Shining Tomorrow Demolishes YA Stereotypes

UPDATE: Welcome, Ace of Spades readers! If you want a little information about the book setting’s background, go read the Shining Tomorrow Historical Lore. You don’t need to read it to understand the novel at all; it’s only there as a bonus.

My upcoming young adult novel Shining Tomorrow will be released in May of this year on Amazon. It is an alternate history tale of a world where the Central Powers win World War I, ultimately leading to the United States becoming part of the Empire of Japan. In this world, a civic-minded high school girl will fight to rescue her best friend from a dastardly private military company, one deeply connected to Japan’s military government.

However, there’s more to it than that. You see, this particular YA novel deliberately inverts the clichés that dystopian YA is known for (FULL DISCLOSURE: I have not read The Hunger Games, Divergent, Uglies, or any others of that ilk. I am only aware of the tropes through pop-cultural osmosis.)

A common complaint about dystopian YA goes as follows (parenthetical added by me):

Contrast [traditional sci-fi tropes] with your typical young adult dystopian romp. Not to disparage the genre (ok, that’s a lie), but the dystopian societies portrayed frequently appear to have developed merely to inconvenience the heroine (almost always a heroine, these days). Their evil ways are never fully explained, their cruelty is not rationalized. Bad thing happened, and so now we have stormtroopers who oppress teenagers. Shrug. We have some fantastic technologies, they will make a limited appearance when necessary for plot advancement, and then be placed in a mysterious uninventing closet when their appearance might be inconvenient. Hope you connected with the protagonist, and picked the correct side of her love triangle for your team hashtag.

The only thing in there that matches anything in my book is the female protagonist. Other than that, I subvert every stereotype associated with the genre, though I did not set out to do such.

Let’s go through each cliché:

(1) A dystopia

In Shining Tomorrow, the dystopia…isn’t. It isn’t anymore nightmarish than Singapore is. While it’s not a democracy and political equality is a distant, faded memory, people still manage to live normal lives. They are more worried about what their families and peers think of them than what the government thinks of them; since they don’t vote, they don’t pay excessive attention to politics.

(2) An unexplained social structure

There’s an in-story reason why the authoritarian government behaves as it does: In 2015 (38 years prior to the start of the story), a massive civil war broke out in the United States. It spiraled into an international war that pit the two superpowers — the Japanese Empire and the German Kaiserreich — against one another for cotrol of North America. Japan wins. But before the 2015 war, intermittent political violence was the norm since at least the 1960s.

In 2053, the book’s Current Year, there had been 33 years of peace and stability. Not since the socialist Norman Regime in the 1950s had Americans known that level of order and safety. Thus, support for the occupation government is very strong — and near unanimous among the survivors of the 2015 war.

The government has more important things to worry about than a bunch of dumb teenagers.

(3) A rebellious heroine

Irma Kaneyasu is the polar opposite of the stereotypical YA protagonist. She doesn’t rebel against her society; rather, she strives to emulate the conservative virtues her society holds dear. Part of the story’s conflict comes from having to go against these virtues to rescue her friend, and this creates genuine anguish in her, like it was an attack on her very identity. On top of that, society itself doesn’t go out of its way to mistreat her.

(4) A love triangle

There is no love triangle. However, Irma does have a crush on a boy. The courtship process is without any drama and only takes up a small part of the story.

I truly can’t wait to bring Shining Tomorrow to everyone. Let me leave you with the copy I plan to use for the back cover blurb, along with a short promo:

From young elegant lady…to masked fury!

Irma wishes to be the perfect girl: chaste, feminine, and generous. But when a giant monster stomps through her hometown, her plans crumbled right along with the stores and apartments.

In the chaos of acrid smoke and panicked civilians, the private military company Shadow Heart snatched her friend out of the crowd and took her captive.

Now Irma must pilot the Grand Valkyur, a mechanical titan of steel more powerful than any weapon made by human hands. With a brilliant sword that could cut any matter and gleaming armor that could withstand any weapon, the Valkyur challenges all who dare to fight it.

But piloting the Valkyur means using violence — and to Irma, violence is men’s work.

How can she rescue her friend without betraying the feminine elegance she prides herself on?