YA Graphic and Illustrated Novels/Series Books

I took a class in graphic novels and comics over the summer with Dr. Figa and absolutely fell in love with graphic novels.  I'm not alone; they are huge movers among adults and teens alike at my library.

I think graphic novels can be an amazing source of education and/or entertainment to those who are more visual among us.  There is a very good reason that some people struggle with reading and graphic novels can bridge that gap.

As for series fiction, well, there is a new series starting every month, it seems.  But for good reason.  Just last week I had a teen come in wanting to start a new series, "a long one, if you have it."  I gave her the Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare and she left happy.  Teens get invested in their characters and want to see them over and over.  Series books meet that desire.  So while they may be a complete pain to anyone who orders books for a YA department, the teens love them and that's what counts.

Larkin is 14 years old and is not really a fan of his age (or his height, for that matter).  This book is written as a notebook/blog for an English class.

Things aren't really going Larkin's way.  It turns out his girlfriend isn't really his girlfriend, just a friend.  He's not very cool (and neither is his best friend).  There is a world class jerk, Dalton, who is bullying him somewhat.  His older sister is a total drama queen.  And his parents won't let him get a job so that he can buy a super expensive video camera and fulfill his dream of being a world famous director/cinematographer.  Life is hard.

This is an illustrated novel, so dispersed throughout the text were pictures. I thought the pictures really enhanced the text and added to the overall story.  This story was really fun to read and went by quickly.

These books made me want to rush out and buy all of the canned goods from my local Wal-Mart.  They were terrifying.

Told in journal form, the first book, Life As We Knew It, Miranda starts her journal in the usual teen way.  She talks about school, boys, her family and other very normal things.  Eventually she casually mentions that an asteroid is set to hit the moon and astronomers say you'll be able to see it with a simple telescope or binoculars.  The night of the impact, everyone on Miranda's block is outside, set to watch the event.  Only when it happens, something goes terribly wrong and the moon is pushed significantly closer to the Earth.  This causes all kinds of weather/environmental problems like tsunamis, volcanic eruptions (and the subsequent ash cloud), and lightening storms.

The rest of her diary (and we get her perspective again in This World We Live In) is her chronicling this very challenging time.  Plants are dying due to the ash cloud, which means animals are dying.  Stores are totally out of canned goods.  People begin to starve.  The infrastructure completely goes under.

The Dead & the Gone is more of a companion novel to Life As We Knew It, which is eventually tied together with This World We Live In.  In this book, we meet the Morales family, who live in NYC.  Alex's parents disappear in the tidal surge/tsunami after the initial asteroid impact and he's left to care for his two younger sisters alone.  Where in the first book we get a more rural view of the catastrophe, this is the city's perspective.  Infrastructure is a bit better in the city, but you also have the problem of more bodies to deal with.

This trio of books is terrifying.  It is presented in a way that makes the situation feel plausible, which is a very scary thought.  These remain popular in my library among kids who like dystopian and post-apocalyptic books.

YA Religion and Religious Issues

I haven't read too many books with religious themes.  I can't say why, I just haven't.  These books, at least in my library, are really gaining in popularity, though.  We live in a pretty conservative area, so lots of teens (or their parents) come in looking for specifically Christian fiction.  I'm not one to only buy Christian fiction, however, so we have lots of books from other religious perspectives as well.

As teens are exploring their faiths and finding out how they feel about it all, it is good for them to have books to bounce these ideas off of.  For those who are already very secure in their faith, I imagine it is nice to see characters that reflect their ideas.

First off, let me say that I adore this cover.  I think whoever chose it did an excellent job.  It is both literal and symbolic at the same time and I simply love it.

Lacy is the daughter of a youth pastor and very involved in her church.  To Lacy, the world is black and white.  This is what the Bible says, these things are right, these things are wrong.  She is thrilled to get to perform in this year's Hell House, which is a huge deal for her church.

Enter Ty, a new boy in town (although he attended school with Lacy and her friends as a young child) and Lacy knees go weak.  He is sweet and cute and he seems to like Lacy.  They start meeting at a park to hang out and talk, often working their way to religious topics.

But when one friend gets bullied, with no consequences to the bully, and another ends up pregnant, with no consequences for the boy who got her pregnant, Lacy's world starts turning gray.  How can the church turn such a blind eye to the bully and the boy?  How can they pass such judgement?  Where is their compassion? Fortunately for Lacy, Ty is a great sounding board and helps her not only ask the tough questions, but helps her come to her own conclusions instead of just parroting her parents.

I think this book would especially touch teens who love God but struggle with "the church" and many of its attitudes.

Amal is in the 11th grade at a prestigious Australian prep school.  She is a Muslim and a very faithful one, at that.  She makes the decision to start wearing a hijab, or head covering, full time.

This is a seemingly small decision, to cover her hair, that leads to huge repercussions.  Her school principal doesn't want her to do it.  Her parents worry that she will have trouble dealing with the stereotypes and have trouble finding a job.  Her crush is initially too shocked to speak to her.  People at school are either curious about why she decided to start wearing it or downright rude about it.  It has a huge ripple effect on her life.

Fortunately, Amal has amazing friends.  Two of them are Muslim and she met them at the Islamic elementary school she used to attend.  Two of them are from her new school.  All of them are insanely supportive and help Amal when she needs help the most.

One thing that struck me about this book is how real and authentic it was.  And how NORMAL Amal was.  I don't really know what I expected (a religious zealot, maybe?  Showing my own stereotype, there...), but Amal was your typical teenager with a scarf and a refusal to kiss boys.  It was so refreshing to see a Muslim portrayed in such a positive way; I fully intend to read Abdel-Fattah's other book, Ten Things I Hate About Me.

YA Dystopian Novels

I love dystopia.  I love the worlds and the issues and the technology so many of them have.  If I could only pick on genre to read for the rest of forever, dystopia would be it.

It isn't hard to see why teens have recently been drawn to books of this nature.  When you're a teen, you feel constantly out of control.  You have rules at home, rules at school, and your life doesn't exactly feel like your own.  And you constantly feel like your world is ending; everything is a big deal.  And, in dystopian novels, the characters also feel the same way.

This is my new favorite book.  In fact, I had to really push myself to get all my reading done this week so that I could go on and read the sequel; I couldn't wait!

Lena lives in a world where love is viewed as a huge problem.  Wars are fought for love.  Families broken because of love, or a lack of it.  Depression can be caused by issues with love.  Love is a problem.  In her world, at the age of 18 you are surgically cured of being able to love.  Up to that point, boys and girls are strictly segregated.  Teens who fall in love can be taken in to surgery early, but there are issues that can arise if the surgery is performed before age 18, which is why society tries to keep people from "catching" it.

Lena's mother died because the cure didn't work on her.  This eventually led to her suicide and a huge stigma being placed on Lena.  Because of this, Lena is beyond thrilled that her time is coming to be cured.  She can hardly wait.  After this she'll get to go on to college and live the rest of her life free of the fear of love.

But she meets a boy.  And she knows she's really not supposed to spend time with boys, but he's older, in college already, and he has the telltale scar behind his ear that one gets during the surgery, so she's pretty sure she's safe.  But it turns out Alex isn't really cured, he's a part of the underground resistance, and he and Lena fall in love.  Now Lena has to decide: does she choose Alex and a life outside the safety of the city, in the Wilds, or does she choose to lose Alex and go through with the surgery, to live the life she had planned.

Things get complicated when she and Alex are caught in their secret meeting place and she's scheduled to get the surgery early.  She knows that that is not what she wants and fights her way out, only to be stopped at the fence surrounding the city.

This book was equal part ethics, love story, and adventure.  Hard to go wrong with that combination!

This book is a mind game.  Or, at least, it screwed with my head.

The basics of the story are this: one day, you wake up and you are in a metal box.  You have no clue what is going on.  You can remember your name.  You can remember things out in the world, but not the context for which they were used (for example, you know what a shower is but you can't ever remember taking one).  You can't remember much of anything else.

So the box starts to rise and you show up in basically a huge stone enclosed square.  And facing you is a group of about 60 boys.  Turns out you are in the center of a big maze.  At night, the walls move to close the square off from the maze because these creepy killer blobs, called reapers, come out.  They come complete with things like chainsaw arms, hooks and needles and no one who has ever faced one has come out unscathed.

One day, a girl shows up and everything starts to change.  She has a note on her that says, "I've triggered the end." and all of the sudden the stone doors aren't closing at night.  The reapers are coming in and dragging one boy at a time out.  They have to be proactive and GET OUT.  People have been running the mazes for years and never found the way out, but a huge clue reveals itself once they place a map of the maze routes, one on top of the next.

It is bizarre and it is fabulous.  This is probably the strongest first book in a trilogy that I've read, save The Hunger Games.

YA Angels, Demons, and Dead People

I think angels are really coming up and replacing vampires as the hot new thing with a paranormal twist.  It seems like we are buying a new angel book with every book order we place!

I must say, however, that the "dead girl" phenomena kind of disturbs me.  It seems so anti-girl power, to have all these dead girls floating around.  But I can see the appeal to teens, who may be curious about death and use that as a way to explore the concept.

I'd heard bad things about this book.  The main male character was a jerk and treated the female character badly.  The female character was weak.  The story was creepy.  I'd heard so many bad things, in fact, that I didn't order this book until a patron specifically requested it.  By then it was already a popular book and I relented (even though the reviews at Goodreads are TERRIBLE).

To me, this book is in a similar vein to Twilight; the female character isn't particularly strong and, yes, the male character is kind of a creepy jerk, but the tension between the two keeps your nose in the book long after you should be in bed.

Nora meets Patch when they are given new seating assignments in Biology class.  Patch unnerves Nora and she finds him cocky and kind of a jerk.  After the new seating assignment, he seems to pop up wherever she is and she starts getting worried.  Is he stalking her?  How does he know so much about her?  Nora eventually starts to feel as if she's being watched, especially in her home and believes Patch is responsible.  She starts to believe that he's trying to kill her.

She's not wrong.

It is hard to go into too much detail about this book without giving the whole story line away.  But I stand by my original statement: it is bad, but hard to put down.

Now this book, this book I really enjoyed.  I thought the concept was really unique: what if someone was practically dead but there was a teeny, tiny part of them still alive, and we could build them a new body and put that teeny, tiny part inside and make them new.

Jenna wakes up one day knowing she is Jenna and not much else.  She has few memories and the few she does have are a bit fuzzy.

Jenna lives in a world where there are lots of antibiotic resistant bacteria and a bad virus wiped out a good portion of the world's population about 25 years prior.  As a result, the government stepped in and created a point system; once you've used up your 100 points it doesn't matter how rich or smart or powerful you are, your medical treatment stops.  Every medical intervention has a point value, obviously the bigger the issue the bigger the point value.

Jenna's dad is a biotechnology genius and Jenna was in an accident that used up all her points. And yet, here she is, alive, with not so much as a scratch.

As Jenna learns more about her world, and re-learns things that were lost during her coma, she starts asking hard questions and pushing her parents to the brink.  They are stressed to the max and her grandmother, whom Jenna has very fond memories of, will hardly have anything to do with her.  Jenna feels like something is off, but she doesn't know exactly what until she accidentally cuts herself and, instead of bleeding, sees blue nanogel inside her body.

This book evokes about a million questions about ethics.  In fact, I'm considering using it for this summer's book club since the theme is "beneath the surface."  This book would fit in perfectly.

YA Vampires and Beyond

I will admit to being a total Twilight fangirl about 3 years ago.  I was totally uninterested initially, but read the book on a whim and was hooked.  Thus began my crazy trips to movie theatres and reading the books one after the other and over again.  So, needless to say, I enjoy a good paranormal book!  Although my love of Twilight  has since faded, I still enjoy picking up a good vampire or similar book on occasion.

I think these books appeal to teens for a variety of reasons.  I mean, who doesn't want to think about all the cool things you'd see if you could live forever?  Or think about how awesome it'd be to have a cool power?  Teens already have a sense of invincibility, so paranormal books in which many of the coolest characters are immortal can be a huge draw.

This was a vampire novel with a twist: vampirism is spread through intimate contact and, wait for it....cat breath by a parasite.  So unique!

Cal is a peep, he was given the parasite during a one night stand while he was drunk.  He is different, though, because he doesn't show symptoms.  There are several others like him, although he is not especially common, and the peeps who don't exhibit symptoms become peep hunters for the Night Watch.  They go out and hunt the peeps that are considered dangerous.  Cal is in the midst of hunting down all the girls that he gave the parasite before he was aware that he had it.  He's also hunting for the elusive Morgan, the girl who infected him, who has essentially disappeared.

Due to his inebriation, Cal can only remember bits and pieces of his night with Morgan.  Things begin coming back, slowly, and one night he ends up at her apartment building.  There he meets Lacy, who clues him in that the entire floor where she lives became vacant all at once and the rents are way below value.  As he explores more and more into this fact, he stumbles upon hordes of red eyed rats in the basement and, unexpectedly, finds Lacey has followed him down.  He likes Lacey and doesn't want anything bad to happen to her (the Night Watch tend to make people who know too much disappear), so she ends up staying at his apartment for several nights.

He eventually realizes that the peeps he's stumbling upon are showing more and more sanity, even in the depths of their psychosis.  In fact, the last batch almost hold a conversation AND they seem to serve a cat.  Something is obviously going on, but the Night Watch doesn't seem willing to fill him in.

Another unique thing about this book is that, between every chapter, there are some facts about different parasites and how they affect their environments.

This is a cool twist on the story of Little Red Riding Hood.  When the March sisters, Scarlett and Rosie, were young, a fenris (a twist on werewolves) comes to their home, transforms and kills their Oma March and leaving Scarlett terribly disfigured in the process.  The fenris seek out young girls to feast on and are particularly drawn to the color red.

Now on their own, with their mother having officially abandoned them once they were in their mid-teens, they are trying to eek out a survival while Scarlett hunts the fenris in their small Georgia town and is training Rosie to do the same.  Scarlett is a girl possessed; every waking minute is devoted to hunting or preparing to hunt.  Rosie realizes that she owes Scarlett her life and, as such, does as Scarlett wants.  If Scarlett wants to train Rosie and have Rosie dedicate her life to hunting, then that's what she's going to do.  Even if it isn't what she wants.

Few people know about the fenris but there is another family near the March sisters that does.  Silas is nearest to the age of the March sisters and has known both girls since childhood.  He's been gone for about a year, visiting family in California, but when he's home he hunts with Scarlett.

Every seven years, there are a group of potential fenris that come of age.  This just happens to be a part of that cycle, so the fenris are much more active.  The trio decide that they should probably head to Atlanta since the population is much more dense (which means more fenris and more chance to find the potential), so off they go.  And, indeed, the fenris population is essentially crawling around and through Atlanta.  There is no problem killing several wolves a day.  But they also need information, namely about who the potential is and how they know he's a potential.

There is build up and a big battle/finish with a twist.  I saw the twist coming, but I don't want to spoil it!  This book was easy to lose yourself in but still had a lot of good plot points and action that barely ever stopped.

YA Books in Verse

This seems to be a really "hot" thing to do right now, to write novels in verse.  I think Ellen Hopkins is considered by many to kind of be the "mother" of this trend, but I have trouble with her content so I have avoided her books this week.

I think this is a great way to expose teens to poetry in a non-scary way.  Many teens think of poetry as difficult to read and even more difficult to understand, but novels in verse are a very far cry from old school traditional poetry.  Most novels in verse are written in free form poetry and are super easy to follow and understand.

I ordered this book a while back and it has only circulated a few times, so I thought this would be a good option for me to read so that I could use it for readers' advisories.

This is a book told from multiple perspectives during the era of the Vietnam War (and just before it).  You essentially have two couples, although one is just a loose couple and the girl in that pair is considered kind of slutty.  These teens basically just talk about things that teens in the 60s might talk about: drugs, abortion, sex, and, eventually, the Vietnam War.

The story line is kind of vague and undefined until the boys are sent to basic training, then most of the correspondence revolves around things happening at home or things happening in the Marines/Army or in Vietnam.

This book would be great for teens who enjoy historical fiction and I've been sure that it is included on our library's historical fiction list that the teens look at periodically.

This was one of my favorite books I've read during this class, as evidenced that I've used it for several assignments!  And it was one that I was simply CERTAIN I wouldn't like.

Told in multiple perspectives, we mainly follow Maura, a young wife and mother, Peter, "the help" at a local club for the wealthy, Celestia, the daughter of a wealthy man and who is staying at the club for the summer, and Kate, a nurse who is seemingly unconnected to the others in the beginning.  All of these people are forced to survive and rebuild after a dam breaks and millions of tons of water crash down from a mountain in  New England.

Each character really endeared themselves to me.  I loved Celestia for her total dismissal of "society", for daring to love someone beneath her social status, and for the the way she loved her family.  I loved Peter for his willingness to take a chance on Celestia and for knowing the reality was that they could probably never be together.  I loved Maura and her fierce love of her husband and willingness to protect her children so faithfully.  And I loved Kate for her realism and bluntness.

I had never heard of the Johnstown Flood and this book made me want to learn more about it.  The author includes a phenomenal list of resources in the back, perhaps knowing that the stories of survival would make people want to learn about it.

YA GLBT Books

When I began working at my library two years ago, this was an area that was seriously lacking in the YA department (in both fiction and non-fiction).  I can understand why: we're in a rural library and it might be easier to simply not have those book vs. facing a challenge.  I don't like it, but I do understand it.

So when I started doing the YA ordering, I got online and ordered what were generally considered to be some of the best of the best in YA GLBTQ books.  I tend to think that, being a more rural library, these books are even MORE important to have.  While a teen in a big city might have a support group to turn to or be "out" so that s/he can be friends with others who are also "out", that simply isn't an option here.  The "good 'ol boys" network in my town is strong and bullying for being different is a part of that.

In my library, the person who was working as the Teen Librarian at the time this book was popular felt it was "too mature" for the teen area.  Considering the book was falling apart when I went after it, I'd say the teens were seeking it out anyway.  And then I got irritated (I mean, it is published in partnership with MTV books, for goodness sake!), so I ordered another copy for the teen area this year.  I knew this book would come back around in popularity, especially because the movie was coming out soon.

This book follows Charlie through a series of letters to a friend, who is never identified.  Charlie is a freshman and having some trouble making friends and fitting in in high school.  Charlie is a wallflower, someone who is there but not noticed.  Until, one day at a football game, two seniors, Sam and Patrick, who are step-siblings.  They are beautiful and worldly, both things Charlie is not, but they befriend him and it means the world to Charlie.

They help Charlie cope after the death of an aunt he loved dearly (and around whom there is a significant twist at the end of the book) and help him with his depression and anxiety.  There are tough issues in this book and they are dealt with in a way that seems to ring true.

It'll sound hokey, but I think all of us have a bit of Charlie in us.  Even the most popular person in the room has probably, at one time, felt like a wallflower.  I think this is one of the reasons this book is still popular (and remains very challenged); everyone can relate, even if only a bit.

Ava is from a super liberal family; she calls her parents by their first names and when she declared herself a lesbian, her parents literally broke out the champagne.  Ava has a girlfriend, dyes her hair a deep black, and wears very little color.

But Ava has a secret: she longs to be a girl who wears pink.  She loves the color.  She also loves skirts and dresses and kitten heels, she just doesn't feel that she can get away with wearing those things.  In order to get a fresh start, she transfers to a private school and, on the first day, wears a pair of fitted jeans and a new pink, cashmere, argyle sweater that she just adores.  

Even though she's struggling a bit with the new, heavy course load, she feels that she's off to a great start.  She's fallen in with a good crowd who conspire to hook her up with a boy named Ethan (Ava thinks she might like boys as well, so she's totally ok with this).

Things start to get dicey, though, when she auditions for (and completely makes a fool of herself while doing it) the school musical.  She ends up signing up to work with the stage crew, or Screw, as they call themselves, which Ava's new cool friends think is just awful.  At this point, you get to see how very confused Ava is about a lot of things in her life.  She is confused about what she wants and who she wants to be.  She wants to be "normal" more than she is normal and has a hard time accepting that.