by JULIET WATERS

It’s been a bad week for YA, the standard acronym for books pitched at the “young adults” formerly known as teenagers. Amidst charges of plagiarism, Kaavya Viswanathan has had her first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, withdrawn from publication. Buzzing around this story have been allegations that publishers are farming out book deals to formula hacks at a rate unseen since the glory days of romance comics.

But the genre has been suffering bad press for months. In March, Naomi Wolf followed up a bleating op-ed piece for the New York Times about the dangers of shallow, pornographic, bestselling YA series like “Gossip Girls” with an alarmist, hand-wringing appearance on Oprah. Now, lurking somewhere left of online predators, under the bedcovers of naïve girls everywhere... oh my God... bad books!

In town last week to launch her second YA novel, The Queen of Cool, Cecil Castellucci refuses to join the alarm squad, even though she’s been referred to by Bookslut.com as the “anti-Gossip Girl.” Her latest heroine is Libby, a high school clique leader who gradually gets in touch with her inner science nerd and befriends the high school freaks when she takes an internship at the L.A. Zoo.

Still, you’re not going to find the former Montrealer dissing popular culture, ever. “Hey. Kids have a right to trash too,” she told me. “I mean I grew up reading Judith Krantz—you know, Scruples and The Thornbirds, and look, I’m okay now.” But worse than trampling on the rights of kids to read bad books, is that this kind of controversy overshadows what Castellucci believes is a golden age of YA.

“That whole Naomi Wolf thing—I mean this idea she has of labelling a genre as dangerous. Could she maybe look at some YA books that are written by women for women that have a good spin? Because there are a lot out there.” Anyone who talks to Castellucci for more than 10 minutes on the subject is going to learn pretty quickly that there’s a passionate devoted community of YA writers who are a far cry from the hacks they’re currently being portrayed as.

In the ’90s Castellucci was better known here as Cecil Seaskull, and she was just as passionately devoted to the Montreal music scene. A founding member of all-girl band Bite, and later Nerdy Girl, Castellucci has since relocated to L.A., where she’s happily living in East Hollywood, near the famous observatory from Rebel Without a Cause. With a few rejected novels under her belt, Castellucci finally landed a deal with prestigious American children’s literature publisher, Candlewick. Boy Proof, her first novel, was about a geeky girl sci-fi fan. Currently in the works are a third novel and a graphic novel with a major comic book publisher (whose name for the time being is off the record.)

“I have to pinch myself,” she says about how happy she is being able to write YA, and has no rancour towards books that might be outselling hers, like the gossip girls, which, to give Woolf some credibility, do dominate the bestseller list. “I mean it’s élitist to say that you can have trash for adults, but you can’t have it for children,” she continues. “I mean it’s not like the adult books on the New York Times bestseller list are all la crème de la crème. And I say ‘trash’ lovingly. I think sometimes you need to be spoonfed, you need to relax, you need to go on an adventure in your brain that’s very easy, just like you need to also have things that are serious and weighty and important. You need a good balance of both in order to be a complete human being. And you can’t tell what’s good if you don’t see what’s bad too.”

The Queen of Cool by Cecil Castellucci, Candlewick, hc, 176pp, $22.99