How do you hook a reader?

Casey McQuiston’s first novel, Red, White, and Royal Blue, published in 2019, was a massive bestseller, sparking what the New York Times called an “LGBTQ romance boom.” It’s a hilarious, joyful, page-turner of a book that showed readers a female president with an openly gay son living in the White House—a fantasy many readers needed after living through years of a Trump presidency. For our Novel Study analysis we’re going to examine McQuiston’s 2022 novel, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, which is billed as a YA romance. The tagline 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 by telling us that Chloe Green, their 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 lighthearted.

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 information is the time stamp after the chapter header:

We don’t yet know who Shara Wheeler is, but the title tells us someone has kissed her, and now we know she is missing. These two time stamps—one in the past and one in the future—establish the timeframe of the novel. Even without having read the first sentence of the novel, we are mid story, between these two events. In addition to being a clever hook, the time stamps generate steady suspense. Watching the hours Shara Wheeler has been missing tick up as the days to graduation tick down generates a charge each time we reach a new chapter.

Before we get into the story proper, let’s explore the topic of time stamps in more detail. Traditionally, a time stamp is used in stories with complex timelines, like a plot that jumps forward or backward 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 view. Do you have to use them? Certainly not, even in narratives that jump around in time. As we saw with Lauren Groff’s Matrix, it isn’t hard to use internal references to keep readers oriented. Groff jumps years and even decades between chapters and uses her protagonist’s age as a subtle time marker.

Returning to Shara Wheeler, 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 diving 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.” Before giving us the details of Shara’s disappearance, McQuiston tells us how Chloe feels about it. The disappearance has already happened, so it’s backstory, but Chloe’s feelings are about to propel her into an action—breaking into the Wheeler house to look for Shara.

When we do get more details, they are filtered through Chloe’s point of view, telling us as much about her as about Shara:

Notice how distinctive the voice is—a 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” (not “the perfect prom”)—a dress that made her look like “a sexy vampire assassin,” screaming to Lil Yachty, going to Waffle House—before we learn the specifics of what happened to Shara. She walked out the door before she was announced prom queen and hasn’t been seen since. Knowing the basic facts only generates more questions in our minds, and Chloe is so busy pursuing her own theory (that Shara is fine), she’s not in a hurry to answer all of the questions we want answered.

Chloe is convinced Shara 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 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 Alabama town. She thinks that perhaps Shara disappeared in order 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:

At this point, romance readers will know exactly which classic trope McQuiston is engaging: enemies to lovers. The tension of this trope, already quite high, 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 has recently been kissed by Shara 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 is how to create an effective hook. 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 entangle 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? We’ll have to read to the end of the book to find out.

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