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I am reading a YA novel about adopted people connecting with their biological siblings and parents. This is a topic I have written about and have an interest in, and it's supposed to be a very good book: Far From the Tree , by Robin Benway. On page 3, the teenage protagonist knows she cannot raise a child, so she immediately begins the adoption process, interviewing prospective parents during her pregnancy. Fine. The word abortion is never used. Not fine. There is no "She knew she would never have an abortion, so she...", no "It was too late to have an abortion, and anyway she doubted she would do that...", no "She was from a religious family, so abortion was out of the question." Not one word. As if the option does not exist. As if abortion itself does not exist. How realistic is that? Not at all? Such is the state of YA in the United States. Does the author, or perhaps the publisher, think if the word abortion  appears once in a 300-page book, the bo...

I don't usually write about a book while I'm still under its spell, but there are always exceptions. John Green's Turtles All the Way Down  is an exceptional book. One reason Green's writing is so powerful is that he conjures both the specific and the universal at the same time. The Fault in Our Stars , for example, is about two teens who have cancer, and how they fall in love and have a relationship, even with the awareness of their own looming mortality. The Fault in Our Stars  is also about how we all love, even with the awareness of our own mortality always looming, be it far or near. We humans must love and be loved, and we must lose our loves, and they us. That is the paradox of homo sapiens sapiens , the animal who knows it knows.  TFIOS  is about nothing less than the human condition. Green masters both of these, at the same time, and wraps it in an accessible package that is easy to read, to understand, and to love. The specific lives are vibrant ...

Girl: Do you have this book, something like, "keeping a secret about you"? Me: Let's take a look in the catalogue. [Stalling for time while scrolling through titles in my mind.] Hmm, do you mean Keeping You a Secret ? Girl: Yes! I took a bus all the way from the South Common branch to here to get this book so I hope you have it. I recognize it as a good title by Julie Peters, excellent writer of LGBT-themed girl books. Me: Let's go over to the youth section to look for it. Girl: Do you know any other good books? Anything LGBT! I want to read lots of LGBT stuff. Me: You've come to the right place, we have a lot of it. I'm making a list now for our upcoming Pride display. [Technically speaking this is not true -- but I will be updating our list in about a month or so.] Girl, pumping fist: Yes! We get to the shelf... and it's there! Yay! We're both happy. Girl: Is there any place I can charge my phone? I point out some places she can hang out, she thanks ...

Young-adult publishers' mania for series, with the emphasis on fantasy, has finally ebbed. There are still plenty of fantasy series to go around, but the new crop of youth novels is chock full of individual titles in the realistic mode. (In YA land, "realistic" means the opposite of fantasy: set in the existing world with real humans only.) I've recently read four such novels. I chose three of them because the titles and covers intrigued me, and one based on the author's previous novel. Here are my impressions. Girl Mans Up  by M-E Girard On the ever-expanding LGBTQ youth bookshelf, Girl Mans Up  appears to be the first book to feature a butch lesbian, and I must say it's a welcome addition. All the other female gay protagonists I'm aware of are written in the "just like everyone else, but gay" vein, people whose orientation would not be guessed if not already known. Not so for Pen. Pen is butch and a little bit genderqueer. Her old-world Europea...

I recently had the pleasure of reading an advance reading copy of Every Exquisite Thing  by Matthew Quick. Quick - a/k/a Q - is the author of The Silver Linings Playbook , which I have not read, but now will. Every Exquisite Thing  combines a few stock elements of youth fiction into something heartfelt, authentic, and compelling. I caught a little bit of Eleanor & Park and a little bit of The Fault in Our Stars  poking through, but none of that stopped me from enjoying the book. Nanette O'Hare is a high-achieving student athlete whose future is all laid out for her to follow. An iconoclastic teacher gives Nanette a copy of a cult novel - echoes of The Catcher in the Rye are obvious - and suddenly she views her privileged life in a new way. The teacher goes even farther, setting up Nanette with another young person to whom he's given the same book, this one a misfit poet with some dangerous tendencies. Nanette needs to rebel, and she's fallen in love with a rebel. Bu...

A thriller about public relations? And for teens? It sounds improbable, and The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi is an improbably terrific book. Marrying a somersaulting plot with heart-pounding suspense to an unabashed political agenda and a hot love story, Bacigalupi has delivered a stunning youth read. On the political front, we contemplate "the place where big companies go when they need the truth confused. . . . when they need science to say what’s profitable, instead of what’s true.” All the tricks of the trade - astroturfing , fronts , false flags , sock puppets , money funnelling , stealth marketing , planted news, and outright false data - are touched on, along with the human damage they cause. And the political is nothing if not personal. Alix leads the good life of a private school girl in Connecticut, and is forced to confront the possibility that her privilege is built on other people's pain. That pain is impossible to miss, when she meets a group of homeless ki...

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." Recognize it? For me it's one of the most memorable final sentences ever written. I just finished re-reading The Catcher in the Rye , possibly for the first time since reading it (twice) in high school. I remembered it in a theoretical way, but had forgotten the details. It's a funny, sad, perfect little book. I'm not breaking any new ground when I call Catcher the original young-adult novel. Every John Green and Ned Vizzini and Stephen Chbosky narrator, every wise-cracking alienated youth straight through to Buffy Summers and Veronica Mars, inherits their voice from Holden. Catcher , published in 1951, is more influential now than when S. E. Hinton started to write The Outsiders  only 13 years later. I had the perfect incentive to re-read Catcher : it's this month's selection for my teen book club. The core group of members are bored with cookie-cutter youth novels. They want...

The Golden Compass , by Philip Pullman, has been on my to-read list since it was first published in the mid-1990s. Although I generally don't read fantasy fiction, after reading an outstanding review in The New York Times Book Review , I was very intrigued. Thanks to the Teen Book Club I facilitate at the library, I recently had an excuse to read it: The Golden Compass  (published as Northern Lights  in the UK) is our March title. This is an absolutely wonderful book. Lyra Belacqua, a smart, spunky 11-year-old girl, is wholly believeable as our powerful, but very human, hero. She lives in a world recognizable to us, but different - a parallel universe which unfolds naturally, without the ponderous world-building that I find so tedious in more typical adult fantasy fiction. The book is chock-full of adventure, mystery, and action, with just the right touch of thoughtful reflection thrown in. It's an excellent youth or tween read, which is to say it's fast-paced, writt...

Despite the increased attention given to graphic novels in recent years, many readers don't consider graphic novels when thinking about what to read next. In this "what i'm reading" post, I highlight four graphic novels considered classics of the form. At least three of these books are included on high school and university curricula, and taken seriously as literature. These are certainly not the only graphic novels to achieve that standing, but if you asked a bunch of non-graphic-fiction readers to name some well-known and influential graphic novels, these would likely top the list. Each is worth reading, and perhaps will lead you to explore the format. (Or not.) First on any such list has to be Maus (now known as Maus I: My Father Bleeds History ). Art Spiegelman is the godfather of the modern graphic novel, and this book, first published in 1986, might be his best work. It is a foundational work of graphic fiction, and a definitive work of the Holocaust. Maus  is b...

Continuing on the young-adult fiction theme, it's been about six months since I blathered about my absolute favourite part of my job: teen book club . Our monthly gathering is still going strong, a small but dedicated group of young readers who love books, and love to talk about books. My posters for TBC invite teens to "hang out, eat snacks, talk about books, talk about life," and that pretty much sums up what we do. Every few months, the group votes on the next four titles, chosen from a selection that I gather, as well as their own suggestions. Most young readers gravitate towards either realistic fiction or fantasy fiction, so I try to balance the two. I also include one or two classics on each list of choices, and they are surprisingly popular: this month we are reading S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders ,  Fahrenheit 451  is on the list for early 2015, and the group is clamouring for Catcher in the Rye . Along with those classics, the next titles are: Dooley Takes th...

In June of this year, Slate ran a now-infamous piece called " Against YA ," in which Ruth Graham argued that adults shouldn't read young-adult fiction, and should be embarrassed if they do. A flood of posts and essays were written in response;  my own response is here . In the short term, as far as I can tell, not a single writer agreed with Graham. Despite this lopsided showing, some headline writer ( possibly here ) dubbed this "The Great Y.A. Debate," and the name stuck. There must be people out there who agree with Graham - surely hers was not an original idea - but one cranky article does not a debate make. I did find a few interesting essays that used Graham's piece as a springboard to unpack some interesting ideas and cultural trends. A. O. Scott, in The New York Times Magazine , is one reader who found himself agreeing with Graham, and asking himself why. Scott's The Death of Adulthood in American Culture  joins the crowded field of "things...

Last year, I wrote about an excellent, unusual youth novel called There Is No Dog , by Meg Rosoff. I recently read the author's 2004 debut novel, How I Live Now , and I'm here to lay down a flat-out rave review. Most of How I Live Now is told from the point of view of a teenaged narrator, in a present-tense first-person stream of thought, with long, rambling sentences and minimal punctuation. I often have problems with quirky or immature narrators as the voice feels forced and inauthentic to me. I found some famous and popular novels unreadable because of this. In this book, however, I found the voice completely authentic and utterly compelling. In the first part of the book, a group of teenagers and children have been left on their own, without adults. They create an idyllic, natural, peaceful world, a kind of anti- Lord of the Flies - cooperating, caring for each other, communing with nature. Then everything changes. The children are split up, the world becomes dangerous a...

The conversation was simple enough. Teenage girl: "Where is the nonfiction?" Me: "Nonfiction is upstairs, but it's organized according to subject. There should be some nonfiction books on the Bingo display." Teen: "I think they're all gone." Me: "OK, we'll find you something. What would you like to read about?" Teen: "So far I've read one nonfiction book. It was about a man who left the war in Iraq. It was called The Deserter's Tale . I loved it." !!!!!!!!!!! Why did this make me so unreasonably happy? 1. War resisters! Teens reading about moral choices! Teens reading about conscientious objection to war! I always include Joshua Key's The Deserter's Tale in my youth nonfiction displays. But I've never gotten feedback on it before! And she didn't just read it, she loved it! 2. One of my missions at the library is to offer nonfiction to teen readers. There is no special youth nonfiction section, and I...

Ruth Graham, writing in Slate, says, " You should feel embarrassed when what you're reading was written for children. " How sad. If anyone should feel embarrassed, it's Graham. She apparently writes this commentary without realizing how narrow-minded, outdated, and ignorant it makes her appear. Then again, what can we expect from a person who describes a love scene by saying a young man "deflowers" his girlfriend? Perhaps Graham hasn't noticed, but in the 21st Century, women are not passive objects; their first sexual experience is not imagined as a loss of innocence and delicacy. Hazel, the hero of The Fault in our Stars , is not "deflowered". She chooses to have sex. Graham mentions that it was "once unseemly" for adults to read young-adult lit. When was that, I wonder? I'm at least 10 years older than Graham, who places herself in the 30 to 44-year-old demographic. I've read young-adult fiction all my life, and I don't ...

I'm sure many of you have read The Book Thief , Markus Zusak's youth novel about a German girl and her (non-biological) family during World War II. If you haven't yet read it, I recommend it. I had little interest in reading this book. I picked it up for professional reasons: it has been one of the most popular youth novels since its publication in 2005, and I intended to skim it, to get the gist. This book didn't care what I had in mind. The opening was so intriguing that I kept reading, and before long I was completely engrossed. In our culture, there aren't many books or movies that contemplate World War II from a German point of view. By giving us the German people during the Nazi era - their suffering, and both their defiance and their complicity - Zusak humanizes war and suffering in a way that Holocaust stories - with humans on one side, and monsters on the other - cannot. As the beautifully drawn characters develop and the situations build - as the reader id...

I thought readers' advisory was the best part of my job, but that was before I began running our library's teen book club. Once a month, I spend an evening with a group of teens who choose to spend their evening at the library, talking about books. We hang out, eat snacks, talk about books, talk about life. Although I've never had an interest in book clubs for myself, facilitating these young people's enjoyment of reading is a joy and a privilege. The teens themselves come from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Most are the first generation of their family born in Canada. Some lead pressured, overly scheduled lives. Others are relatively independent and mature. Some are bursting with ideas and enthusiasm. Some are quiet and speak very little. All of them listen respectfully to each other and encourage each other. This is what I love best. Always, they are kind to each other. I've read that reading helps people develop empathy and compassion, that readers exhib...

If you enjoy youth novels of the realistic (non-fantasy) variety, Eleanor & Park , by Rainbow Rowell, is just about as good as it gets. Who else might enjoy Eleanor & Park ? Readers who like beautifully drawn, believable, yet quirky and unique characters. Readers who are teens. Readers who have ever been teens. People who have fallen in love. People who dream of falling in love. People who like to read. Eleanor & Park is about two people who don't fit in slowly and tenderly finding their way to each other. It's about the horrors that ordinary young people endure, adults who make their lives hell, and adults who are there to support them, whether or not they understand them. It's a book full of music, and the discovery of music and art that, as a teen, might just save your life. It's a book about love. Last year in The New York Times , Eleanor & Park was reviewed by none other than John Green, far and away the most popular and famous author of realistic ...

It's so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's the first line of Ned Vizzini's excellent 2006 youth novel, It's Kind of a Funny Story . By the time I read the book this year, the author was already dead. Vizzini committed suicide last December; he was only 32 years old. Those facts alone are tragic. But now that I've read this book, I find Vizzini's death even sadder. On some level, I chide myself for that: every person's life is of equal value, and every early death is a loss. But we feel the way we feel, and Vizzini's suicide feels, to me, inexpressibly sad, a monumental loss. Vizzini wrote youth fiction in a natural, straightforward voice, with deep insight and wry humour. It's Kind of a Funny Story is a slightly fictionalized account of the onset of the author's depression as a teenager, and the five days he spent in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Brooklyn, New York. It's a funny book, often poignant, sometimes very ...

Flight  is a thought-provoking short novel by one of my favourite youth writers, Sherman Alexie. The main character in Flight , a Native American boy who goes by the derisive nickname Zits, is a troubled soul with a long history of abuse, neglect, and abandonment. He seems to be on the brink of a major transition, either going off the deep end or beginning the long climb back. I don't know how to write about this book without spoiling it. So if you're like me, and you don't like to know  anything  about a book before you begin, and you like a book to reveal itself exactly as the author intended,  skip to the next book right now . Zits finds himself inexplicably inhabiting the bodies and minds of different people in the history of his family and his people. He doesn't choose this, and he has no control of it, but Zits finds himself quite literally walking in the shoes of his fellow man. The boy's journey into other people's lives takes him to some watershed momen...

Today I break one of my own rules, and write about a book I didn't enjoy. Not only that, but I trash the author, too. But perhaps author is the wrong word. Maybe I should call him the factory boss. I know something about how difficult it is to write a book, and I feel solidarity with all writers. When it comes to blogging about books, I usually employ the old saw, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it". So when I didn't like I Am Number Four , I wasn't going to write about it. Until I discovered what it really is. I Am Number Four is a youth novel, the first in the "Lorien Legacy" series, written under the obvious pseudonym "Pittacus Lore". The writing is stiff and inauthentic, the pacing plodding, the characterization and suspense nonexistent. I was surprised at the poor quality of the book, and went online to read more about it. A quick search revealed that the book and the series are the product of author James Frey...