Top Ten Settings I’d Like To See More Of (Or At All)

In which I share many novel ideas that you should probably use. This is my fourteenth Top Ten Tuesday post, but yet again it’s Wednesday as it took me a while to finish the list! Top Ten Tuesday was created and is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

1. British Boarding Schools – I eat boarding school stories up, well, like Girl Meets Cake. (See also: Night School)
2. London – I live in London, but that doesn’t stop me loving stories set here. From Sarra Manning’s Pretty Things/Adorkable to Luisa Plaja’s Extreme Kissing to Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy – if the characters spend time in London, I’m having fun.
3. Subcultures – I really enjoyed Jo Brand’s It’s Different For Girls, and won’t somebody who was around at the time write a book set during the heyday of goth? Pretty please with a black eyeliner pencil on top?
4. Spaceships – specifically, I’d like to read more YA about girls who live on spaceships. I’m brewing up a novel like this myself but there’s plenty of room at this party – come on in, the space water’s lovely.
5. British secondary schools – I haven’t read many great UKYA books largely set at school and this is a shame, because there is so much potential there to be explored.
6. Arts schools – E. Lockhart has covered performing arts with Dramarama and visual arts with Fly on the Wall, while Sophie Flack’s Bunheads reminded me how much I loved ballet stories as a kid, but I want more!
7. Paris – To be fair, there are probably loads of YA books set in Paris, but only Diary of a Crush:French Kiss and Nobody’s Girl spring to my mind immediately. Sarra Manning just makes Paris sound so good, I have to be careful not to read any of her books in the same week that I watch an episode of Rachel Khoo’s The Little Paris Kitchen or I’ll find myself packing my bags and grabbing my passport.
8. Less well-known countries – Admittedly, there are scores of popular YA books set in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and all the most tourist-doused European countries. Even India gets a fair bit of teen-literary attention, though almost always with an American or British protagonist. I would like to read more stories about teens in other countries that are actually growing up in those countries.
9. Universities – Young Adult or New Adult or literary fiction, I’d like to read more books set in universities. Especially if those universities are NOT Oxbridge.
10. Libraries – because they’re not just for sitting in and reading or collecting books from!