Interview with YA Author Tracy Badua
My Interview with YA Author Tracy Badua gets answers to my questions about We’re Never Getting Home, Tracy’s brand new YA realistic fiction title coming out in April 2024 PLUS her thoughts on friendship, band fandom, and teenage hijinks.
Interview with YA Author Tracy Badua
I’d like to welcome Tracy to YA All Day and tell you a little more about her:
More About Tracy:
Tracy Badua is an award-winning Filipino American author of books about young people with sunny hearts in a sometimes stormy world. According to her grandmother, Tracy inherited this love of the written word from her great-grandfather, a school teacher in the Philippines. To Tracy, this means writing is in her blood, and she continues this family tradition by telling stories with her own spin in an accessible, heartfelt way.
By day, she is an attorney who works in national housing policy and programs. By night, she squeezes in writing, family time, and bites of her secret stash of candy. School and work brought her from California to Washington, DC, and back, and she now lives in San Diego, California, with her family.
Tracy Badua’s YA Novels
Tracy also writes middle grade novels (check out those on her website at the link above.)
Her two YA novels are both fun and heartfelt.
I love that they capture the fun side of being a teenager. When in life are you going to get the chance to do wacky things? Reading We’re Never Getting Home made me look back on some of the funny schemes I took part in, many of which involved revenge toilet-papering people’s houses. Yes, we did that back in the 80s.
This is Not a Personal Statement (2023)
Perla is a sixteen year-old senior at hyper-competitive Monte Verde High. Known as “Perfect Perlie Perez,” she’s endured all the late nights, social isolation, and crushing stress that she knows will get her into the college of her dreams: Delmont University.
But Perla doesn’t get in. In a panic, she forges herself an acceptance letter. The next thing she knows, she’s heading to Delmont for real, acceptance or not. Perla’s plan? Beef up her application and reapply spring semester before she’s caught.
But as her guilty conscience grows and campus security looms large, Perla starts to wonder if her plan will really succeed—and if this dream she’s worked for her entire life is something she even wants.
We’re Never Getting Home (2024)
Jana Rubio and her best friend, Maddy Parsons, have an epic senior year finale queued up: catching their favorite band at the Orchards, an outdoor music festival a two-hour drive away. But when a blowup over Maddy’s boyfriend exposes a rift in their friendship, Jana calls off their joint trip and gets a lift to the festival from her church friend Nathan…only to realize Maddy and her boyfriend are along for the ride, too.
All Jana wants is to enjoy the concert and get home. But then Nathan loses his car keys crowd-surfing, and it’s up to Jana and Maddy to find them. As they navigate stolen phones and missing friends, scale Ferris wheels and crash parties, the two of them are forced to reckon with the biggest obstacle of all: repairing their friendship.
Interview with YA Author Tracy Badua about her latest YA book, We’re Never Getting Home
JEN: It was such an exciting surprise that We’re Never Getting Home is a 24-hour timeline book. I’m a huge fan of those books! Why and how did you decide on that format?
TRACY: I wanted readers to feel the same urgency that my main character, Jana, does when she realizes she’s stranded at the festival. Condensing the timeline was a fun way to bring readers along for every excruciating moment of her search for the missing car keys. Also, logistically, I couldn’t imagine more than twenty-four hours going by as a high schooler without my own parents knowing precisely where I am and when I’m getting home, especially not with cell phones everywhere. I knew Jana and her friends would only have so long to bumble around on their own before minivans full of their parents screeched through the festival gates.
JEN: At the music festival, Jana is forced to face her former BFF, Maddy. Friend break-ups are so devastating, especially as a teen, and I don’t think they are covered enough in YA fiction. I’d love to know more about your thoughts on this aspect of the book.
TRACY: I wanted to focus on a friendship in this book because there’s so much more to our experience as young people than who we dated. We cross paths with countless others in our lifetimes, and romance isn’t a requirement for closeness, lasting memories, or a broken heart.
JEN: The music elements of the book were so much fun! Jana is a super-fan of the Newcomers and Goers, or “CoGo.” How did you go about creating an imaginary band? Did you have any real-life musical inspirations for CoGo, either current ones or songs you had on repeat as a teenager?
TRACY: In creating the Newcomers and Goers, I honestly focused more on how the music would make the listener feel rather than what kind of music was actually being played. I wanted them to be upbeat, colorful, emotive, and chaotic in the best way, and I tried to convey all that in the book. I apparently concentrated so hard on this that a trusted critique partner, after reading my earliest drafts, had to ask me straight out whether the Newcomers and Goers were rockers, rappers, polka players, or something else. In my head, the Newcomers and Goers are a fusion of a few rock bands from the early 2000s, with solid helpings of soulful, speak-to-your-soul lyrics and modern, glitzy showmanship.
FAST FIVE for Tracy (and JEn!)
1) Item in your closet you’d grab if you got a last-minute invite to a music festival?
TRACY: Anything with deep pockets that car keys won’t casually fall out of.
JEN: Ha! I’d just grab my coolest looking jeans and hope for the best.
2) Your most-used texting emoji?
TRACY: According to my phone, it’s the fingers crossed emoji, which says a surprising amount about me. ????
JEN: Mine is the laughing/crying face, which is pretty accurate too!
3) Item of yours most likely to end up in the lost and found?
TRACY: My wallet. And I know this because I have lost my wallet many, many times.
JEN: Mine is my keys. Every day I run around my apartment because I misplaced them. So this aspect of you book was pretty stressful for me 🙂
4) Favorite reading spot?
TRACY: On the couch, with a comfy pillow and the windows wide open
JEN: Same! Sometimes I have a fuzzy blanket in case it gets drafty.
5) Favorite procrastination activity?
TRACY: Sleeping. I am an expert napper.
JEN: I wish I could stress-sleep! Mine is Reddit. I know more about strange topics than I should.
JEN: Before I let you get back to your writing, Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this book, you, or your writing journey?
The characters, the concert, and everything are entirely fictional, but I did have a friend lose their keys crowdsurfing at a concert two hours away from home. It wasn’t nearly as chaotic as Jana’s night, but clearly that moment stayed lodged in my brain after all these years. I can’t wait to see what other messy high school memory warps into a YA book.
That wraps up my Interview with YA Author Tracy Badua.
Thanks to Tracy for taking the time to answer my questions. I hope you try We’re Never Getting Home and also check out my other Spring and Summer-Themed YA Book lists:
Best Road Trip Books for Young Adults
Irresistible Books Like Daisy Jones & The Six
