I live in Canada, and sadly, I don’t know if many YA books are set here. I haven’t read any, but I’m looking forward to finding one. I live in Toronto, and I bet a lot of those possibly-existant Canadian YA books are set either here, Vancouver, or maybe Montreal. (Any suggestions on Canadian YA Books? Anyone? Anyone? I’d love to know!)

Don’t take it the wrong way though! Reading a lot of NYC just makes me want to go to the city even more.

Great post!

Having said that, I recently read Magic or Madness and was thrilled with the descriptions of Newtown and Camperdown Cemetery, down to the monuments and tombstones. It’s great to read a writer’s perspective of your hometown and I always love reading stuff set in Sydney (brings back good memories). I spent a lot of time in that cemetery – a group of friends and I put on a trilogy of plays, performed around the perimeter of St Stephen’s Church.

I now live in Coffs so the mention of Woolgoolga was another woohoo moment!

But I am surprised that a lot of Oz YA is set in country towns. It’s not a trend that I’d noticed – will have to watch out more.

Granted, I also love very place-specific books, like how Lois Lowry’s Anastasia books are definitely set in Boston and Cambridge and make use of Boston-specific landmarks like Charles River and MIT. But even as a non-New Yorker, I love books set in NYC.

I currently live in the US, but I was talking about Mexico and particularly Mexico City.

Justine, I’ve read your books and your blog and I love how you write about San Miguel. When I read you, I can recognize it and say YES, it’s just like this!! Well, I want to find that recognition on books set in Mexico City. I’m not looking for idealized-everything is good descriptions, that would be just ridiculous. We have lots of problems, and by all means they should be included, but our problems are not us, they are just a PART of us. If that makes sense.

Today I was discussing this with a Brazilian friend who said the same happened with his city [Sao Paulo].

As long as it works with the story, I don’t mind where a book is set. I was excited when I read the two Diana Wynne Jones books that pass through Bristol, where I grew up, but it doesn’t bother me that it doesn’t often feature.

Plus, I’ve never been to NYC and have always wanted to go.

I love reading about [what are to me] new and exotic places — whether real or invented. However, since I’m pathologically bad at visualizing, a lot of setting kind of … flows past me. This may be why I get a particular thrill from books set in places I’ve lived or visited, and why I will often put down the book and start Googling when my lack of familiarity with a book’s architectural landmarks, say, becomes a problem. Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Findley’s Headhunter were a whole different, and better, experience for me after a few years of living in Toronto; I love W.O. Mitchell’s books partly because they take me back to my childhood in Alberta; my brain tends to link Bujold’s Chalion books to my memories of Spain …

I’m not sure whether Canada suffers from a surfeit of YA books (or other books) set in certain cities, but I don’t think it does (although Ontario and Quebec are certainly overrepresented — then again, Ontario and Quebec account for a very big percentage of total population, so…). Like Australia, we’re extremely urbanized. If anything, what we suffer from a surfeit of is books set in the USA.

And I am very amused at how so many people who live in NYC are saying that they never noticed the overabundance of books set in NYC. I always thought that this occurred across all genres and carried over into movies as well, although I’ve heard for movies that the NYC skyline is the only US skyline that is instantly recognizable anywhere (I know that I don’t recognize the skylines of any other US city and just a few international ones).

As a natiive NYer, I didn’t notice how many books and movies were set in NY till I left. It just bolstered my self-satisfied and myopic sense of being in the navel of the universe. A great NY YA novel still thrills me, like Rebecca Stead’s recent When You Reach Me, but I do tend to get more excited about YA books that take me to the middle of the country like Catherine Murdock’s Dairy Queen.

And I’m not annoyed per se at the setting of novels in my country. I’ve read stuff that just about describes our rural small towns [where a lot of our population lives], but pretty much all the books I’ve read set on our cities [especially mine]** portray us as insecure, poor, & dirty places. And although sadly, there IS truth on that, there is also a whole other side of our cities that often gets neglected –the good side. We are rich in history, art, sports, museums, food, universities… I mean, we are a place defined by its contrasts. Our good stuff lives and breathes along the negatives. I want to read that. I want the beautiful and ugly place that it actually is. Not just that awful place from the news. So no, the setting doesn’t trouble me, it’s its representation that does, we have enough misconceptions and stereotypes going around as it is.

**which admittedly are not that many, so I might haven’t gotten to the right books.

(I was very surprised, some years back, to learn that my 80-year-old grandfather, who spent his entire life in the same small town in California, loved watching Seinfeld.)

My favorite childhood books set in New York included The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, Mixed-Up Files by E.L. Konigsburg, and Trixie Belden Mystery of the Blinking Eye by Kathryn Kenny. Recently I enjoyed the picture book What Happens on Wednesdays by Emily Jenkins, which is distinctively Brooklyn but also universal.

Also, after reading your last post I feel fairly stupid but I have to ask: what exactly is Charlie’s race? You mentioned that she’s not white… maybe it’s really obvious but I don’t remember anything specific about her race…

And yet, there are so many books published about country towns. I’m not quite sure why… Possibly something to do with our Bush cultural heritage maybe?

I recently finished a YA novel called Ruined by Paula Morris. I loved it. It’s set in New Orleans the author gives so much history of the city. It was such a joy to read a great book and learn about a city I was unfamilar with.

The author is from NZ but has been living in New Orleans for sometime now.

There are exceptions, of course, but man, I am tired of New York. And I LOVE New York. New York was one of the hardest things to leave when I moved from the East Coast to St. Louis. But please. Fewer NY books. It seems like most YA authors who now live in NY have lived SOMEWHERE else. Set your book there.

And no kid outside of a very big city is going to care about a picture book about the subway. Also, could we stop having picture books that take place in NY that feature zero minority faces, even in crowd scenes?

I definitely noticed the preponderance of NYC in books growing up. Even kids in small towns were sorta peripheral to NY or had moved from NY.

It would be hard for me to set a particular kind of YA novel in my hometown because of the culture where I grew up. (Orem, Utah.) Which means I would have to include aspects of Mormonia or it wouldn’t be realistic, but it would also be somewhat limiting because of the sheer amount of religious jargon and assumptions dealing with that culture. Not that it couldn’t be done, mind you, but it would be a different sort of novel to start with than I want to work with right now.