Tag Archives: YA

Off the Shelf – LGBT Fiction for Young Adults

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Listen here.

May 17 is the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia so I thought this was the perfect time to talk about books that feature LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered) characters.

First off – I’m no expert so if you are wondering what it all means there’s a great glossary at the UC Davis Resource Centre.

I’ve often talked about how important it is for young readers to recognize themselves in the books that they read, and for that reason it’s obviously important for LGBT characters to have access to books with characters that reflect their own experiences. I don’t know whether those books existed when I was a teen – although that was a million years ago.

I spend a lot of time choosing books for my classroom library. I’d love to have a little bookstore someday, but stocking the shelves in my classroom is almost as much fun. But I digress. When I’m buying books for my class I try to keep in mind all my students – so I have to buy books about hockey and skateboarding and kids from other countries. I have to buy non-fiction.I have to buy easy books and challenging books.  I have to appeal to all my readers and, more importantly, I have to give my kids an opportunity to read books that will expand their worlds. Books have done that for me; I want books to do that for them.

Having the opportunity to read about someone’s journey – regardless of what that journey is – goes a long way to developing understanding, acceptance and the most important human quality – empathy. We seem to be inching our way towards a world of acceptance – lots of positive things happening out there – the straight guy who asked his gay friend to the prom, for example…but the world that I dream of for my own kids is one where people are just people and that kindness extends to everyone and that a story like that is the norm…and therefore, not news, really.

So I have some book suggestions.

16BLEVITHANEvery Day – David Levithan

So every day the main character ‘A’ wakes up in a different body. He spends 24 hours in that body and he is essentially that person. This is a strange way to live, but it gets even stranger when A falls in love with Rhiannon, the girlfriend of one of his ‘host’ bodies. This book really blurs those gender lines and asks its readers to consider what love is and, more importantly, what it is not. I recommend this book a lot in my classroom.

morethanthisMore Than This – Patrick Ness

So everyone knows I am a huge Ness fan and I loved this book, too. The fact that Seth, the main character in this confounding novel is gay is only incidental, really. The novel starts with Seth drowning and then waking up in a bizarre sort of post-apocalyptic world. More Than This is a page turner, for sure. It’s philosophical and difficult and profoundly moving.

aristotle_and_danteAristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Bejamin Alire Saenz

I just finished this book and I loved it. Aristotle is a 15 year old Mexican American and lives with his parents in Texas. It’s 1987. He’s angry and sort of depressed, too. He meets Dante at the pool and they become friends when Dante (also Mexican-American) offers to teach Ari to swim. This is a coming-of-age story and a story about family and community and it’s a love story. I may have teared a few times reading it. So good.

Here are some other books featuring LGBT characters and I encourage everyone to expand their reading horizons to mark May 17th, sure, but beyond that – let’s make every day a day of acceptance.

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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Sáenz

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aristotle_and_dante Aristotle (Ari for short) is a 15-year-old Mexican American living in Texas in 1987. He’s bored and miserable and pretty much hates his life.

Dante is also 15, and also Mexican-American, but he’s “funny and focused and fierce.” Ari says “there wasn’t anything mean about him. I didn’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without some meanness?”

Aristotle and Dante meet at the local pool where Dante offers to teach Ari how to swim. “All that summer, we swam and read comics and read books and argued about them.” It’s the beginning of beautiful friendship, something that Ari seems to desperately need.

Feeling sorry for myself was an art. I think a part of me liked doing that. Maybe it had something to do with my birth order. You know, I think that was part of it. I didn’t like the fact that I was a pseudo only child. I didn’t know how else to think of myself. I was an only child without actually being one. That sucked.

Ari has older twin sisters and an older brother who is in prison. He was born after his father returned from serving in Vietnam.

Sometimes I think my father has all these scars. On his heart. In his head. All over. It’s not such an easy thing to be the son of a man who’s been to war.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is a coming of age story. It’s a story about fathers and sons and mothers and sons. It’s about sacrifice and loyalty. It’s a story about friendship.

I wanted to tell them that I’d never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren’t meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn’t have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. “Dante’s my friend.

It’s a love story.

I was the age of these characters somewhere around 1976. I didn’t know anyone who was gay. Okay, looking back – of course I did, but we didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t acknowledged. As far as I know, they weren’t out. I am profoundly grateful as a teacher and a parent, just as a human being, that books like this exist. Alire Sáenz has written a story about boys who are smart and fragile and flawed. I admit it – I got teary a few times reading this book.

What are the secrets of the universe? As Ari discovers “we all fight our own private wars.”

This is a beautiful book and I highly recommend it.

Monument 14: Sky on Fire – Emmy Laybourne

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monumentskyOkay, Ms. Laybourne, you should totally take it as a compliment that I bought the second book in your Monument 14 series before I had even finished the first book. And then, without delay, I read the second book. Geesh, I haven’t even read Catching Fire yet. I should also point out that I don’t traditionally like post apocalyptic  fiction and sequels almost always irritate me. (Patrick Ness, you are totally excluded from this; you know how much I loved The Knife of Never Letting Go and the other books in the Chaos Walking trilogy.)

That said, I read Monument 14  in one breathless gulp and I read Sky on Fire just as quickly. I mean, come on, I couldn’t NOT find out what happened. But it’s going to be difficult to talk about any of it because – hello, spoilers.

Let’s just say this.

Dean goes from zero (he’s not really a zero, he just doesn’t have any confidence) to hero. His little brother, Alex, continues to act far older than his years. Niko is braver than any sixteen-year-old should have to be. Astrid turns out to be a lot more than a pretty face.  Oh, yeah, and the world has gone to hell in a hand basket.

The world outside the Greenway proves to be a lot more dangerous than any of the kids imagined and their mettle is tested on more than one occasion. Often the dangers aren’t environmental and there are plenty of creepy encounters with people who prove to be willing to kill to get what they want.

Kids in peril. A toxic wasteland. Crazy people on the loose. What’s not to love? And because Laybourne wisely decides to leave the confines of the Greenway, the reader gets to follow one group of kids as they try to make their way to the Denver Airport (and potential help) and one group who decides to stay in the superstore (and hope help finds them). It’s all pretty exciting stuff.

Okay, but then….the ending. (Which is not an ending because there’s a third book, Savage Drift) Can’t say I was a fan for a whole variety of reasons. Still, my issues are minor and even though I wasn’t as in love with Sky on Fire, I am totally in love with these kids and I will no doubt be joining them on the next leg of their journey.

The Watcher – James Howe

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watcherThe Watcher was published in 1999 to much critical acclaim. James Howe is the well-known author of the over 90 juvenile and YA books including Bunnicula and The Misfits series. ( I read Totally Joe and was a big fan.)

There are three main characters in The Watcher: Chris, the golden-boy lifeguard, Evan, the fourteen-year-old on vacation with his younger sister and parents, and the girl who sits at the top of the steps leading down to the beach, watching.

The truth is, though, that they are all watching each other. For example, Chris notes that “he didn’t know how he knew she was watching only him and not them. He could just feel it.” She’s watching him; he’s watching her.  Evan thought Chris was “the coolest guy on the beach” and secretly wished he could be just like him. The girl watched the families, “not pieces of families with only a mother or a nanny, but what she thought of as complete families with two parents and at least two children, preferably a girl and a boy.”

All three of these characters are on Fire Island, a popular beach resort near New York City. There is no reason to think they will ever cross paths, but they eventually do.

Howe is a straightforward wordsmith, and he creates compelling back stories for Chris and Evan. We know that Chris is at a crossroads, unsure of what to do now that he has graduated from high school. He feels the weight of his parents’ expectations, although we don’t understand exactly how much pressure he feels until much later in the book. As for Evan, he adores his little sister Callie and is doing his best to be a good big brother because he senses that there are things going on behind the scenes which might spell the end of his happy family.

As for the girl, we know nothing at all about her except that as she sits on the steps surveying the beach. She is imagining a much different life for herself, one where she is a princess who has been separated from her true family.

I read The Watcher in one sitting. I can only imagine that when it was first published it would have caused quite a sensation. It’s easy to see why. Each of these characters is called upon to do something brave and Howe handles their stories without sensationalism or preaching. Young readers would certainly recognize themselves in these pages.

Leftovers – Laura Wiess

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leftovers-coverBy the time you hit fifteen, there are certain survival lessons you’d better have learned.

That’s the world-weary voice of Blair Brost. She’s one of the two teenage narrators of Laura Wiess’s compelling YA novel, Leftovers. Blair’s co-narrator is Ardith. Although they are fifteen when they begin to tell their story, Ardith says they must “go back to eighth grade, which is when it all began.”

Blair is an only child. Her parents are lawyers; her mother is particularly ambitious and when she makes partner “she decides it’s time to buy  one of the big new, McMansions across town.” Blair isn’t interested in moving. She also doesn’t understand why her dog, Wendy, isn’t allowed to come. The dog is old and incontinent and Mrs. Brost says they’ve found her a new home, which isn’t exactly true.

Ardith lives with her alcoholic parents and older brother, a good-looking, charming snake.

You call your parents Connie and Gil, because they hate the heavy tags of Mom and Dad, and buy baggy, boring clothing so your mother won’t borrow them. Your hair is short because the guys like it long…

Blair and Ardith are trying to navigate the slippery terrain between childhood and adulthood and they don’t really have any positive role models. In fact, the only adult who takes any real interest in them is Officer Dave Finderne, a cop who finds them wandering home after a night at the pool.

Leftovers has elements of suspense. There are questions that need to be answered and readers will turn the pages quickly to find them. But this novel also cracks open the lives of adolescent girls, where the only way to survive is to know the rules:

Never bow before your tormentors.

Never let them know you’re vulnerable, especially when you are.

Never trust someone else to protect you, and never forget that every choice you make is on you.

Ardith and Blair are compelling narrators and their story is both heart-breaking and authentic. As both a mom and a high school teacher, I found Leftovers difficult to read (I just wanted to bring these girls home with me), but I think it has important things to say and it says them beautifully.

Highly recommended.

This Is Not A Test – Courtney Summers

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testThis is my second book by Canadian YA writer Courtney Summers and, that’s it:  I am a fan. I previously read Some Girls Are and I was totally taken with its unflinching look at what it is to be a teenage girl. It isn’t pretty, people.

This Is Not A Test has won a slew of awards including being named a  2014 OLA White Pine Honour Book, 2013 ALA/YALSA Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, 2013 ALA/YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, and  a  Kirkus New & Notable Books for Teens: June 2012. Trust me, the book delivers on every possible level.

Sloane lives in with her father  in Cortege. Her older sister, Lily, has left home and taken a piece of Sloane with her. It won’t take the reader very long to figure out that Sloane’s father is abusive. She tells us he burns the toast because she deserves it and when he reaches out to examine her face, Sloane flinches before she can catch herself. It’s no wonder that Lily has left, but the plan was that they were supposed to go together.

Based on the first couple of pages, it would be reasonable  to think that This Is Not A Test is a story about abuse, but you’d be so wrong. As Sloane is contemplating the burnt toast and the note her father has written to explain her absence from school, their front door starts to “rattle and shake.”  Someone is screaming for help and it is such a creepy event that as Sloane’s father heads to the door to investigate Sloane notes that he hesitates and she has “never seen him hesitate” in her life.

When Sloane’s father returns to the kitchen he’s screaming that they have to leave and he’s covered in blood. And then all hell breaks loose, literally.

Seven days later Sloane finds herself barricaded in Cortege High School with five other students: student body president, Grace, and her twin brother, Trace; Rhys, a senior;  some-time drug dealer and some-time boyfriend to her sister Lily, Cary and Harrison, a freshman who can’t seem to stop crying. The high school offers the six teens sanctuary while they wait for the help the feel sure will come. Unfortunately, the only announcement on the radio proclaims that “This is not a test.”

As the days drone on, Sloane and the rest of the trapped teens struggle to stay calm. They jockey for position, alliances are formed and they wonder what has happened to the rest of the world. It all makes for a riveting psychological drama because Summers has an ear for how teens speak and she doesn’t shy away from the fact that this scenario is relentlessly grim. It’s the end of the world as we know it. Except for the feeling fine part.

Sloane narrates this story and she is a sympathetic character. Even if she could get back home, what does she have to return to? No one knows about the abuse she suffered and without Lily she feels as though she has very little to live for. Thus, she has nothing to lose.

This Is Not A Test is my very first zombie novel. I’ve pretty much avoided them until now because, truthfully, they don’t really interest me all that much. If they were all as good as this one, though, I’d be a fan.

Apparently there is an e-sequel available, but truthfully, I thought the ending to This Is Not A Test was pretty damn perfect.

Highly recommended.

Charm & Strange – Stephanie Kuehn

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charmWow. This William C. Morris Debut Award winner has it all. Charm & Strange, the first novel by Stephanie Kuehn, is amazing. I read a lot of YA fiction and this book is just a cut above. Way above.

Win has attended a boarding school in New England since he was twelve. A top-ranked tennis player, Win once hit an opponent across the face with his tennis racket.

He’s a lot of things. He is prone to motion sickness. He’s cold. Dangerous. Broken.

Into his life comes Jordan. She’s the new girl and she doesn’t know anything about Win and that’s pretty much the way he wants to keep it. They meet in the woods. Win has just been attacked by a couple of school bullies and Jordan has witnessed the whole thing. She asks why he didn’t fight back. Win never fights back because “That wouldn’t be fair.”

Their relationship is tentative because Win tends to stay away from people. His only other ‘friend’  is Lex, his former roommate, but even their relationship is strained.

Charm & Strange is a compelling story about dark secrets and how they can twist lives. Kuehn skillfully pulls the reader along a path that is almost too painful to read about, but she does it so well that you just can’t stop turning the pages. The novel is layered: Sixteen-year-old Win at school is told in first person sections called ‘matter’ and ten-year-old  Drew at home with his family (first person narrative in sections called ‘antimatter’). Win and Drew are the same person, and the reason for the name change will be revealed in due course. Win’s family: professor father, depressed shadow of a mother, older brother, Keith, and younger sister, Siobhan, are important characters is Win’s story.

This novel is so cleverly constructed; every page offers just a little more of Win’s story. Win is convinced he is about to change and not in a good way.

Change is imminent.

It has to be.

“Yeah, well, have fun with that,” Lex says. “Moon or no moon, I don’t plan on being anywhere near you.”

“Good,” I snarl, and he laughs even harder than before. My hands curl into fists. I want to shut him up.

Lex notices and skitters toward the door.

“Hey, Win,” he says as he leaves, “maybe it’s your head that’s broken, not your body. Ever think about that?”

Charm & Strange is a terrific book. I am having a hard time articulating how amazing it is. It is almost relentlessly bleak and yet as I closed the final pages I felt confident that despite Win’s dark past, the beast within would be tamed. For mature YA readers, Charm & Strange is one of the best of the bunch.

Highly recommended.

The Girl in the Park – Mariah Fredericks

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parkRain, the compelling narrator if Mariah Fredericks’ YA mystery, The Girl in the Park, attends the prestigious Alcott School in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “At our school,” she says. “everybody is the child of a somebody.” Rain’s somebody is her mom, an opera singer and “if you’re into opera, you probably know her.”

Rain is a watcher, a listener. Mostly it’s because she was born with a cleft palate, and although speech therapy has smoothed out some of the T’s and S’s, Rain’s still self-conscious. She hates how she sounds, “mushmouthed and nasal.”  That is, until Wendy starts school and tells her “Big deal. Okay, maybe you sound a little funny. But you need to forget about that and speak up girl.”

Wendy is larger than life. Although she’s rich, she comes from Long Island and doesn’t have the right kind of money or pedigree. The students at Alcott are snobbish and clique-ish, but that doesn’t stop Wendy from trying to make inroads. It’s when Rain tells her that she’s approaching it all wrong that the two girls become friends.

We only ever really see Wendy through Rain’s eyes because when the novel begins, Rain discovers that her friend has been found dead in Central Park. At this point, Rain and Wendy were friendly but no longer really friends. Wendy’s blatant disregard for the prep school rules and her reputation as a “skank” have caused Rain to distance herself from the girl who once told her that “You. Other the other hand. Listen. And you think. So when you do speak? You’re brilliant. So, give up the silence, okay”

Rain can’t stand the thought that something so horrible has happened to Wendy. Worse, the night it happened Rain was at the same party as Wendy and she feels she may have seen something that could help the police — she just doesn’t know what it is.

The Girl in the Park is a fast-paced mystery with enough suspects to keep readers engaged and guessing whodunit. It’s also a story that peers into the nasty, and sometimes heartbreaking, world of teenagers. I couldn’t put it down.

Try Not to Breathe – Jennifer R. Hubbard

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breatheI think I am starting to suffer from YA fatigue. Or maybe it’s just that, despite its accolades, Jennifer Hubbard’s novel Try Not to Breathe, didn’t quite work for me. I don’t mean to imply that the novel isn’t decent or that it isn’t well-written, either. I can’t say for sure why it was that when  I got to the novel’s tidy ending,  I just felt sort of meh.

Ryan is 16 and has recently returned home from a stint at Patterson, a psychiatric hospital. Ryan attempted suicide and now “everyone snuck looks at me in the halls…Sometimes I was tempted to foam at the mouth and babble to invisible people, because the other kids seemed so disappointed that I didn’t. But I couldn’t be sure they would realize it was a joke. The few times I’d tried to make anyone laugh, all I got were nervous glances and squirming.”

Ryan’s circle is pretty small. He’s an only child; his father travels a lot and his mother works from home – to keep an eye on him. Everyone is pretty much on tenterhooks. His only freedom comes at the waterfall, where he stands under the punishing water “because [he] needed it.”

Into his world comes Nicki. She’s the younger sister of a guy he sort of knows from school. She shows up at the waterfall and the two form a friendship that soon becomes necessary to them both. Nicki isn’t afraid to ask Ryan questions, and soon Ryan discovers that he isn’t afraid to answer them. She has an agenda, as it turns out; her father committed suicide and she thinks, given the circumstances, Ryan might have some insider information.

The other important people in Ryan’s life are Val and Jake, two other teens he met during his stay at Patterson. He thinks he has feelings for Val, but a road trip orchestrated by Nicki (who is too young to drive, but does it anyway) delivers the heart-crushing news that Val is not as willing to take a chance on Ryan. It’s just one of the post-suicide-attempt blows Ryan is dealt, but he manages to rally.

Try Not to Breathe does a good job describing a teenager’s depression. Ryan had “lived behind what felt like a pane of glass, separated from the world.” Ryan is a likeable character, too, and so is Nicki. I found his parents less successful, sort of hovering non-entities. Despite my own reservations, I think the book will likely speak to teenagers who have ever considered suicide because, ultimately, Ryan’s is a story of survival.

When You Reach Me – Rebecca Stead

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book-whenyoureachmeRebecca Stead’s Newberry Award winning novel, When You Reach Me, is a puzzle of a book. And I should note that the Newberry isn’t the only prize this book received – there’s a list of twenty other prizes and distinctions this book has received. This book has some serious pedigree. It’s a middle grade book, but I’m telling you – those middle grade kids better be on their toes because this book is a puzzle.

Twelve-year-old Miranda lives in a New York City apartment with her legal secretary mom. Sometimes her mom’s boyfriend, Richard, is there. That’s okay because “Richard looks the way I picture guys on sailboats – tall, blonde and very tucked-in, even on weekends.”

Miranda’s best friend, Sal, lives one floor below Miranda. For as long as Miranda can remember it’s been Sal and Miranda, Miranda and Sal. Until it wasn’t.

It happened in the fall, when Sal and I still walked home from school together every single day: one block from West End Avenue to Broadway, one block from Broadway to Amsterdam, past the laughing man on our corner, and then half a block to our lobby door.

Miranda has been receiving mysterious notes, notes that seem to predict the future. The notes seem to know an awful lot about Miranda and her life. And then the spare key to the apartment goes missing. And while all this is happening Miranda has to manage her estranged relationship with Sal and all the other pre-teen drama a twelve-year-old must face.

When You Reach Me is a delightful hybrid. It’s one part coming-of-age novel, one part science fiction, one part homage to Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and all parts fabulous.