Welcome Back to YA Cafe, where book lovers can gather and chat about teen literature. I’m your barista, along with Ghenet from All About Them Words.

Each Friday we pick from a menu of topics and share our thoughts on our respective blogs. We’ve also got plans brewing for interviews, events and even some exciting giveaways, so stay tuned! Join the discussion by responding in the comments, on your own blogs or on twitter using the hash tag #yacafe.

Today we’re discussing Sara Zarr’s heart-breaking book: Sweethearts.  This book, about two childhood best friends who are separated, then reunited, is fraught with emotion and at the end I definitely found myself in tears.  (OK, so I admit I cry easily with books, but still.  This one was a tear-jerker.)  But today I’m not planning to gush about the book or blather on about how easily I cry (those ASPCA commercials on TV? Yep, I cry during those too).  No, today I want to talk about flashbacks.

Perhaps one of the most central elements of Sweethearts is the series of flashbacks that reveals a traumatic memory tying the childhood best friends together.  The book opens with a scene from this series and subsequent scenes are sprinkled throughout the first two-thirds of the novel.  So, what makes these flashbacks work?  What could be better?  Here’s my analysis.

5 Tips for Using Flashbacks in Your Novel

1) Put the reader in the scene.  In Sweethearts, all the back-story is revealed through actual flashbacks, not through exposition.  In these snippets of scenes, we’re right there with the characters, experiencing the moment with them rather than being told about the moment from an after-the-fact point of view.  By immersing the reader in the scene, the back-story feels more real and is much more effective at capturing the reader’s attention.

2) Consider verb tense and point of view.  One of the elements that struck me about Sweethearts was that all the flashback moments are in present tense, while the rest of the book is written in past tense.  What this does is that it adds immediacy to the flashback moments, as well as a sense of urgency.  Also, by using different tenses in the flashbacks than the real-time text, Zarr makes it easier for the reader to identify when we’re in flashback mode and when we’re back in the present.  This is a nifty technique that solves the problem of having to add headers to flashbacks with dates or what-have-you so that the reader knows where we are in the timeline.  The present tense serves as enough of a cue.

3) Don’t forget to bring the reader back.  The reason many writers are often encouraged to avoid flashbacks is because of a phenomenon dubbed “Disappearing Scene Syndrome” (I first heard this term at a lecture by author and teacher Peter Selgin).  What this means is that sometimes writers will get so wrapped up in the flashback that they forget to bring the reader back to the present.  Example: Your character is brushing her teeth and remembering a wild, crazy night she had partying with her girlfriends.  The story continues following the women as they tour the party circuit and we never come back to the scene in the present where the main character is brushing her teeth.  What Zarr does so beautifully in Sweethearts is that she always brings the reader back to the present after those intense flashback scenes.

4) Don’t make the flashback too long.  A corollary to the previous tip, be careful about making flashbacks that are too long so that the reader doesn’t forget where we are in the actual timeline.  The way Zarr resolves this problem is that she gives us a longer flashback right at the beginning (with a header and date so we know we’re in the past), but subsequent flashbacks are much shorter.  She also does a great job of cutting off the flashback at a cliff-hanger so that we have to keep turning pages to find out what really happened.  Again, a subtle technique, but very effective one.

5) Make sure there’s a pay-off.  This is my one quibble with the flashbacks in Sweethearts.  There is so much suspense and buildup to the grand finale that when we finally do discover what really happened, I’ll admit that I was slightly disappointed.  I thought that the result would be much more terrifying.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a painful scene (or series of scenes) to read, but I was expecting something much, much darker to be the end-result and when that didn’t happen, I felt like the author had led me to believe one thing and then given me another.  Again, let me underscore that the actual series of flashbacks are very scary and dark.  It’s just that with the rate of the build-up, I was expecting the climax of that sequence to be even darker than it ended up being.  But this is all a minor quibble, considering how artfully Sara Zarr handles the flashbacks otherwise.

Take-home Message: In the end, it’s all about building trust with the reader and making sure that the reader understands where the story is in time and place.  Flashbacks are tricky to handle well and the series in Sweethearts is artfully done.  If you’re writing a book that involves a series of flashbacks, I definitely recommend reading Sweethearts by Sara Zarr as an example of how to do them.  Actually, if you’re looking for a heartbreaking, heartfelt book, I would also recommend Sweethearts, because it’s just that: heartfelt and heartbreaking.

Want to read more about SWEETHEARTS: check out Ghenet’s response at All About Them Words.  Then share your thoughts with us in the comments or on your own blog.  (Don’t forget to leave a link in the comments so we can check it out!)

This week is our last of the YA Cafe Summer Book Club sessions and we’ll be discussing Sweethearts by Sara Zarr.  I can’t believe the summer went by so fast!  Feels like just this morning we were announcing the book club idea and now we’re on our last book.  But don’t worry, Ghenet and I have lots of fun things planned for YA Cafe in the fall so stay tuned for more adventures in teen literature.

The Book Club Discussion posts will go up this Friday on both iggi&gabi and All About Them Words.  As always, you can share your thoughts in the comments or share a link and post your response on your own blog.  Also, don’t forget to join in the conversation on twitter, using the hash tag #YAcafe.  Here are a few discussion questions to get discussion going.

1. Did you find that the cover and title represented what the story was really about?  How so or how not?
2. What did you think of the story structure with the past revealed in short chunks?  Did you find it effective?
3. How did you react when you finally found out what happened to Jennifer and Cameron in the past?  Was it surprising?  Scary?
4. Secondary characters play an important role in this book.  Which secondary character resonated most with you and why?
5. How you define yourself is a central theme in this story.  Jennifer goes through great pains to redefine herself as Jenna.  Have you ever had the experience of redefining yourself as someone new?  What was it like?
6. What did you think of the ending and how it’s not a typical love story?

Can’t wait until Friday!  In the meantime, if you haven’t read Sweethearts, get your hands on a copy and read it!

Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

Hello all!  Just a quick reminder that YA Cafe summer book club will be continuing on August 26th, when we’ll discuss Sweethearts by Sara Zarr.  As always, feel free to post your thoughts on your own blog and share a link in the comments, or just use the comments to tell us what you think!

Starting in the fall, we’ll be back on our regular schedule of YA Cafe posts every Friday and we’ll have some fun new things up our sleeves.  Hope you all are having a superiffic summer and enjoy these last few weeks.  Can you believe we’re almost halfway through August?  Where did the summer go?  Seriously, I want a do-over.

Keep reading, keep writing and keep being awesome!

Welcome Back to YA Cafe, where book lovers can gather and chat about teen literature. I’m your barista, along with Ghenet from All About Them Words.

Each Friday we pick from a menu of topics and share our thoughts on our respective blogs. We’ve also got plans brewing for interviews, events and even some exciting giveaways, so stay tuned! Join the discussion by responding in the comments, on your own blogs or on twitter using the hash tag #yacafe.

You know when you’re reading a book, and you’re about three chapters in, and all you can think is “where is the author going with this?”

Then you get this sneaking suspicion that this author knows what she’s doing–maybe because you’ve read previous books, or maybe because you want to give her the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t really matter why you keep reading. All that matters is that you’re willing to trust the author and go along for the ride.

And you know that feeling you get when you reach the final chapters of that same book and the author managed to pull off what you thought was impossible and the ending totally delivers?

That was exactly how I felt when I read Carolyn Mackler’s Tangled. Having read all of her previous books I was excited… but also slightly terrified… to read this book. This is a new approach for her, juggling four different point of view characters (two of them are boys!), and telling a story in short spurts rather than one long narrative that spans the entire novel.

I was worried about a lot of things. Like what if it wasn’t really one story? What if it turned out to be four loosely-connected novellas? Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with novellas, but if I’m sitting down to read a novel, I have certain expectations. Like, I need an overarching narrative, however loose that narrative may be. And I want to see the characters grow and change throughout the book. How on earth was Mackler going to pull this off if she was jumping from one character to another and if each character’s story takes place in a different time/place than the other stories?

When I read Jena’s story, my apprehensions grew exponentially. Jena’s character is an archetype we’ve seen in Mackler’s work before (in particular, the protagonists in her first 3 books all have certain similarities to Jena). But the thing that always made Mackler’s depiction of this archetype satisfying in her other books is that, in the end, the smart-but-not-very-popular girl who’s insecure about her looks always seems to learn to accept herself as she is. It’s a message of empowerment that I always looked forward to in Mackler’s work. Needless to say, by the end of Jena’s section of Tangled I was devastated. It felt like the message was: life sucks, and it keeps on sucking.

With each subsequent section of the book, I grew more relieved. At first, I was worried that we would be getting a “grass is always greener” moral and that the point of the book was just to show that even so-called popular kids have problems. But I should have known that Mackler wouldn’t settle for an answer that easy. In the end, this book isn’t just about seeing the other side of a situation or understanding how the other person feels. Really, this book is about reaching out to that other person.

The structure of the book perplexed me at first. We see a lot of “before” and “after” moments with these characters, but we rarely see the actual change. Most of the time, the moment of transformation happens “offstage” between sections and we only get hints of it later on in the novel. Then it occurred to me that this book really isn’t about change. The fact that these characters will change is a given, but what truly matters is how these characters help to transform one another.

It takes a lot of guts to write a book like this, where you have to hope that your readers will trust you to know what you’re doing.  Mackler had gotten really good at writing the smart-but-not-very-popular heroine and suddenly she comes up with Tangled which turns all her previous books on their heads.  Not many authors are willing to break away from their tried-and-true styles to try something new, but Mackler definitely did that here.  And suffice to say, she did so beautifully.

Tangled is an interesting departure for Mackler. While her previous books have mostly focused on one protagonist’s path to self-discovery and acceptence, this book emphasizes the importance of connection with others. In the end, I had nothing to worry about, but worrying actually made me enjoy the book all the more.  I became invested in wanting to see how Mackler was going to pull this off, how she was going to redeem some seemingly un-redeemable  characters.  But she did.

It’s like that car insurance commercial: I should have known all along that I was “in good hands.”

Want to read more about Tangled: check out Ghenet’s response at All About Them Words.  Then share your thoughts with us in the comments or on your own blog.  (Don’t forget to leave a link in the comments so we can check it out!)