I was listening to Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series this week, and I found myself irritated by what I see so commonly in Young Adult literature: boys who know “nothing” about girls.

Now, I’m not picking on Nix here – I understand that his work can be extremely powerful, with Sabriel coming highly recommended. What I’m bothered by is more of a trend in the field. It is a cliché that needs to be defeated. That can only happen with better versions of adolescent gender relations, better versions that more closely relate to the real experiences of the readers.

Today I was reading The Casual Vacancy and I found exactly the kind of moment which works: J. K. Rowling writes, “Andrew wished he knew more about girls; he had never got to know one well enough to fathom how their minds worked” (132). Clearly Andrew, like Nix’s Arthur, is a boy who knows “nothing” about girls. So why isn’t this the same cliché? Simply because Andrew is an anomaly. He knows nothing about girls because he is an abused child from an abusive home where he is not allowed to venture into society – in other words, he knows nothing about girls because he is screwed up.

Rowling, of course, writes wonderfully about adolescents, almost as if she once was one and has perhaps seen a few. She even nails some very male-like thinking when she has Andrew spot a tampon wrapper in a friend’s bathroom – the cliché reaction would be puzzlement and perhaps disgust, while Andrew’s reaction is excitement, “akin to seeing a rare comet” (133). Fact: straight adolescent boys are excited by anything that relates to the sexuality of girls they find attractive. (They also spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about girls in the same exact ways that girls spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about boys – this is something that John Green does so well it’s ridiculous.)

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Nix’s YA series to Rowling’s adult novel, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. YA readers are, as John Green says, the most important readers many novelists have – and it’s because they are YA. They are learning how to be “real people” from the books they read, and when those books are filled with sloppy caricatures instead of genuine characters, those readers suffer. There are reasons why Holden Caulfield matters, why understanding Ender Wiggins can make us all better, and why Huckleberry Finn is such and amazing human character. Like Rowlings’ Andrew, these “boys” do not know much about girls, but that’s not a cliché because they have real, legitimate reasons for such lack of knowledge.