Room 101, for Teenage Girls: A conversation with Only Ever Yours Author Louise O’ Neill

by Jessica Monk

an image flared in my mind’s eye. It was of a girl, she was 16, standing in front of a classroom in her bikini while a nun-like figure walked around her, circling her ‘defective’ body parts with red marker while the class chanted "fat, fat, fat."
As YA fiction explodes with myriad worlds to explore and conquer, one thing that’s often taken for granted is the freedom to roam. With the reader piggybacking on the exploits of an adventurous protagonist (as in The Hunger Games), the YA novel becomes an exemplary “rite of passage” that puts readers’ feet back on the ground and th...