Young adult literature represents youth culture. Reading such novels defines adolescence through which youth culture is further reproduced. The most popular young adult novels are often formulaic in their form, with a homogenous content and white heteronormative protagonists. The Perfect Chemistry Trilogy, which I analyse, belongs in the genre of romance young adult literature. It describes the lives of three Latino American brothers in the USA and their romantic relationships with the female protagonists. In my thesis I analyse the narrative structure of the novels in the trilogy and the representations of gender and ethnicity of the main characters. The analysis shows that the structure of the novels is similar to the one defined as typical for romance novels by Janice Radway in the eighties. Representations of gender and ethnicity are found to be problematic, because Latino Americans are represented as »Others« in comparison to Americans and the female gender as »Other« to the male gender. Reading such novels establishes cultural hegemony and the privilege of white Americans and their culture.
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