Look out, Stephenie Meyer!

J.K. Rowling, best brew your strongest magic spell!

A Bullitt East High School English teacher just might knock both vaunted young-adult writers from the best-seller list.

Bethany Griffin's debut novel, "Handcuffs," on Random House imprint Delacorte Books, has already put a bite on "Twilight," Meyer's rabidly popular vampire series. Well, at least at Carmichael's Bookstore, where "Twilight" is so very 2008 and cool teen readers are now clamoring for "Handcuffs."

The daily paper amNewYork just named Griffin, 34, one of the five "potential stars of 2009." And the critics have been effusive.

In School Library Journal, Johanna Lewis of the New York Public Library wrote that "Handcuffs" had "excellent" character development and that Griffin "manages to tie the strings together clearly and cleverly."

The influential Web site YAReads.com raved that Griffin "captures the essence of adolescence superbly," adding that her characters are "believable, raw, honest and absolutely engaging. Teenage girls everywhere will be able to relate to Parker's pain and angst, her self-doubt and her hormonal desires."

But the critics and readers Griffin cares about the most are the teens she sees every day in class. And now when she hands her papers back with comments -- or talks about how much time it takes to make their work improve draft by draft -- they're likely to listen a little closer.

"When I make the kids in my writing class revise stuff, I have a lot of street cred," she said with a laugh, between sips of hot chocolate at a local coffee shop. "I'm like, 'You don't know how much I revised this book,' " the 34-year-old Griffin said.

Grounded, forever

Indeed, Griffin can teach her students plenty about hard work, patience and writing what you know. While "Handcuffs" became bound to a big-time New York publisher, there's an unpublished book in a drawer at the south Louisville home she shares with her husband, Lee, and children, Ezra, 6, and Noel, 4.

What changed? Her principal might want to cover her ears at this point.

"The first young adult book I wrote, I was very aware that I was a teacher, and I never got very deep into any of the characters," she said. "But I just kind of went crazy with 'Handcuffs,' and I put in all the sexuality and stuff I had been afraid to put in before."

Yes, there's a little "Gossip Girl" and "Secret Life of the American Teenager" in Griffin's novel. Those handcuffs from the title? Well, they get main character Parker Prescott in a little bit of trouble.

In the book, Parker is a high school student whose classmates refer to her as an "ice princess" -- but lucky for her, she's still dating the hottest guy in school. Parker's adolescent unease around her parents only gets more awkward when they walk in on her and her boyfriend -- and those handcuffs -- quite unexpectedly.

She's grounded -- "indefinitely" -- but this only gives Parker more time to obsess over the frequent posts about her on a popular high school gossip blog, to fret over her family's financial woes and to decide whether to lose her virginity to the high school hottie, assuming she's ever allowed to leave the house unsupervised.

Parker's aloof and cold demeanor is simply a shield. She's an introspective teen struggling with the issues most adolescents face -- just with a pair of handcuffs thrown in to spice things up.

"I'm finding that either people do connect with her and they connect with the book or they don't and they hate the book," Griffin said.

Sex and sensibility

Although it's not unusual for young adult literature to deal quite openly with teenage sexuality, Griffin still worries the book will rub some parents the wrong way.

"There's always that fear that somebody is going to take it wrong, and the people that do that are often the loudest and the most aggressive," she said. "Of course, that would be great for sales," she added with a laugh.

Griffin believes that fiction is supposed to reflect life and not necessarily teach one how to live it. Griffin doesn't intend for her book to encourage teenage sex, she said, but she did want "Handcuffs" to deal with teenage sexuality realistically.

"Adults think that when there's sex in a teenage book or movie, something bad should happen -- they get a venereal disease or they get pregnant -- and that really doesn't happen all the time," said Griffin, who is currently working on a young adult novel, set in the Highlands, about a bisexual teenager.

"You learn things by reading because you learn that other people have different experiences than you and other people have similar experiences as you," Griffin said. "It's not supposed to be, 'Don't do drugs. Don't have sex.' "

The misfits

Griffin drew on her own high school memories for the book, but she's hardly the real-life Parker. In high school, she was the quiet girl sitting in the back of class scribbling poetry and prose in her notebook.

"I was very shy, a little bit like Parker," she said. "I was really into reading, and I was into sort of alternative music before it was alternative music. I was not into sports or shooting guns -- not to characterize Bullitt County. There are more groups of kids and different kinds of kids in Bullitt County now, but at that time for whatever reason I didn't feel like I fit in. I was too awkward and anti-social."

She always wanted to be a writer, but she found teaching -- let alone two young children -- so all-consuming that there never seemed to be enough hours in the day.

"Teaching just sucked up all my creative energy," she said. "I would start things but never finish them."

But with "Handcuffs," things were different. Griffin actually finished her first draft in six weeks. She sat down to write every evening from 8 to 10 p.m., after her children were asleep. Her secret: swearing off prime-time TV.

Passing down inspiration

Griffin's students might not like that advice, but they are getting excited about having a published author in their midst.

"Kids that I've never taught are coming to me asking about it," she said.

Griffin got her students involved by having some write reviews of the book for her Web site, and some students even helped with the plot summary for the book's dust jacket.

Valerie Page, one of Griffin's former students, had a chance to read the entire book before it was published.

"I really liked how it was just raw teenage life," Page said, adding that she's excited to have an autographed copy of the hardcover book. "And I really like knowing her. She's pretty cool."

Page, now a freshman at the University of Louisville, had Griffin as an English teacher in eighth grade and then served as Griffin's aide during her senior year.

"She was kind of sarcastic like her character in the book," Page said when asked what Griffin was like as a teacher. "But I enjoyed her as a teacher because she was good at what she did. She loves writing. If you just listen to her, you can learn a lot."

And Griffin herself learned a lot about writing at U of L, where she completed a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in education. That's also where Griffin met Marjorie Kaiser, a professor of English education who became her mentor.

In a class called Teaching Adolescent Readers, Kaiser introduced Griffin and her other students to a host of young adult reading that most of them didn't even know existed.

"Most of the students had never read this material when they were adolescents," said Kaiser, who also founded the Louisville Writing Project. "Somehow they jumped from children's lit to classics and there was this great gap."

At the end of the class, Kaiser, now retired from teaching, issued a challenge to her students.

"I always said to the classes at the end of the course, 'Now, every one of you has a young adult novel in you. Your own life story is a young adult novel because they're all about coming of age and facing life's problems as a teenager and coping with the world and coping with adults and finding their identity and all those good things,' " Kaiser said. "And everyone always said, 'Oh sure, I could write a novel,' but no one ever does -- except Bethany!"

Reporter Javacia Harris can be reached at (502) 582-4629.