3. After about 1950, if the heroine's sibling dies, the entire book has to be about that. Before about 1950, it could be a sad interlude in a book that's about something else entirely.

4. In the eighties and nineties, the YA novel plot was "Teenager meets dying/mentally ill/emotionally scarred/physically or mentally disabled person/child of said person, and learns the important lesson that you can't fix other people's lives." Thank God, that plot seems to have fallen out of popularity.

yhlee

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