February 28, 2005

Everywhere We Go... People Wanna Know...

Yeah, I guess no one who's read the latest offering from Julie Anne Peters, or David Levithan doesn't get the point that YA lit isn't what it used to be. We were stuck, for a long while, with Nancy Drew's perfectly polished world -- blonde hair, good grades, her own car -- then the 80's had us stuck in re-runs of divorce stories and high school pregnancy tales, as the media endlessly reviled poor Judy Blume for trying to portray a world in which nothing so catastrophic happened on an hourly basis. Young adult literature has evolved past these little growing pains, and now there's pretty much nothing that isn't a topic for a book. It must be really different to come of age in a world where there's a book like Julie Anne Peters' Luna, which is about a transgender teen in transformation. And The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon - a book that was really strange, and really intense, and touched on a topic to which 'normal' teens aren't expected to relate, which is people who aren't mainstream.

Did YOU like either of those books? Have you read them? What have you been reading lately? Wanna talk about it? That's the point of this site, that's who we are, and this is what we do.

Welcome, everybody. Happy Reading.

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