by Nancy Pearl
Lisa Papademetriou and Chris Tebbetts’s M or F?, an entertaining combination of Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Julie Anne Peters’s Keeping You a Secret, Far from Xanadu, and Luna, her groundbreaking novel (and National Book Award finalist) about a transgender teen
Sara Ryan’s Empress of the World (two girls at a summer program for gifted teens fall in love)
Alex Sanchez’s series about three gay high school students, including Rainbow Boys, Rainbow High, and Rainbow Road
Shyam Selvadurai’s Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (set in a lush Sri Lanka, this is the story of a young man’s growing awareness of his sexual identity)
Andreas Steinhöfel’s The Center of the World (good for those who enjoyed Selvadurai’s novel)
Jacqueline Woodson’s The House You Pass on the Way
Three quality nonfiction books on this topic are Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents, edited by Noelle Howey and Ellen Samuels; The Shared Heart: Portraits and Stories Celebrating Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young People, a collection of photographs by Adam Mastoon; and Hearing Us Out:Voices from the Gay and Lesbian Community, a series of interviews by Roger Sutton.
GROWING UP IS (SOMETIMES) HARD TO DO
The novels that follow are the teen equivalent of the middle-reader “family story.” They’re set in both contemporary times and the not too distant past, and feature teens who find that becoming an adult can be a tricky business, indeed.
When sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey—growing up in the Adirondacks in the early years of the twentieth century—discovers a packet of letters left behind by a dead young woman that reveal a murder has taken place, her desire to go to college and become a writer grows more intense than ever, in Jennifer Donnelly’s A Northern Light. (Interestingly, the murder that occurs in this novel is the same one that inspired Theodore Dreiser to write An American Tragedy.)
In Car Trouble, computer geek Duff takes off for a new job across the country from his home in Virginia. Jeanne DuPrau combines a road-trip novel with Duff’s voyage of self-discovery.
Sarah Dessen knows teenage girls inside and out—this was eminently clear from her very first novel, That Summer, in which two upcoming weddings are bedeviling fifteen-year-old, too tall Haven: her father’s marriage to Lorna Queen, weather girl at the local television station, and her sister Ashley’s upcoming wedding to a young man who can’t hold a candle to her first boyfriend, Sumner Lee—who comes back to town shortly before the wedding. For another of Dessen’s outstanding novels about teen life in suburban America, try Just Listen, which is a bit darker than That Summer.
R. A. Nelson’s Teach Me explores what happens when high school senior Nine (short for Carolina) has an affair with her youngish English teacher, Mr. Mann. The plot of this novel reminded me strongly of Elizabeth Strout’s Amy and Isabelle (a novel you’ll find in the adult fiction section—but it’s appropriate for older teens as well), which also looks at the forbidden relationship between a high school student and one of her teachers.
Other good choices in this category include Kim Ablon Whitney’s The Perfect Distance (aimed at horse-crazy girls); Big Mouth and Ugly Girl, the first young adult novel by Joyce Carol Oates (the voice of Ursula, self-styled Ugly Girl, is mesmerizingly real); and Annette Curtis Klause’s Freaks: Alive, on the Inside!, about Abel Dandy, the “normal” son of performers in a freak show (the armless woman and the legless man, in fact), who learns—after many adventures—that it’s not what you look like but who you are on the inside that really matters.
HEARTBREAK HOTEL
Although we tend to think that “heartbreak” simply implies love gone wrong, the possibilities for a broken heart are almost endless, as can be seen from the following titles, which range from the pain and sadness of losing a parent, to the problems of returning home after fighting in a war, to becoming physically incapacitated. Read on....
When Anna realizes that she was conceived in order to be a donor match for her older sister, Kate, who has a rare type of leukemia, she makes a decision that will have repercussions far beyond her original decision to stop being her family’s guinea pig, in My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.
Callisto, the heroine of Borrowed Light by Anna Fienberg, keeps hoping that she can find a way to shine on her own, even as she finds herself in the shadow of her famous grandmother and charming brother, and ignored by her distant mother and work-absorbed father.
In John Green’s impossible to put down Looking for Alaska, Miles chooses to attend his dad’s alma mater, Culver Creek Prep, an Alabama boarding school, where he’s drawn into the web of his roommate, Chip, and Chip’s best friend, the enigmatic temptress Alaska.
Set in a sunny, small fishing village in Guam, Keeper of the Night by Kimberly Willis Holt is the story of Isabel, who tries to make order out of the chaos caused by her mother’s suicide by compiling lists and helping to care for the rest of the family.
Raised by her uptight but loving single mother and grandmother in a working-class neighborhood, Josie attends a private school on scholarship, meets her father for the first time in seventeen years, and lusts after two completely different boys. Melina Marchetta explores the choices that Josie faces in Looking for Alibrandi.
Anna’s dreams of a black belt and future championships in karate are shattered when she breaks her neck in a car accident. Although some of her friends and family treat her as if she is too frail and broken to recover, she realizes that she must be stronger than ever to overcome the physical and psychological pain, in Wendy Orr’s Peeling the Onion.
Though Imani is the child of a rape, Tasha loves her daughter with all her heart and is determined to make a better life for her in a world that seems to offer only obstacles to success, in Connie Porter’s moving Imani All Mine.
What do you do when your closest friend—your blood brother—starts hanging out with the wrong people, who are certain to increase the likelihood of his death at an early age in your inner-city neighborhood? Jesse tells the story of the life and death of Rise, in Walter Dean Myers’s Autobiography of My Dead Brother, with illustrations by Christopher Myers.
HISTORICAL FICTION
Why read historical fiction? The easiest answer is, of course, why not? Besides the innate pleasure these well-written, well-researched, and interesting novels provide, they may also start readers on the path to a lifelong interest in history. Plus, if these books click with readers, they also point the way to other pleasing reads—both fiction and nonfiction. They’re all useful for teachers seeking to turn students on to particular historical time periods, as well.
The Turkish genocide of its Armenian citizens from 1915 to 1918 is the subject of Adam Bagdasarian’s Forgotten Fire, which is based on his great-uncle’s experiences. Teens live with Vahan as he tries to adjust to the cataclysmic changes going on around him, including the deaths of friends and family, the loss of all he knows, and finding love in unexpected places. (A follow-up for this novel is Peter Balakian’s memoir, Black Dog of Fate.)
Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793 is the story of Matilda Cook, a young woman trying to survive the yellow fever epidemic on her own in what was then the nation’s capital, Philadelphia.
Marie Dancing by Carolyn Meyer illuminates the life of a little-known historical figure, Marie van Goethem, the young woman who was the model for Degas’s sculpture Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans; it offers, as well, an accurate picture of the life of a ballet dancer in the late nineteenth century. Meyer also did a series of historical novels about well-known women in Tudor England, including Mary, Bloody Mary; Doomed Queen Anne; and Beware, Princess Elizabeth; collectively known as the Young Royals series.
The twelfth-century crusades by King Richard I of England to retake the Holy Land from the Muslim infidels led by Saladin are vividly portrayed in K. M. Grant’s Blood Red Horse (the first in the De Granville trilogy), as seen through the experien
ces of two English brothers, their adopted sister, a young Muslim warrior, and a horse named Hosanna. Grant doesn’t take sides in the conflict, and best of all, doesn’t glorify the events on the battlefield.
The late twelfth and early thirteenth century in Europe is also the setting for an engrossing quartet of novels by Catherine Jinks, all featuring Pagan, an orphan who joins the Knights Templar to escape from the slums of Jerusalem. Readers follow Pagan as he becomes an adult and is finally appointed the Archdeacon of Carcassone, in Pagan’s Crusade, Pagan in Exile, Pagan’s Vows, and Pagan’s Scribe.
I’ve known a few teenagers who counted the historical novels of Rosemary Sutcliff among the best books they’d ever read, but to be quite honest, it’s an abysmally small number. Probably the majority of teen readers are likely to be put off by the smallish type and the dense narrative of Sutcliff’s prose. Readers who do make it even a little way into these outstanding books will find, however, that Sutcliff animates a historical era like no other author I’ve ever read, making us care deeply about her characters and their (often fraught) situations. Her best books for teens feature main characters who are themselves in their teens or early twenties, and all take place in Roman Britain. These include The Eagle of the Ninth (set in AD 133), The Silver Branch (set about a century and a half later), The Lantern Bearers (set in the fifth century, when the Roman troops were all pulled out of Britain by their emperor), and Dawn Wind, with the main character being the great-great-grandson of the hero of The Lantern Bearers. Once readers finish these, it’s a natural progression to go on to Sutcliff’s great Arthurian novel (although Arthur appears as a character in The Lantern Bearers), Sword at Sunset.
In Richard Peck’s The River Between Us, set in 1915 and the Civil War period, the author makes adroit use of flashbacks to discuss race, war, and family secrets, while telling a grand story at the same time.
Jamila Gavin has a talent for creating exciting plots and vivid settings, as can be seen in both Coram Boy, set in eighteenth-century England (you can go to Russell Square in London even today and see the setting for this book) and The Blood Stone, which takes place in Venice and Hindustan in the seventeenth century.
The importance of not only knowing yourself, but also your place in the world is the subject of Aidan Chambers’s Postcards from No Man’s Land, which combines two tales. One, set in contemporary times, is about seventeen-year-old Jacob Todd, who comes to Amsterdam from his home in England to honor his grandfather who died in World War II.The other is the story of his grandfather, as told to Jacob by a now elderly nurse who knew him during the war. This challenging and sometimes disturbing novel is most appropriate for older teens.
More recent history—the period immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—is conjured up in Suzanne Fisher Staples’s Under the Persimmon Tree. The lives of two people—one a girl disguised as a boy and the other an American convert to Islam—intersect at a refugee camp in Pakistan, where kindness and friendship manage to flourish in unlikely places. As she did in this book, Staples brings the Middle East alive for teen readers in her other books, Shabanu and Shiva’s Fire.
IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES
Being a hyphenated American is especially hard during adolescence, when there’s such a need to find a sense of oneself and discover where one fits into the world. These books (all of which can lead to fruitful discussions) take place in many different decades of the twentieth century. They offer a nice balance between normal teen issues and the special problems that being an immigrant or being adopted from another country can impose, such as how to balance traditional family ways with a new life in a new culture, or the embarrassment that accompanies the knowledge that older relatives don’t seem to fit into their adopted country.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 is the background for Mary Jane Auch’s Ashes of Roses, the story of Rose, who refuses to leave her new home in America and return to Ireland with her family, only to find that working long and grueling hours in a factory is not the future she envisioned.
A Step from Heaven by An Na is a powerfully told novel that describes the differences between dreams and reality, as Ju and her family discover that America isn’t the heaven on earth that everyone in their native Korea imagined it was.
Fictional stories of teenage immigrants from Kazakh to Romania, from Palestine to Sweden, from Haiti to Cambodia, written by Lensey Namioka, Pam Muñoz Ryan, David Lubar, and others, explore what it’s really like to leave your homeland for an America that might not meet your dreams and hopes, in First Crossing: Stories about Teen Immigrants, edited by Donald R. Gallo.
In Sherry Garland’s Shadow of the Dragon, Danny comes of age between two worlds: his American life at school, where he’s just like everyone else—hoping for a date with a cute girl, studying for his driver’s license, and working for good grades—and his life at home, where his family stubbornly holds on to their traditional Vietnamese customs and beliefs.
Fresh Girl by Jaira Placide is the story of Mardi, who returns to Brooklyn from her grandmother’s home in Haiti when the political situation there becomes too dangerous. She finds it difficult to bond with her American classmates while at the same time trying to cope with her painful memories of the past.
You might also want to try Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan; Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier; Rita Williams-Garcia’s Every Time a Rainbow Dies; Journey of the Sparrows by Fran Leeper Buss; Fresh Off the Boat by Melissa de la Cruz; Linda Crews’s Children of the River; and these excellent novels that are usually found in the adult section of the library and bookstore: China Boy by Gus Lee; Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street; Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony; and Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge.
IT MIGHT AS WELL BE GREEK
Teens are usually introduced to Greek mythology in the eighth or ninth grades, frequently through being assigned Edith Hamilton’s classic Mythology. But that should just be the beginning of what can easily become a lifelong love affair with all things Greek.
I think a lot of authors feel that ancient Greece is the ideal location to set a historical novel because you have so many options open to you—you can deal realistically with the rivalry between the Greek city-states, or bring in the fantastic stories of gods and heroes, or take a new look at the classic Greek tales of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Or you can select whatever combination you want from options a, b, and c! In any event, the books described here are surefire choices.
In Adèle Geras’s two fabulous novels, readers are plunged into the world of ancient Greece, and two of its most famous incidents are retold in lush and evocative language. Troy is the story—told from the points of view of a variety of narrators—of the Trojan War, with its great and terrible battles, the death of Hector, the anger of Achilles, and the interference in mortal lives by the bored and jealous gods on Mount Olympus.The wanderings of Odysseus and the stay-at-home life of Penelope (who waits patiently for him while he’s off having the adventure of his life) are described through the eyes of Klymene, who’s always regarded Penelope as her mother, in Ithaka.
Donna Jo Napoli has written several outstanding adaptations of Greek myths.These include Sirena, also set around the Troj an War, about a young woman who becomes a siren (like the ones who tempted Odysseus) despite her determination to be different from her sisters, and The Great God Pan, in which Napoli weaves together the various versions of the Greek myth and adds in a love story with Iphigenia, daughter of the Greek king Agamemnon.
H. M. Hoover’s The Dawn Palace is a retelling of the story of Jason and Medea, beginning with their first meeting—it’s love at first sight, at least for Medea, when Jason arrives in Medea’s father’s kingdom on his quest for the golden fleece—and ending with the tragic conclusion of their love story.
There’s no fantasy in The Road to Sardis by Stephanie Plowman; it’s straight historical fiction—and heartbreaking at that—about the events of the Peloponnesian War, the c
onflict between Athens and Sparta, which broke out in 431 BC and lasted twenty-seven long years.
Others to try include Quiver by Stephanie Spinner, a retelling of the myth of the huntress Atalanta (this is a nice follow-up to Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris’s Atalanta and the Arcadian Beast, which is for younger readers); Clemence McLaren’s Inside the Wall of Troy and Waiting for Odysseus, both told from the point of view of the women (both mortal and immortal) involved in The Iliad and The Odyssey; Patrice Kindl’s Lost in the Labyrinth (Theseus and the Minotaur); and Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B. Cooney (the siege of Troy as seen through the eyes of a young princess—it’s especially good if you’re not that big a fan of Helen, who caused the war in the first place). The Firebrand by Marian Zimmer Bradley and The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault are especially sound recommendations for older teens.
IT’S A GUY THING
Both avid and reluctant male readers will want to check out these titles. Their styles range from the humorous to the serious, and their subjects from the mundane to the unusual.
