Sixteen-year old Niarah Holloway’s only goal in life is to get through it unnoticed. That, and to spend her first summer in LA building a doomsday bunker in her backyard. But Niarah wasn’t prepared for Mac Torres. Not for his disarmingly cute face, or for his surfer lifestyle, or for the way his smile resuscitates her heart. Mac is a bomb that blows Niarah’s world to pieces, but instead of disaster, he fills it with sunset bonfires, breakfast burritos, and new friends.
For years, Niarah’s life has revolved around ignoring the demons of her past, avoiding the problems of her present, and preparing for the catastrophes of the future. Now Mac—with his sunshine laugh and infectious optimism— is determined to show her another way to be. But in a world where the worst feels inevitable, can one summer be enough to light the way to a hopeful future? Can one summer be enough to fall in love?
We spoke with YA author, Jade Adia, about their contemporary fiction book, Our Shouts Echo. Adia shared advice on writing mental health in YA fiction, the theme of power dynamics in her work, and romance tropes.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In Our Shouts Echo, Niarah lives with anxiety, depression, and OCD, all of which are influenced by her fears for the planet. This includes environmental catastrophes, wars, and climate change, to the point that the audience can understand her justifications in doomsday prepping. With all this in mind, do you have advice for other writers in writing about mental health in contemporary fiction for young adults?
My best advice for other writers when it comes to tackling mental health in young adult fiction is to be honest. I think sometimes adult writers have an urge to protect young readers and romanticize the healing journey. There’s an impulse when writing to “wrap the story up neatly,” so sometimes authors get to the finale and are like, “Okay and now our protagonist is totally healed and everything will be okay!” And while I think it’s totally okay to have happy endings, when we’re talking about mental health, I think it’s important to not make “100% healing” the goal. Like it’s okay if your character isn’t perfect by the end of the book. It’s okay if they still have lots of stuff to work through. As writers, we don’t need to rush our characters’ mental health journeys.
In Shouts for example, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the arc of my main character Niarah isn’t, “Girl overcomes depression, anxiety & OCD,” but instead something more like, “Girl explores whether she can learn to open up and trust just a littleeeeee bit.” Healing is all about baby steps, so my advice is to give yourself permission to set the pace slow and really just sit with your characters on their journeys without rushing them to some magical, often illusory, post-mental illness end goal.
Many writers have an education beyond writing, and yours goes into Ethnicity, Race, & Migration as well as law with a specialization in Critical Race Studies. All knowledge is power in the writing world, so we’d love to know how your education has influenced your writing.
It’s funny because early on in my publishing journey, there were definitely times when I wished that I was an English major or took more creative writing classes. Now though, a couple years into this work, I’m really glad that I studied a different discipline. One of the central tenets of both Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Studies is an exploration of the nature of power – how power is articulated along the lines of race, class, gender, nationality, etc. While all of the stories that I write are quite different from one another, these ideas of power – and how powerless you can feel as a young person in a very ageist society – emerge again and again.
I think coming-of-age stories are the perfect place to explore the ideas of how power dynamics play out interpersonally as well as on a societal level because I think most people can relate to the feeling of being ignored or underestimated just because the dominant culture says they’re “too young” to understand. In Shouts, Niarah’s frustration with the world is deeply related to her feelings of powerlessness and her overwhelm at systemic inequities. So, in a way, I feel my intersectional education creeping into my fiction constantly. As writers, we all have certain themes that we simply can’t escape in our art; I’m starting to realize that one of mine is the eternal question of how we can find ways to feel powerful in a world designed to make us feel just the opposite.
What are some of your favorite books and why?
An impossible question! I’ll try my best to pick just a few haha.
On the adult side, one forever favorite is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. It’s a strange book about a nameless man who is lost in the world. I think it captures a very unique, tragic, existential feeling in a deeply compelling way.
When it comes to YA, I love contemporary books with complicated protagonists that pull at your heartstrings like Grown by Tiffany D Jackson, Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min, and The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed.
I also grew up on John Green books and honestly do not know if I’d even be writing contemporary YA had it not been for those novels. I will never forget reading Looking For Alaska for the first time.
Romance tropes are well known and can often be divisive among the reading community. Are there certain ones you love and/or were there some you wanted to avoid?
One trope that I knew I wanted to analyze in Shouts
was the “boy gets in fist fight on behalf of girl” trope. Growing up, I hate to admit it, but I always loved these moments when a possessive boy would go all Knight In Shining Armor for his crush. As I got older though, I started to unpack the ways in which young women are conditioned to romanticize violence in their relationships.
Without giving away too much, there’s a moment in my book when this trope is presented and subsequently challenged. My goal in doing so wasn’t to shame this trope per se, but to offer an alternate perspective on it that might resonate with certain individuals who may have experienced violence in their lives before and who might not see these fight scenes as innocently as they’re so often presented to be.
What are your writing plans for the future?
I’ll have some news to share soon about some upcoming YA projects in the pipeline, but for now I’ll just say that I’m experimenting with new genres!
Anything else you would like to share?
Thanks for this opportunity to chat about Our Shouts Echo! If anyone would like to follow along for more updates, the best way to stay in touch is with my free newsletter at jadeadia.substack.com.
