This Lauren is right though. Nearly all kids books these days seem to have girls and/or POC on the cover.When I was of that reading age, it didn't matter so much because chances are the surface level traits would be more or less incidental. But kids know what's up, and a cover depicting one of the above could easily be dismissed as "girl shit" or "nigga shit". The industry should be trying to keep boys reading, not turn them away.
White working class boys are the only "group" who don't get specialized help within education, and if any was proposed it 'd be called "waycist". (I'm jus t going to ignore Milo's shit from a few years back)
Trying to make book recommendations for boys in the YA range is like pulling teeth.
It's part of why I
hate listening to the SJW crowd crow about how "necessary" feminist teen fiction is; I remember nearly having a fucking aneurysm a few years back when the Maze Runner movies were coming out, because so many women and feminists were bitching about the male-centric novels. It was epitome "I am uncomfortable when things are not being about me?". Girls have
so many diverse options in YA and children's fiction; boys have far,
far less, and woman have a
lot of fucking nerve to complain about this one series doesn't have enough girls in it for them. For all their bitching about how men have "everything" handed to them, they seem chronically incapable of recognizing when they've cornered the market on something (who am I kidding, they recognize it- they just don't want to acknowledge it).
If I had to ballpark it, I'd say (conservatively) about 80-85% of YA fiction features a female main character. And of the 15-20% that does have a male main, about 5% of that would be books with multiple protagonists (collections of short-stories, books that split POVs between male and female characters). The popular male-centric YA books, off the top of my head, are the Maze Runner, the Gone series, and Simon vs. The Homosapiens Agenda. It's worth mentioning that a lot of male-centric YA has a woke spin to it, too: A Long Way Down, All American Boy, Dear Martin, Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, The Simon book I just mentioned, among others.
Sure, you have classics like Hatchet, the Outsiders, Where the Red Fern Grows, Call of the Wild, My Side of the Mountain- but the problem with these books is that they're often assigned for school, and chances are the boy's already read them and doesn't want to again. You also might have noticed, if you're familiar with these books, that four out of five of them are wilderness-survival based books; and not all boys are into that, so they'll turn them down anyway.
And just because it has a male protagonist doesn't mean it's marketed at boys: There are YA books with male characters (centric or sharing the book with a female protagonist) that are
clearly slanted for female readers: Cassandra Clare's stuff would count, so would John Green, as well as a lot of romance and sci-fi books. And don't even get me fucking started on the number of female authors (feminist or not, though many are and the rest probably won't cop to it) that have been applauded for "really giving a
deep understanding of what it means to be a boy/man". Can you imagine the fucking
explosions that would ensue if a male author wrote a book with a female main character and people said that he had a "real understanding of what it is to be a girl/woman"? every feminist in the country would be frothing at the fucking mouth and rushing to say "No no no, men can never
truly understand what it is to be a woman! Only women understand!"
Goodreads has
a list assembled here of YA books with male protagonists (I glanced through it as I was writing this because quarantine has fried my brain) and here's the problem, coming from someone who works in a bookstore: A chunk of the books on this list (Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Percy Jackson, Holes, Ranger's Apprentice, and Cirque du Freak) are actually classified as children's lit, not YA, and I don't think I have to tell you that bringing a sixteen year-old boy to the kiddie section to find a book is an unpopular move. Additionally, some of the books are not marketed as YA, but as Adult Lit (of varying genres): Perks of Being a Wallflower, Ender's Game, Life of Pi, Ready Player One. This is a problem because A) the reading level might be too advanced depending on the boy, and B) a lot of parents will hesitate to get their child a book whose content has not been moderated for their age; some parents are very picky about what sort of content they want their kids exposed to and when.
I should also mention that a lot of the books on the list are older- not classics, per se, but written a decade or more ago and are therefore not as readily available in stores or libraries as other more recent books are.
Children's lit isn't as bad because the genre was around long before YA became a recognized, distinct genre, but it's still difficult to think of popular male-centric books off the top of your head in that category that isn't Harry Potter, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, or Percy Jackson. And nine times out of ten, with these and the YA options, I hear "Oh, he's already read those."
The point of this long-ass rant is that I am ready to drop-kick any dumbass who throws a temper-tantrum over a YA book being centered around a straight-white male protagonist, I will
gladly read and recommend Lauren Myracle's book when it comes out to spite the dipshits, throw me 'dem top-hats and have a lovely evening.
))" but they're fortunately avoidable.