YA Spring Break Week: Guest Blogger Monica McKayhan Weighs In On Bad Boys

UPDATE: The winner of five books from Monica's INDIGO series is Anna! Please email your physical address to contests @ knightagency.net (remove the spaces in the email addy).

He’s the rebel, or the boy from the wrong side of the tracks. He’s bitter, volatile, a crushed idealist, but he's also confident and mysterious, charismatic and street smart. He despises authority and doesn't buckle under to anyone, which also makes him somewhat a bully. Girls are attracted to the bad boy because he represents everything that is exciting, intriguing and new. He’s everything she’s not. He’s nothing like her father and doesn’t possess anything that resembles her values. She knows that he won’t be accepted in her healthy circle, but she loves him nonetheless. And according to him, she’s the only one who loves him. “Without her,” he says, “no one else will care.” He’ll perish without her love. His mystery, confidence and seemingly unavailability in the beginning cause her to chase him, which proves that girls are also attracted to boys who ignore them.

Consider Stephanie Meyer’s Edward Cullen character in The Twilight Saga; a vampire who takes bad boy to a whole other level. When Edward first sees Bella in class, he stiffens up like he’s smelled a dead skunk and avoids her like the plague. She searches for him everyday and when he finally does come back, he alternates between being nice to her, and telling her she shouldn’t be friends with him. This back and forth drives Bella crazy, which is probably what Edward wants all along.

There’s nothing worse than a guy consistently having to resist the urge to kill you for lunch, but the fact remains that girls’ love for bad boys had withstood the test of time. In the not-so-terrifying ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, we see the bad boy as the protector when he and Becky Thatcher are lost in a cave. In the beginning, Tom Sawyer primarily has no moral code, his sense of ethics confined to feeling guilty over a terrible act he’s already done through selfishness or impulsiveness. He is, however, presented with a genuine moral dilemma when he witnesses a murder, and travels a path that causes him to do the right thing. In this story, the bad boy becomes the hero.

Bad boys exist in real life – not just in fiction, which is why YA writers have such an important job. We have an obligation to not only entertain our young readers, but to equip them with information that can help them make good decisions. If we’re creating characters that look and act like them, then those same characters must be able to identify what’s good and whole, as well those things that are potentially harmful. While we, as girls, love bad boys – we have to know when bad is reflective of a flaw in character – perhaps a lack of maturity, or when bad is just bad for no good reason at all.

THIS CONTEST IS CLOSED. Leave your name in the comments and enter to win FIVE BOOKS from Monica McKayhan's INDIGO series!! The winner will be announced tomorrow morning.












DEAL WITH IT (Kimani Tru, June 2009)

www.MonicaMckayhan.com