by Nancy Pearl
Cynda falls for the wrong vampire entirely in Look for Me by Moonlight by Mary Downing Hahn, when she becomes infatuated with the mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know Vincent Morthanos.
M. T. Anderson, in Thirsty, strikes a sadder and more somber note, as Chris struggles to remain human against the inevitable forces that are turning him into a vampire.
Other vampire novels too good to miss include Companions of the Night by Vivian Vande Velde; Sunshine by Robin McKinley; Dangerous Girls and The Taste of Night by R. L. Stine; Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps; Bram Stoker’s Dracula (well, duh); Salem’s Lot by Stephen King; I Am Legend by Richard Matheson; and Vampire High by Douglas Rees. For a more lighthearted story, try Gil’s All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez, in which a vampire and a werewolf join forces to defeat some zombies who are determined to destroy Loretta’s diner. (A great choice for fans of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.)
SLOWLY UNRAVELING
Some books reveal all to the reader from the very beginning, while others make us work a little harder, slowly offering pieces of a puzzle to reader and characters alike. Sometimes even the ending is left open, so that the reader is forced to make up his or her mind about what happened. In any case it’s a magical sort of ride that leaves the reader reveling in the experience long after the book is finished.
When Clare moves with her mother to a small English town in order to help care for the elderly owner of the Ravensmere Estate, she finds life a bit spooky. Everyone around seems to know Clare and is overjoyed at her arrival; add a gorgeous bad boy into the mix, and it’s one puzzling place, in Liz Berry’s The China Garden.
Anna is odd, unlike anyone that the unnamed teenage narrator in As Simple as Snow by Gregory Galloway has ever known before. When she disappears—her dress left beside a hole in the ice shortly before Valentine’s Day—he tries to make sense of what happened. But will anyone ever know for sure?
Dead Girls Don’t Write Letters by Gail Giles sets up this intriguing plot: Sunny instantly knows that the woman at her door who looks a little like her dead sister and knows everything about her dead sister is really someone pretending to be her dead sister, but why?
Shortly after becoming the hero in a bank robbery, Ed receives the ace of diamonds with a mysterious message and sets out with his smelly dog, the Doorman, to decipher the clue, in the somewhat noirish I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak.
Fifteen-year-old Cait looks back on the events of the previous year, when the arrival of a young drifter on her small, seemingly idyllic island off the coast of England set off a series of events that ended in tragedy, in Lucas by Kevin Brooks.
Much to his father’s displeasure, Eli decides to take a year off after graduating from high school and go to work for Dr. Quincy Wyatt, a molecular biologist, at Wyatt Transgenics, a company exploring the far reaches of genes and gene-splicing.What he discovers there will change the way he looks at the world, and himself, in Nancy Werlin’s gripping Double Helix.
SMELLS LIKE TEEN NOSTALGIA
Maybe it simply means that I travel in the wrong circles, but I don’t have any friends who want to go back and relive their teenage years.Their twenties, maybe. Their thirties, yes. But those years from thirteen to nineteen are too often filled with enough pangs and pains to preclude ever wanting to go through them again.
Contemporary teenage fiction contrasts sharply with most young adult novels written during the late 1940s through the 1960s.The task of coping with the demands of school, the expectations of one’s family, and interpersonal relationships was certainly the subject matter of these older titles, but they had a sweeter certainty that life would turn out fine. In more recent books, this isn’t always (or even mostly) the case.
Many of these novels have been brought back in print, and some, like Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer, have never gone out of print. Forgive me for being self-indulgent, but it gave me enormous pleasure just to write the names of these books down and remember the enjoyment they gave me when I read them.
Betty Cavanna’s Going on Sixteen, The Boy Next Door, Angel on Skis, Paintbox Summer, Spurs for Suzanna, Accent on April, A Girl Can Dream, Spring Comes Riding, and all the rest of her early novels really deserve to be reissued, even knowing that they’ll be bought for nostalgia’s sake, if at all.
In Green Eyes by Jean Nielsen, Jan Marie has to deal with a bratty—and much favored—younger brother, a father who’s gone for weeks at a time for his work, and a mother she’s convinced doesn’t like her. She’s also the youngest person in her high school graduating class and she has to deal with fierce competition (in the form of a very cute guy) for the editorship of the school paper.
Madeleine L’Engle’s books for middle-grade kids are what made (and make) her beloved among young readers, but these days nobody seems to mention her teenage novel, And Both Were Young. Maybe it was never much read, even when it was first published. I’ve never actually met anyone, except for my daughters and me, who even knows about it, which is a real shame because it’s a sensitive, finely written coming-of-age novel set in a boarding school in Switzerland.
Rosamond du Jardin’s three series of books, one about Tobey Heydon (Practically Seventeen; Boy Trouble; Class Ring; and more); another about Marcy Howard (Wait for Marcy; Marcy Catches Up; A Man for Marcy; Senior Prom); and the third about Pam and Penny Howard (Double Date; Double Feature; Showboat Summer; and Double Wedding) are perfect exemplars of a world long gone, if it ever existed.
The Beany Malone series by Lenora Mattingly Weber (Meet the Malones; Beany Malone; Leave It to Beany!; Beany and the Beckoning Road; and all the rest) gave me enormous pleasure when I was a young teen. The ones I reread most often are Make a Wish for Me and Happy Birthday, Dear Beany. (And I am far from the only woman of a certain age who remembers them fondly—there’s an online discussion group for Beany Malone fans: [email protected].)
I always enjoyed following Anne Emery’s heroine Dinny Gordon through her four years of high school, in the very straightforwardly entitled Dinny Gordon, Freshman; Dinny Gordon, Sophomore; Dinny Gordon, Junior; and Dinny Gordon, Senior, but I also found her stand-alone novels like Tradition (one of the only—maybe the only—teenage novel I know of from the late 1940s that deals with the issue of prejudice against Japanese Americans), and Married on Wednesday (teen marriage) to be great fun.
In Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, Ann Head takes on the subjects of teen pregnancy and marriage, both less prevalent then—in the 1960s when the book first came out—than today.
I know teens are still reading Judy Blume’s Forever, one of the first teen books to feature a sexually active heroine, and I suspect that it’s still giving some parents fits, more than thirty years after it was originally published.
The plots of Gretchen Sprague’s A Question of Harmony and White in the Moon combine classical music and racial prejudice— and believe me, it works well in these novels, which I often fear nobody but me knows about. I hope that’s not true.
I recently met a teenage girl who said Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s Greensleeves was her favorite book of all time. It’s high on my list, too.Very much aimed at the over-sixteen crowd, it takes an unusual summer of pretending to be someone else to make it possible for Shannon Lightley to figure out who she is.
Mary Stolz’s terrific stream-of-consciousness novels deal with all sorts of issues that will still resonate with teens today, assuming, of course, that they don’t balk at the writing style (many will). Some of my favorites are In a Mirror; Ready or Not; Rosemary; Because of Madeline; To Tell Your Love; and The Day and the Way We Met. If you do decide to introduce a teen reader to Stolz’s work, be sure to find books that were published in the 1950s and 1960s—not the later titles, which aren’t nearly as good.
TAM LIN
The story of Tam Lin began as a Scottish ballad about a brave maiden named Janet who saves her human lover (who’s been kidnapped by fairies) from being sacrificed on Halloween night. That’s the bare bones of the tale, but some tal
ented contemporary writers have taken the original ballad (thrilling to read on its own, actually) and adopted and adapted it, producing some impossibly romantic tales that are just perfect for dreamy teenage girls who believe in true love (and what teenage girl doesn’t?).
Begin with my absolute favorite, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, which takes place at a college in the Midwest in the 1970s—how Dean winkles the magic elements into what is basically a contemporary novel about relationships is remarkably effective. (It’s part of The Fairy Tale Library created by Terri Windling, a series of contemporary novels that retell classic stories; another in the series is JaneYolen’s Briar Rose.) There’s an excellent chance that readers who enjoy Dean’s Tam Lin are also likely to adore her Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, also a magical realist retelling of a Scottish folk tale.
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, another novel set in the late twentieth century, is a genuinely thrilling story of a young woman whose life gets caught between two sets of very different memories, where the magic and the mundane intertwine and pull her in different directions, although it all seems to have something to do with a cellist named Thomas Lynn.
Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard takes place in 1588 during the reign of Queen Mary of England, and the heroine, Kate Sutton, one of Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, is banished to the Gard, where she finds herself kidnapped by the fairy folk and forced to find a way to save her true (and mortal) love, Christopher.
Janet McNaughton’s An Earthly Knight is set in twelfth-century Scotland; this story of a love that survives in the face of increasingly difficult tests is romantic enough to satisfy the most demanding teen reader.
Patricia A. McKillip’s Winter Rose introduces teenage Rois Melior and her older sister, Laurel, who both fall in love with the mysterious Corbet Lynn. Corbet has returned to his ancestral home (now a ruin) in their small town, despite the curse laid upon the family by his vengeful grandfather. How Rois gradually realizes what’s going on and ultimately saves Corbet (here’s where the Tam Lin part enters the plot) involves both sacrifice and an understanding of what love is.
There are two illustrated children’s books about Tam Lin and the young woman who loved him, and maybe once teen readers are caught up in the magic of the story they’ll want to take a look at the versions by Jane Yolen and Charles Mikolaycak, and Susan Cooper and Warwick Hutton, both entitiled, simply, Tam Lin.
THIS IS MY LIFE
Sometimes the best young adult novels are those written in the first person, novels in which the narrator comes across as a real person, the emotions are convincing, and the situations are familiar to everyone who’s living through, or has lived through, adolescence.The classic novel here is, of course, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
In Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin, teenage Owen describes his attraction to his classmate Natalie and his confusion over balancing his own desires for his future with what his parents want for him.
Teenage Toby Malone’s prematurely gray hair is probably caused by his worry over his older brother Jake’s increasing use of illegal drugs; he’s finding that despite how much he wants to help Jake, he’s powerless to do so, in Patricia McCormick’s My Brother’s Keeper.
In The First Part Last by Angela Johnson, Bobby finds that life as a teenage father with full responsibility for his newborn daughter is far different from the old days when school, basketball, and hip-hop took up all his time—but the hardest part is deciding what’s best for baby Feather.
A complement to Johnson’s book is Margaret Bechard’s Hanging on to Max, another tale of a teen father and the difficult—impossible, really—choices he faces when he thinks about his son’s future.
Laurie Halse Anderson went on to write some other outstanding novels for young adults, including Catalyst and Prom, but her first, Speak, remains one of her very best. It’s the realism of Melinda Sordino’s voice that will resonate with teen readers, as she suffers through her first year of high school not just because of the normal sort of teen angst, but because something awful happened at an end-of-the-summer party, and Melinda is unable to talk about it, even to defend herself to the girls with whom she used to be close friends. (Anderson has also written picture books and a slew of books for middle readers.)
Another novel in which a teenage girl has trouble articulating what’s going on in her life is Patricia McCormick’s Cut, in which Callie, who’s in a residential treatment facility called Sea Pines (although the girls there call it Sick Minds), tries to understand why she cuts herself. The cuts are never deep enough to kill herself, but the pain of cutting herself dispels—for a brief moment, anyway—the greater pain of life.
What if your mother dragged you and your younger brothers and sisters off to a mountaintop to await the end of the world that she and other followers of Reverend Beelson knew would take place on the very day of your birthday? Teenagers Marina and Jed (who comes to Mount Weeupcut with his Believer father) take turns telling the story of what happened during those tumultuous two weeks in Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville’s Armageddon Summer.
Eleven teenagers from a variety of ethnic groups, genders, and economic levels tell their own stories—in remarkably real voices—of the triumphs and tragedies of adolescence in E. R. Frank’s Life Is Funny.
The laugh-aloud Alice, I Think by Susan Juby begins: “I blame it all on The Hobbit.That, and my supportive home life. I grew up in one of those loving families that fail to prepare a person for real life.” Its sequel, also a hoot, is Miss Smithers, in which Alice, most improbably, enters the local teen pageant and—less improbably—starts a zine.
Tending to Grace by Kimberly Newton Fusco tells the story of fourteen-year-old voracious reader Cornelia, who finally comes to terms with her mother’s neglect when she goes to live with a great aunt she never knew existed.
Inexcusable by Chris Lynch is a good choice for an adult/teen book discussion—it’s about teenage Chris, who’s accused by his old friend and longtime crush, Gigi, of date rape.
In Anne Fine’s sensitive Up on Cloud Nine, Ian tries to make sense of the accident that put his best friend Stol in the hospital . . . only he’s got a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t really an accident.
Other outstanding “I” books include David Klass’s You Don’t Know Me, the story of a teenage boy trying to cope with the general trauma of adolescence as well as the abuse (both physical and emotional) his mother’s boyfriend metes out;Terry Trueman’s riveting Stuck in Neutral, in which teenage Shawn, who suffers from cerebral palsy, begins to believe that his father is intending to kill him; K. L. Going’s Fat Kid Rules the World, a marvelous choice for music fans; and Funny Little Monkey by Andrew Auseon, about a pair of feuding twins—four-foot-two Arty, who narrates this darkly humorous novel, and his six-foot-tall brother, Kurt.
UP ALL NIGHT
Well, consider yourself warned. The subject matter of these books is often graphic, they’re frequently filled with violence, and they’re sometimes downright terrifying. Don’t hand these books out to kids on a school night, because they’re simply not put-downable, and think twice before giving them to impressionistic, overly sensitive readers who might be too scared ever to sleep again. (I myself had to read most of these books at an emotional arms’ length, as I was pretty much unwilling to get involved with them.) With those caveats in mind, it’s hard to see how you can miss with recommending these to teens.
And all that being said, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is one of my all-time favorite books. I recommend it often to both teens and adult readers. It’s Alice in Wonderland for horror fans. Instead of following a rabbit down a rabbit hole, Richard, who works in the financial district in London, rescues a mysterious young woman who’s bleeding to death and follows her into London’s underworld, a place of magic, evil, and intrigue. Remember, no good deed ever goes unpunished.
Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always, the story of a bored kid lured into something totall
y sinister, is one of the creepiest reads around, yet there’s nary a drop of blood in sight.
Unbeknownst to them, five sixteen-year-old orphans become subjects in an eerie experiment in mind control in William Sleator’s House of Stairs, originally published in 1974 and still in print. (When I was at my local library checking this out, the man at the circulation desk—who must have been in his late thirties—commented that this had been one of his favorite books as a teenager.)
Kaye, the human-appearing heroine of Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black, is quite possibly being used as a pawn in an all-out war in the faerie world—and who can she turn to for help? Kaye’s adventures—graphic, violent, and scary—continue in Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie.
In The Wereling: Wounded by Stephen Cole, Tom (who’s the wereling of the title, someone who’s half human, half werewolf) encounters the Folans, a rather strange family who have evidently chosen him to be a mate for their daughter, Kate, who’s a werewolf. Can Tom (who’s developing a hunger for bloody meat) and Kate escape their fates and still remain together? Fans will want to follow Tom and Kate through the next two books—so offer them Prey and Resurrection, too.
