“There’s a real beauty beneath how vicious they can be,” says children’s author G.F. Miller. She’s speaking about 14-year-old girls, and how she balances the darkness and joy of adolescence in the voices of her characters. Miller’s latest outing for the age group is What If You Fall For Me First? (Aladdin, June 10), a Pygmalion-inspired middle-grade romance. The novel follows Sofia and Holden as they stumble their way through the age-old unlikely love story of quiet girl meets rebel guy. A familiar tale it may be, but, as Miller explains, “Everything is fresh to young readers.” We spoke to the author over Zoom from her home in Chandler, Arizona, to learn more about executing the genre for a middle-grade audience. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The romance genre is generally associated with YA and adult readers. What’s your perspective on writing love stories for a middle-grade audience?

There was never a time in my life when I was more interested in reading about romance and relationships than when I was in sixth or seventh grade. As an age group, middle-grade readers know that something’s bubbling, and it’s right outside their reach. You wait your whole life for your turn to get in on this thing—being part of a couple with someone else. In a way, you’re at the very beginning of that romance journey. But in another way, you’ve seen it in the adult world, and you’ve played house when you were a little kid, and when you hit 11, 12, 13, you’re really interested in how it works.

But because it’s an adult and YA genre, there’s a lot of content that kids just aren’t ready for. Inevitably, that means reading about people who are older than you. I’ve been reading YA for a long time now, and the protagonists are always 17 or 18. Occasionally you’ll find a 16-year-old. The content of those books about 18-year-olds has become more and more and more mature, I’d say, and it’s left behind some of those 11-, 12-, and 13-year-old girls who really want to read about and imagine themselves in these scenarios in a safe way. Most of us don’t really want to experiment with sex or dating at that age, but we’re really interested in thinking about it and pretending. Romance that’s geared toward that age group is a genre that really fills that gap. It helps them think through what relationships and friendships and romance can be like, without actually having to take risks in the real world before they’re ready.

When you were 13, what were you reading? How did you approach romance literature when you were that age?

Oh man, where do I start? I was a huge fan of Lois Duncan. She wrote paranormal YA with light romance way back in the day, and I discovered those books in my school library when I was in junior high, and I read the covers off them. Then, the summer between seventh and eighth grade, my best friend and I would walk to the library, check out stacks of Harlequin romance novels, and just sit and read them. It didn’t take very many before I had the formula down, so then we would play games like, I bet I could, without looking, turn to the page where they kiss first. Or Find a fight—go!

Some of those novels are pretty sweet, and some of them get a little spicier than you’d expect when you’re 13, and then you’re like, Where should I hide this? [Laughs.] Right around that time, too, I started reading Jane Austen. I decided I was going to read her books out loud to my mom. She would be in the kitchen doing stuff and wasn’t really interested, I don’t think, but she was like, “OK, you can read it to me.” I remember sitting in the kitchen reading Austen with my mother at that age.

I was thinking about Austen, because it seems like a lot of the ways to build tension and chemistry in a middle-grade romance follow the same rulebook of restraint that we find in Regency romances.

Junior high is the perfect place to set things for that kind of tension, because every look is so loaded, and there’s so much going on in your mind, like, OK, he looked at me like that; what could that mean? Every slight touch is mind-blowing—you brush someone’s hand, and it’s a big deal! You just don’t have that in adult romance these days, but that’s part of what we love about Jane Austen, that there was so much structure that she had to work within.

Junior high is also perfect for the wild antics of the classic ’90s rom-com. Things that are absolutely ridiculous when you put grown-ups in the situation—like How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days; you watch that movie and it’s somewhat entertaining, but it feels absolutely ridiculous. But make them both eighth graders and it’s perfect; it makes perfect sense.

This book exists in the same world as your previous book, Not If You Break Up With Me First, in which Sofia and Holden played supporting roles. How did you land on them as the protagonists for this installment?

I landed on Holden first. In the previous book, Holden was just kind of classically skeezy; he wasn’t acting right. The funny thing was that all the adults who read the book were like, That kid! I hated that kid!, and all the junior high girls who read it were like, That guy? He was just a normal junior high guy. That made me really curious. I wanted to explore a little more of what was going on with him and why he was behaving the way he was. As I dug into who he was and what was going on with him, it became clear that Sofia—who was this character who always insisted on seeing the best in everyone—was the one person at school who would draw out the best parts in him.

It’s interesting to hear you describe the different responses you get from adult readers and young readers. I was struck by how natural and accurate the voices of your teen characters feel.

Madeleine L’Engle said, “The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.” She described this process of reaching back into our own experiences, being able to access the thoughts of our younger selves. I remember so viscerally feeling like, I hate everything about myself. Those things don’t change. Kids still go through the stage of feeling all that; if anything, it’s much worse now with social media. I think it can be cathartic for us grown-ups to read and remember those things. A lot of us are still carrying around some scars from junior high—the things that people made fun of you for, or the things you felt really self-conscious about. I still, to this day, could name the exact things I got teased about in seventh grade. I hope for kids reading my books, they’ll help them take it all a little less seriously. To be able to laugh at ourselves relieves so much of the pressure we feel to get it exactly right.

Ilana Bensussen Epstein is a writer and filmmaker in Boston.