenBella’s Jane Austen theme anthology Flirting with Pride & Prejudice, and is the editor of and a contributor to BenBella's forthcoming anthology This Is Chick-Lit.