How do you hook a reader?
Casey McQuiston’s first novel, Red, White, and Royal Blue, was a massive bestseller, sparking what the New York Times has called an “LGBTQ romance boom.” It’s a hilarious, joyful, page-turner of a book that offered an alternate view of what might be happening in the White House than what actually had been happening in the White House in the years before it was published in 2019. It was the escape reading I needed at the moment.
McQuiston’s latest novel, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, is billed as a YA romance, so it will give us a chance to explore the boundaries of both of those genres. The tag-line for the novel is featured on the cover and hints at yet a third genre: “To get the girl, first you have to find her.” A mystery!
Before we get to the first words of the novel, we get three bits of text to interpret. First is an address to the reader, which turns out to be a content warning that the novel “includes elements of religious trauma and homophobia.” McQuiston softens this warning a bit by telling us that Chloe Green, her point of view character, isn’t an Evangelical Christian and that the topic will be “approached with humor, because sometimes you really do have to laugh.” I like this solution, which honors the reader while also staying light-hearted.
After the content warning is an epigraph, a line from a song by the Killers: “It started out with a kiss…” This clever once-upon-a-time alternative gestures at the inciting incident referred to in the title, though it turns out that’s not what McQuiston is going to show us first.
Our last bit of info is the time stamp after the chapter header:
HOURS SINCE SHARA WHEELER LEFT: 12
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 42
We haven’t talked about time stamps yet on the blog, so let’s spend a few minutes on them. Traditionally, a time stamp is used in stories with complex timelines, like a plot that jumps forwards or backwards in time. These preliminary lines can also include things like a location or a character name—again, useful for any book that covers a lot of territory or stories that are told from multiple points of views.
Do you have to use them? Certainly not, even in narratives that jump around in time. As we saw with Matrix by Lauren Groff, it isn’t hard to use internal references to keep us located. She jumps years and even decades and cues us in by mentioning her protagonist’s age.
In this case, I think McQuiston is using the stamps as a way to build suspense. I expect that watching the hours Shara Wheeler has been missing tick up as the days to graduation tick down will generate a charge each time we reach a new chapter—we’ll see what unfolds! Notice, too, how this first time stamp also establishes these two markers are signal events in the narrative—one in the past and one in the future. We are mid-story right now, even without reading a word of the novel proper.
Now, look at this first line: “Chloe Green is going to put her fist through a window.” Fabulous, right? We know whose point of view we are in now, and we know she is worked up. The use of the near future tense (“is going to”) gives a charge to the narrative and, just like the time stamp, tells us we are jumping straight into the action.
The next paragraph gives us a character insight and also the setting: “Usually when she has a thought like that, it means she’s spiritually on the brink. But right now, squared up to the back door of the Wheeler house, she’s actually physically ready to do it.” Notice that McQuiston establishes that what Chloe feels about Shara’s disappearance is more important than the disappearance itself.
It’s only at this point that we find out what happened: that Shara disappeared from prom the night before. Here, too, the event is filtered distinctively through Chloe’s point of view: “It has to be an act, is the thing. Obviously, Shara Wheeler is fine. Shara Wheeler is not missing. Shara Wheeler is doing what she does: a doe-eyed performance of blank innocence that makes everyone think she must be so deep and complex and enchanting when really, she’s the most boring bore in this entire unbearably boring town.” Notice how particular the voice is—a distinct hallmark of YA as a genre. McQuiston’s use of repetition and parallel structure in this passage is masterful: the angry drumbeat of “Shara Wheeler is…”, the repetitive drone of variations on the word bore.
The next paragraphs follow the same pattern: we find out first what Chloe had planned for “her perfect prom,” as opposed to “the perfect prom” (a dress that made her look like “a sexy vampire assassin,” screaming to Lil Yachty, going to Waffle House) before we find out what happened to Shara—or what little Chloe is inclined to tell us. Shara walked out the door before she was announced prom queen and hasn’t been seen since.
Chloe is convinced she is simply skulking inside her house while her family is in church, so she casually breaks in. As she wanders through the house, we start to get a sense of how closely she’s paid attention to Shara. She’s shocked, for example, to find a scrunchie in the bathroom because Shara has never been known to wear her hair back. When she reaches Shara’s room, she feels a frisson of excitement to discover “what sort of perfection incubator Shara Wheeler climbs inside when she goes home every day.” Here McQuiston sneaks in what I suspect will be an important theme question: “Who is she when, for once, nobody is looking?”
Buried in the many specific details about the objects in Shara’s room are more clues to the relationship between these two girls: Chloe considers Shara to be popular, while she is part of the “weird and queer” crowd in their small-ish Alabama town. She thinks that perhaps Shara wanted to frame her, Chloe, for her murder. Another mystery!
We’re just about to learn more about the mystery embedded in the title and epigraph—that kiss between Chloe and Shara—when Chloe’s reverie, brought on by the smell of a lipstick she finds in the trash can, is interrupted by a new character, Rory Heron, coming through the window. Chloe gives him the kind of hyper-precise social label used only by teens and Real Housewives: “Willowgrove’s answer to every brooding bad boy from every late ’90s teen drama. The most eligible bachelor amongst the stoners-skaters-and-slackers rung of the social ladder.”
It’s only then, when Rory asks why Chloe even cares why Shara is gone, that we understand the relationship between the two girls:
Why does she care? Because she and Shara have both spent every day of their high school careers dedicated to the singular goal of graduating valedictorian, and the only thing Chloe has ever wanted as much as that title is the satisfaction of knowing Shara Wheeler can’t have it. Because Shara Wheeler has everything else.
Because if Shara’s really gone, that’s a forfeit, and Chloe Green does not win by default.
Because two days ago, Shara found her alone in the B Building elevator before fifth hour, pulled her in by the elbow, and kissed her until she forgot an entire semester of French. And Chloe still doesn’t know why.
At this point, romance readers will know exactly which classic trope McQuiston is engaging: enemies to lovers. This trope, already intense, is heightened in this case by the YA setting and by the questions around Shara’s sexuality. She has a boyfriend, Chloe has told us (the football quarterback, of course), but then there was that kiss…
The final twist of the chapter is that Rory was just kissed too. This turns out to be enough of a bond to unite Chloe and Rory in trying to discover what happened to Shara—not so much because they are worried about her (she is perhaps too perfect for them to believe something bad could happen?) but because, as Chloe puts it: “What if she ghosts everyone forever? What if you spend the rest of your life wondering why, in the name of God, Shara Wheeler kissed you?”
And that, dear readers, is how a book’s hook works. McQuiston doesn’t rely just on a missing prom queen to draw in readers. That story, after all, has a few known endings. What McQuiston is offering instead is a less predictable mystery: Why did Shara go out of her way to ensnare weird-and-queer Chloe and stoner–bad boy Rory in a quest to figure out where she went, awakening them each with a kiss before disappearing, like a reverse Sleeping Beauty? This is a story for which I don’t already know the possible endings.