{"id":586786,"date":"2026-08-08T07:42:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T07:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/586786\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T07:42:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T07:42:13","slug":"ya-fiction-had-author-jenny-ireland-hooked-from-the-start","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/586786\/","title":{"rendered":"YA Fiction had author Jenny Ireland hooked from the start"},"content":{"rendered":"

Young Adult Fiction, or YA Fiction, is often misunderstood. The uninitiated might think it\u2019s only for teenagers, but that couldn\u2019t be further from the truth.<\/p>\n

Some of the biggest and most beloved series of recent times are YA; take, for example, The Hunger Games<\/a>, Twilight, and Heartstopper.<\/p>\n

For Jenny Ireland, who is based in Belfast and was on a very different career path before finding writing 13 years ago, the genre is full of potential.<\/p>\n

\"AuthorAuthor Jenny Ireland. Pic: Supplied<\/p>\n

Chatting with EVOKE as her fourth book, French Kisses, was released, Jenny said: ‘People assume YA is one thing, and I think Colleen Hoover and Harry Potter get lumped into YA, but there are so many different genres within it.’<\/p>\n

One thing that Jenny thinks makes YA so appealing to readers, of all ages, is that the teenage years are often jam-packed with emotions and full of intensity – two great traits for a book.<\/p>\n

She said: \u2018I think when you’re a teenager, everything is happening to you, all these experiences, that are so concentrated in like five years and everything is so intense\u2026<\/p>\n

\"AuthorAuthor Jenny Ireland. Pic: Supplied<\/p>\n

\u2018In general, YA speaks to the questions that are still relevant, like \u201cwho do I want to be?\u201d and “who am I?\u201d and on a more simple level, YA readers or teenagers get bored very quickly, so the story usually starts with a bang and tries not to let you go… You don’t really have time to get bored.\u2019<\/p>\n

Jenny\u2019s own love of reading isn\u2019t something she\u2019s always had. She explains: \u2018I wasn’t the biggest reader as a kid, so I feel like a hypocrite when I’m going on with my kids to read more books.<\/p>\n

\u2018It wasn’t until I read Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild that I saw a character, Petrova, that looked a bit like me. That was the first time I saw myself in a book and realised how powerful it could be.\u2019<\/p>\n

Her own writing career came even later, with Jenny first embarking down the legal route and going to university to train as a solicitor.<\/p>\n

Laughing, she said: \u2018Now it just seems ridiculous because I spend most of my time in a darkened room with the dog for company, so it was never going to be the career for me.<\/p>\n

\u2018It wasn’t until I had my first child 13 years ago, when I had absolutely no sleep and was dying for some headspace of my own, that I started writing.<\/p>\n

\"AuthorAuthor Jenny Ireland. Pic: Supplied<\/p>\n

\u2018I started writing children’s stories, and I got absolutely hooked. I can thank my kids for the torture that drove me to that, I suppose!\u2019<\/p>\n

Deciding to make writing a career felt \u2018bonkers\u2019 to Jenny for a long time, but her family got behind her, with her mum and dad even paying for a writing course.<\/p>\n

During the course, Jenny had a moment that will stay with her forever.<\/p>\n

She said: \u2018I had no idea if what I was just writing was absolute drivel, but in one of the one-to-ones, I was told \u201cI think you’re going to be published one day,\u201d and that just stayed with me.\u2019<\/p>\n

Jenny\u2019s latest book, French Kisses, follows swimmer Margot, whose life is thrown upside down when she freezes on the block at the biggest championship of the year.<\/p>\n

\u2018Her parents do the worst thing you can do to an 18-year-old with a social life: They take her on holiday for four weeks to Eurocamp in France,\u2019 Jenny explains with a laugh. \u2018There she meets two boys, F\u00e9lix, who is maybe the nicest boy in France, and Antoine, who is an insufferable surf instructor who calls her princess.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"AuthorAuthor Jenny Ireland’s book French Kisses. Pic: Supplied<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just a love story, though. Jenny explains: \u2018It\u2019s really about who you are when the thing that you built yourself on has disappeared. Whether she ends up with a boy isn’t really the biggest question by the end.\u2019<\/p>\n

Jenny has plenty of experience of spending her own summers in France, which alongside her own teen obsession with the Kate Bosworth film Blue Crush, helped her tell the story of French Kisses.<\/p>\n

\u2018I love France and the language, so I just wanted to see how a girl from Belfast would get on over there,\u2019 she said. \u2018It was so much fun to write, and I find that with most of the YA books I write, they all sort of end with hope and there’s a lot of fun in there as well as the deeper stuff.<\/p>\n

\u2018I think falling in love and being in love is one of the nicest parts of being human and it’s so easy to forget with all the awful stuff going on in the world\u2026 and teenagers need that.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Young Adult Fiction, or YA Fiction, is often misunderstood. The uninitiated might think it\u2019s only for teenagers, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-586786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}