Girls Rocking Out in YA

By Charlotte Huang
For the Record, my YA debut, is about a high school girl who gets her dream job fronting a successful rock band. Chelsea Ford spends the summer on tour getting a crash course on the inner workings of the music industry, grappling with sudden fame, and learning how to survive living on a bus with a bunch of other people–most of whom are boys.
There may be nothing especially revolutionary about seeing characters like Chelsea in contemporary YA novels, but for a story about rock music, having a girl protagonist is not an obvious choice. Mind you, we’re not talking about pop music, where there are many female performers. We’re talking about rock bands, with multiple members who play actual instruments.
Consider one recent headline that proclaimed, “75% of 2015’s summer music festival bands [were] all dudes”. In light of this information, making any girl the front person of a famous band is more subversive than it appears at first glance. Obviously great bands with girls in them exist in greater numbers than this statistic would indicate, but the culture of rock is still pretty exclusively male. I chose Chelsea to tell this story, at least in part, to support girls who want to be rockers and show them that their dreams are possible.
I also made a conscious decision to populate the large cast of characters with people of color. Malcolm Ho, the band’s hard-partying drummer, is Chinese American and also one of my favorite characters. His cousin, Rob Chang, is the conscientious, exacting tour manager. My hope is that characters like these, in some small part, move the needle of diversity if only by offering varied, non-stereotyping representation of Asian Americans in YA novels.
While many of the characters in For the Record share at least some of my views and traits, Malcolm is particularly close to my heart. I’m certainly not like him in all ways, and social issues may not actually rank high on his list of concerns, but Malcolm helped me say what I needed to say when I wanted to comment on racial diversity, or lack thereof.
Malcolm knows what it’s like to be a minority. He’s used to functioning in non-diverse environments and is comfortable enough in them to remark on crap when he sees it. Writing him was so fun and at the same time, oddly comforting. I want to be as brave and irreverent as Malcolm and I can only hope that he has the same effect on readers.
Charlotte Huang is the author of FOR THE RECORD and GOING GEEK (Fall 2016). She’s originally from Boston but now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.
For the Record is available for purchase.