Until very recently, simple romances were "out" in YA realism, replaced by novels about various social concerns: drug abuse, premarital sex, and so on. Instead of a character being the focus of the novel, a condition became the subject of examination. With individual books often described as "tough," "honest," and "hard-hitting," the genre became known as the "New Realism." Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Nilsen claim that not only had there been a shift in subject matter in the contemporary realistic novel for young adults, but that there had been a shift in fictional mode as well: from romantic to ironic, and sometimes tragic [see excerpt above].

Tragedy, cynicism, irony: certainly these were foreign to Betty Cavanna's Diane Graham or [Rosamond] du Jardin's Tobey Heydon. But are they that typical of the teen problem novel? How often, really, does the bad guy win out?…

It is self-deluding to call...