by Nancy Pearl
Donna Jo Napoli’s Zel retells with a lovely resonance the tale of Rapunzel from three points of view: the adolescent Zel, her overly possessive mother, and Konrad, the prince who falls in love with Zel. Other clever retellings of classic fairy tales by Napoli include Spinners (Rumpelstiltskin); Bound (based on Chinese Cinderella tales); North (The Pied Piper of Hamlin); The Magic Circle (Hansel and Gretel); Crazy Jack (Jack and the Beanstalk); and Beast (Beauty and the Beast).
In East, Edith Pattou vividly retells the old fairy tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon from the point of view of four characters: a young woman named Rose, her father, her brother, and an evil troll queen who has bewitched a prince by turning him into a bear.
Other “one-word wonders” well worth reading include the humorous Squashed by Joan Bauer (a teenager tries to lose twenty pounds as well as grow the largest pumpkin in Iowa); Celine by Brock Cole; Peter Dickinson’s awfully spooky Eva; Smack by Melvin Burgess (a riveting look at teenage heroin addiction); Will Hobbs’s Downriver; Jerry Spinelli’s Crash and Stargirl (which can make even grown-ups cry); Fade by Robert Cormier (well written and painful as all his books are); Laura and Tom McNeal’s Crushed, Crooked, and Zipped, three tales of the ups and downs of life during high school; Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (the real story of the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz); Pete Hautman’s provocative, painful, and sometimes controversial novels, including Invisible (which is almost unbearably sad) and Godless, winner of the National Book Award; and Bird by Angela Johnson.
OUR LOVE IS HERE TO STAY—OR NOT
Teenage romances will never go out of style, and here are some goodies to try:
Sarah Dessen writes what are best described as “oldfashioned teenage books in an updated world.” I love them because they remind me of the books I read as a young adult, but at the same time they are totally contemporary, without a hint of the mustiness or dated-ness of the past. As Dessen so charmingly shows in The Truth About Forever, when your boyfriend breaks up with you via e-mail, you’re stuck in a dull summer job that he arranged for you, and you’re still grieving over the death of your father, meeting the crew of Wish, a catering company (including the incredibly handsome Wes), can go far in cheering up a teenage girl.Take a look at Someone Like You and Keeping the Moon, as well.
Dessen also wrote Dreamland, a sensitive and honest book about a girl falling in love with a boy who abuses her. Another excellent book on the same topic is Fault Line by Janet Tashjian.
Of course Jessica Darling fell for Marcus Flutie, who’s all wrong for her, but she vows to not get burned again in her senior year. But like a moth to a flame . . . or so Megan McCafferty tells it in Second Helpings.
When sixteen-year-old Ruby McQueen falls for bad boy Travis Becker, it takes the efforts of a senior citizen’s book club, her mother’s understanding, and the story of a love that transcended years of separation to help her deal with her feelings, in Deb Caletti’s Honey, Baby, Sweetheart. (Her Wild Roses and The Queen of Everything are also wonderful.)
Gordon Korman’s Son of the Mob is a witty updating of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which the main characters—seventeen-year-old Vince Luca and his girlfriend, Kendra—are not destined to live happily ever after, all because Vince’s dad is a mob boss and Kendra’s father is the FBI agent assigned to find the goods on Mr. Luca and put him behind bars.
Other novels exploring high school romances include David Levithan’s The Realm of Possibility; Boy Girl Boy by Ron Koertge; and Ellen Wittlinger’s Heart on My Sleeve, which uses all the tools of modern communication, including e-mails, instant messaging, and—surprise!—actual letters, to explore Chloe and Justin’s relationship.
PAGE-TURNING PLEASURES
Sometimes what teen readers want is just what a lot of adult readers are looking for in their pleasure reading—a fast-moving, exciting page-turner, where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next, page by page and chapter by chapter. Here are some doozies:
Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines, the first in The Hungry City Chronicles, is set far in the future, when cities consume other cities—what Reeve cleverly calls “municipal Darwinism”—and the mayor of London has discovered the weapon that effectively wiped out much of humanity eons before in the “sixty-minute war.” It’s up to a group of teens, led by an apprentice historian named Tom, to stop him. The action, excitement, and mayhem continue in Predator’s Gold and Infernal Devices.
Matt, the main character in The House of the Scorpion (set in an alternate future that frequently looks a lot like today—or at least like the day after tomorrow), is a clone of a powerful drug lord. As Matt starts to realize just what that means for his future, Nancy Farmer offers readers the chance to consider issues of good and evil and what it means to be human.
Danger, excitement, and romance combine to keep the action moving along at a fast clip in Philip Pullman’s The Tin Princess, which takes place in 1882 in an imaginary kingdom nestled between Germany and Austria.
Eleanor Updale brings the Victorian period to life in her trilogy that begins with Montmorency:Thief, Liar, Gentleman?, about a cunning thief who uses a double identity (and the London sewers) to steal from upper-class British families all over the city.The cliff-hanging chapter endings will keep readers turning the pages quickly and immediately going on to the sequels, Montmorency on the Rocks: Doctor, Aristocrat, Murderer? and Montmorency and the Assassins: Master, Criminal, Spy?
Victoria McKernan’s Shackleton’s Stowaway is a maritime adventure based on the disastrous expedition that trapped Ernest Shackleton and his crew of the Endurance in the ice for months. It’s told from the (imagined) point of view of a (real) stowaway, eighteen-year-old Pierce Blackborrow.
Other page-turners include The Road of the Dead by Kevin Brooks (a dead sister, sinister inhabitants of a small English town, and a brother determined to find who killed his sister, and why); Jackie French Koller’s The Falcon (which partially takes place in a psychiatric ward); Mr. Was by Pete Hautman (time travel); Lois Duncan’s Down a Dark Hall; and Graham McNamee’s heart-pounding Acceleration, in which seventeen-year-old Duncan hunts down a serial killer.
PLAY THE GAME
Sometimes the best way to get reluctant teens to read is to give them fast-moving books about whatever their particular interests might be. If it’s painting ceramics, you might not be able to find much out there, but if it’s sports, you’re in luck.Try these:
Sticky, a white foster kid who spends his days playing street basketball, realizes that his talent on the court just might offer him an escape from a dead-end life in Ball Don’t Lie by Matt de la Peña.
Three not-to-be missed books about boxing include Robert Lipsyte’s classic The Contender, which takes place in more or less (it was originally published in 1967) contemporary Harlem; Fighting Ruben Wolfe by Markus Zusak; and The Boxer by Kathleen Karr, about a fifteen-year-old ex-con who tries to make it as a fighter in the last years of the nineteenth century.
Hockey was all that mattered to Nick Taglio, and he was great on the ice. When he doesn’t bounce back from his most recent concussion—leading to his doctor forbidding him to play again, maybe permanently—he’s forced to contemplate life after hockey, and it doesn’t look good, in Pat Hughes’s Open Ice.
Many of Chris Lynch’s best novels can be seen as either sports novels with a coming-of-age subtext, or as coming-of-age novels set against the world of high school sports.Three of my favorites are Slot Machine, about an overweight, sports-phobic teen who’s sent to a Christian Brothers sports camp to get him ready for high school; Iceman (hockey); and Shadow Boxer.
Ultimate Sports, a collection of stories edited by Donald R. Gallo, is a solid introduction to some of the leading YA writers around, including Robert Lipsyte, Thomas Dygard, and Chris Crutcher. (A popular novel of Crutcher’s is Whale Talk, about a talented teen who’s always hated organized sports but decides to start a swim team made up of his school’s misfits.)
Other sports fiction to try includes The Perfect Shot by Elaine Marie Alphin; Carl Deuker’s Painting the Black; Gloria D. Miklowitz’s prescient novel—published in 1989—about the lure and dangers of steroid use, Anything to Win; Hoops by Walter Dean Myers; Wrestling Sturbridge by Rich Wallace; Joyce Sweeney’s Players; Bull Catcher by Alden R. Carter; Marie G. Lee’s Necessary Roughness (football); Rich Wallace’s Playing Without the Ball; Randy Powell’s Dean Duffy; and Danger Zone by David Klass.
POEMS AS NOVELS AND NOVELS AS POEMS
It might be hard to get many teens to read poetry, but sometimes if the poems have all the hallmarks of their favorite novels—good characters, realistic settings, and energetic plots—voila!, the problem’s close to being solved. Try recommending these novels-in-verse:
The hero of Ron Koertge’s Shakespeare Bats Cleanup is a high school baseball player stuck at home in bed with a bad case of mononucleosis, who discovers that looking at his life through the lens of poetry is a great way to pass the seemingly interminable time until he can play again, if that ever happens.
While this isn’t exactly a novel, the poems in Naomi Shihab Nye’s 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East are united by their attention to the lives of Arabs and Arab Americans.The collection begins with a poem she wrote after the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. There’s also a moving and heartfelt introduction.
Besides its knockout title, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, Sonya Sones’s novel of the ups and downs of a teenage girl—trying to accept her mother’s death, moving across the country to live with her movie-star father (whom she’s never even met), losing her first boyfriend to her best friend, and more—is one of those books where the narrator simply comes alive for the reader.
Ellen Hopkins has written two moving novels in verse: Crank is the almost terrifying tale of a teenage girl’s infatuation with a dangerous drug, and Burned is the story of a teenager’s search for acceptance and self-understanding after being banished by her abusive father to live with an aunt she doesn’t know.
Josie, Aviva, and Nicolette all fall for the same irresistible boy and find that their lives will never quite be the same again, in Tanya Lee Stone’s A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl.
AnnTurner tackles difficult subjects (in free verse,yet) in Learning to Swim: A Memoir (which is really a novel).
Poignant glimpses of seven young people grappling with pregnancy, foster families, abusive parents, arrest, and sexuality form the short collection called Keesha’s House by Helen Frost. As you read you can almost hear the rhythm of the beat driving the words along the page.
Even reluctant readers and poetry-averse teens will be drawn intoVirginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade and True Believer, the first two of a proposed trilogy.They’re written in free verse in the voice of LaVaughn, a teen who wants more than anything a life outside the projects where she lives.
QUEENS OF FANTASY
Without fail, every teenage girl I talked to told me that I had to include Mercedes Lackey’s books in Book Crush (not that there was any doubt I would: I’m a big fan, too). They couldn’t stop raving about Lackey’s ability to create a realistic fantasy world, spellbinding plots, and dynamic characters. (In fact Lackey’s world, Valdemar, is so well drawn that other fantasy writers have chosen to set their books there as well.) You can read Lackey’s novels in an order based on the Valdemarian timeline, or in chronological (publishing) order. Or you can start with my favorite trilogy, composed of Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, and Magic’s Price, and go on from there.When you finish all the novels, take a look at The Valdemar Companion: A Guide to Mercedes Lackey’s World of Valdemar by John Helfers et al.
Tamora Pierce almost single-handedly changed the world of teen fantasy from a place devoid of girls (except for princesses) to a world of women warriors. Her books are feminist in outlook, frank in their descriptions of sex and violence, and utterly enthralling. She writes grand stories of adventure, danger, intrigue, and heroic feats. I haven’t ever met a female teenage fantasy fan who hasn’t adored Pierce’s books.
While Pierce has several series, probably her best known is The Song of the Lioness, a quartet of novels featuring Alanna, the archetypal girl warrior. Set in the land of Tortall, a wonderfully conjured mix of myth, magic, and an invented medieval-ish land, Alanna’s story begins as she persuades her brother to switch places with her so she can go to the castle of Prince Jonathan as a new page and knight-in-training. Disguising herself as a boy, Alanna begins an epic adventure that will lead to her ascension as the ultimate warrior in the land. The series includes Alanna: The First Adventure, In the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, and Lioness Rampant. These are grand choices for feminists-in-training.
Pierce has written several other beloved series, connected slightly to the Alanna books. Trickster’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen tell the saga of Alanna’s daughter, Aly, a spymaster. The Protector of the Small quartet includes First Test, Page, Squire, and Lady Knight, which together tell the story of Keladry of Mindalen, another girl determined to become a knight.The Immortals quartet, Wild Magic, Wolf-Speaker, The Emperor Mage, and The Realms of the Gods, is the story of Diane, whose magic powers must be developed to help save Tortall.
Her Circle of Magic (Sandry’s Book, Tris’s Book, Daja’s Book, Briar’s Book, and The Will of the Empress) and The Circle Opens (Magic Steps, Street Magic, Cold Fire, and Shatterglass) series take place in a different world and may work better for younger readers who might not be quite ready to encounter the emerging sexuality that’s found in some of the other books.
SHAPE SHIFTERS
Shape shifting, the ability to become another animal at will, offers lots of opportunities for authors to let their imaginations run wild. What happens if you get stuck in that other body? Is the change for good or ill? Can you change to more than one animal or are you more or less exclusive (e.g., are you an avian shape shifter or can you also become a dog at another time)? However writers approach those questions, the possibilities have made shape shifting a relatively small but popular subgenre in the world of fantasy fiction.You won’t want to miss these:
Teenage Owl’s ability to shift between being human and being an owl becomes ever more complicated when she falls in love with her (human) biology teacher, Mr. Lindstrom, and discovers a runaway teenager stalking Lindstrom’s house in Patrice Kindl’s Owl in Love.
The fact that Tess can change into whatever animal she chooses has always been her deepest held secret, but when she meets Kevin, who also has the ability to switch bodies, she discovers that the two of them are somehow destined to save the world from ultimate destruction—only there will be a huge cost to pay, in Switchers by Kate Thompson.
Others I’ve enjoyed include Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover; Jennifer Roberson’s Shapechanger’s Song, the first of the Chronicles of the Cheysuli; Shapeshifter’s Quest by Dena Landon; and Hawksong by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, followed by Snakecharm, Falcondance, and Wolfcry.
SINK YOUR TEETH INTO THESE
Teenager readers have long been fascinated with the allure of the vampire—all that sensual attractiveness plus the ability to live forever make for an unbeatable combination. “Tall, dark, and handsome” is taken to a whole other level, here. Plus, if you add the angst that teen vampires tend to (understandably) suffer from, you’ve got some winning reads. Readers who enjoy a gothic atmosphere, a troubled romance, and a subtle undercurrent of menace can quench their thirst with these (dare I say) toothsome novels.
One—if not the first—vampire novel written specifically for teens was Annette Curtis Klause’s classic, The Silver Kiss. While comforting Zoe, who’s grieving for her dying mother, Simon, a vampire, enlists her aid in defeating his evil vampire brother, Christopher.
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer introduces the vampire as a tortured individual who knows that he shouldn’t love a human girl but cannot stop himself. The trouble begins wh
en Isabella Swan meets the handsome yet mysterious Edward Cullen at her new high school.
While traveling around Europe to a series of psychic fairs with her mother, a witch, teenage Fran (who has some unusual powers of her own) falls for Benedikt, a motorcycle-riding vampire who beseeches her to find a way to lift the curse that has been bedeviling him for centuries, in Katie Maxwell’s Got Fangs? Great fun.
In Vampire Kisses by Ellen Schreiber, Raven grows up watching Dracula on late-night television, idolizing author Anne Rice, and hoping she can become a vampire someday, a wish that just may come true when she meets the strange and very handsome Alexander Sterling. Kissing Coffins continues Raven’s story.
Author Amelia Atwater-Rhodes is often referred to as the Anne Rice for teen readers.Vampires take center stage in her novels In the Forests of the Night, the story of a time-traveling teenage vampire, and Demon in My View, in which Jessica (who had a bit part in the former book) realizes that vampires are not just subject matter for her past and future books; they actually exist—and one of them is out to get her.
