First or Third Person?

Okay, I've hit a snag. My manuscript is in third person. Always has been. It's based on Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and since my beloved Jane wrote in third person (with the occasional first person interjection. She's allowed. She rocks.) I decided to approach my book that way, too.

 

The problem is, now I'm 40,000 words into my rewrite and I'm considering changing it over to first person.

 

My main character is a contemporary sixteen-year-old girl and I'm just struggling with the fact that the third person narrator of my story is not "teen" enough. She sounds a little formal (hell, I sound a little formal. Too many Jane Austen novels, I think). I know that sounds dumb. Certainly teenagers understand adult words. They don't converse solely in textspeak and LOLz. Many of them are studying for SAT's and ACT's and reading classic novels which were intended for adults. I'm sure they'll be able to follow the narrator (i.e. me) as she guides them through the story.

 

But, my big fear is that an agent or publisher will look at my manuscript and just think it's not "YA enough." Is that a silly thing to be worried about? I'd just hate to polish the whole thing up, make it perfect and awesome and then have an agent/editor tell me that the voice just isn't right. That it doesn't grab you or sound like something a teen would read.

 

Part of my issue is this: all the YA books I've read in the last few months were written in first person. Seriously. Prada and Prejudice. The Hunger Games. The DUFF. Matched. Dirty Little Secrets. Paranormalcy.

 

The only YA that I can think of off hand that's in third person is Harry Potter (and I suppose we can debate whether that series is even MG/YA). Of course, Jo Rowling does such an incredible job with the narrator there. She is telling the story, allowing us to move around inside Harry's head, but her voice doesn't feel intrusive. She's guiding us through the world, but allows us to see all the characters for ourselves through their dialogue and actions. We all know how I love Harry Potter, so the fact that it is told in third person is really having a huge impact on me.

 

I could change over to first person, but it also seems like the easy road to take. Like I'm just doing it to try to fit in with all the other cool YA books in the library instead of trying to tell the story the way it wants to be told.

 

I don't know. What do you guys think? Changing over would make the book "fit" more with other contemporary YA, which is primarily first person. And it wouldn't be that much work (she typed, as she envisioned another solid month of rewrites). I don't know.

 

Can contemporary YA work in third person?

 

Any suggestions of contemporary third person YA that I can rush out and buy right now?

 

-- Lisa