There's a natural tension in young adult fiction: the main characters are the same age as the readers (teenagers), and yet in order to have a story, the characters need enough agency, enough freedom from adult supervision to have an adventure. This creates a handful of tropes that can work really well, or can trigger my eye rolling.
1. The parents are dead. This worked well in The Reader, which was a recent review here on the site, because her father's murder deeply affected her and sent her on a vengeance spree. Also she was trying to rescue her guardian and therefore working towards regaining some supervision. But often enough, killing the parents is a way to shuffle them off so we never have to think about them again. Sometimes the loss of parents happens well before the story starts and doesn't even seem to affect the kid at all. I've learned that orphans in the English countryside have whacky, lighthearted fun!
2. The parents are criminally negligent. This crops up a lot in contemporary YA, where the parents are too wound up in their own things to remember they have wild teenagers or to notice that those teenagers talk to demons. You also see parents who travel for long periods of time for work and leave their kids home unsupervised in an empty house. I've learned that this is a recipe for your kid getting their group of friends together in your living room to have a séance and do battle with a poltergeist.
3. Related to 2: when the adults know that the kids are about to face grave danger and instead of stepping in, say, "No! It has to be you!" I will forever hold up the sixth and seventh Harry Potter books as an example of this. Even though Harry did not graduate magic high school and has no idea what he's doing or how to do any of the magic involved, even though he has the whole Order of the Phoenix (which is full of some of the best, most experienced witches and wizards, all of whom will drop what they're doing to help him in any way possible) at his disposal, no, no, he's the chosen one and it has to be him. Let that child go muck around and be in danger, and drag his friends into it to boot. Not only is it child endangerment, but it's a bit of a logical stretch that a kid will be able to defeat the dark lord for you.
I make fun of these, but I completely understand why they happen. Another recent review here on the blog was The Rhithmatist, and in it the adults did a good job sheltering the kids and keeping them away from the danger. This resulted in the stakes being really low as the main character's conflicts revolved around failing to make friends and bickering with the friends he had and not liking one of the new professors, instead of the conflicts revolving around kids being kidnapped and possibly murdered by terrifying chalk monsters. The big danger was not front and center for the main character so it wasn't front and center for the reader. Before I put my finger on what was happening, I thought the book was skewing younger, leaning towards being a middle grade book. The adults behaved appropriately in that one and so the main character had less agency.
It wouldn't be much of a story if the parents do all the adventuring and the kid is their sidekick. Although, that's sort of what happens in The Girl from Everywhere and not only did it work great, but that was an awesome book.
So now I want a book where the kid is the chosen one, but the kid's mom says "Nope," and does everything they can to keep their baby safe. It'd be from the mom's point of view, making it not a young adult book, and then...I don't know who would read this but me.
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