Review: Alicia Thompson scores a hit in YA fiction with 'Psych Major Syndrome'

TAMPA

When Alicia Thompson was in kindergarten, her teacher displayed a wall of pictures of writers like Roald Dahl in the classroom — what Thompson called the "arthur wall."

"I told my mom, 'I'm going to be up on that board,' " Thompson says.

Thompson might not be on the kindergarten author wall yet, but her first novel, Psych Major Syndrome, a romantic comedy for young adult readers (ages 12 and up), was just published by Disney Hyperion.

Set on the campus of a small liberal arts college, Psych Major Syndrome is narrated by Leigh Nolan, who is navigating her freshman year, her relationships with her free-spirited roommate and her oddly distant boyfriend, and her role as mentor to a middle schooler who may be more sexually sophisticated than she is. And, as the title suggests, Leigh is finding that her psychology classes may be providing her with more insight than she's comfortable with: Everywhere she looks, she sees relational aggression and cognitive dissonance.

Thompson is 25, but she looks as young as her protagonist. Wearing pin-striped black pants and a black T-shirt, she talks about her book at a Starbucks near the University of South Florida, where she's a graduate student in creative writing.

Thompson says she chose USF's program mainly to be close to home. She grew up in Valrico, graduated from King High School in Tampa, earned her bachelor's degree from New College in Sarasota and now lives in Riverview with her husband, Ryan Guy, a student and musician who plays bass in the indie rock band Maybe Foreign.

USF's program doesn't offer a concentration in young adult writing. But, Thompson says, "I'm amazed so many people want to write it. All these people in my fiction workshop say, 'I want to try YA.' It's an exploding genre."

Thompson started graduate school last year, after a two-year hiatus spent working as a legal assistant. "I wanted to go back to school. I love college. If I won the lottery — which I won't, because I go out of my way not to play it — all I would do is write and go to school."

Many aspiring authors would say she has won the lottery — placing a first novel with a high-powered publisher. Psych Major Syndrome wasn't the first book she wrote; she sent several romance novels out to publishers while she was in high school.

"They all wanted me to change them — to make the main character pregnant. I was like, wouldn't that change the story? Then I started looking at all the pregnant women in romance novels, and it seemed like there were a lot of not careful women out there."

She wrote Psych Major Syndrome in about six months during her senior year of college. She sent it out to "random agents" and got no takers, then remembered the advice to seek an agent who handles the kinds of books you want to write.

"So I sent it to the agent for Meg Cabot," author of the Princess Diaries series and a host of other hugely bestselling books for young readers. "I couldn't believe she responded. Initially she said no, but I was so invested in it, I asked her, can't you just read three chapters?

"I still have the message she left on my machine" accepting the book. "I had my husband record it so I could keep it forever."

Much of the plot of Psych Major Syndrome revolves around sex — Leigh isn't having any but thinks she should be, other people are having it and perhaps shouldn't. Thompson says she didn't set out to write a book about sex: "I think it's just organic to that time of your life. Either you're having it or you're not, and either way it can be causing you distress."

Leigh's school, Stiles College, with its 85 percent vegetarian student body and small-school tendency for everyone to know everyone else's secrets, is "definitely" based on New College, Thompson says. As for Leigh, Thompson says, "It's appalling how many similarities there are between us."

But in the book trailer on her Web site, alicia-thompson.com, Leigh is played by Thompson's younger sister. "I'm too old for my market."

Thompson says she "wouldn't mind branching out sometime" but loves writing for young readers. "I'll be watching Breakfast Club when I'm 85, and adolescence is what I'll want to write about.

"What I like is how consuming it is, that time of life. Everything is just so important, every decision you make is so critical."

She's already working on another YA novel, about a girl who struggles with an eating disorder. "It's a symptom — she feels very isolated, very alone. It's definitely different in tone."

Thompson is also working on what she hopes will be a series for readers ages 8 to 12 about gymnastics. "I was obsessed with gymnastics when I was a kid. I didn't do them, I was just obsessed with them."

She's working on the books with Olympic gymnast Dominique Moceanu, one of the "Magnificent Seven" U.S. gold medalists in 1996.

"It's about four gymnasts and what they go through," Thompson says, "kind of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants meets Stick It."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435. She blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.