Dear gawd, I should have joined this thread a long time ago. I've been painfully enduring some comments from my agent-subbed YA fantasy, by the big houses. It appears that waaaay too much teenage slang is tanking my chances, along with stilted prose and behavoir that is not indicative of teenagers.
I emailed my agent and said, "HOLD THE HORSES." Spent five 12-hours days rewriting the whole manuscript, including pulling verbose sentences and fixing some small plot holes. I just sent it off minutes ago, freshly revised. I have little to no slang in the new version, and the kids are actually thinking like and talking like kids.
I can only imagine one of the reasons for removing my slang--if the book were published by a NYC house, there would be all kinds of problems trying to transcribe American slang into foreign language editions. Along with the fact that it looks like stereotyping and comes off as cliche.
Lesson learned for me, the hard way. Apparently I can't get away with it. Seems others can with no prob.
Tri