This weekend I've been reading three books from Unshelved's Bookclub. An Abundance of Katherines, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, and Kiki Strike in the Shaddow City. All three have been a lot of fun, but if I had to choose my favorite it has to be Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. It makes me feel both old and young at the same time. I was half way through the book when I looked back at the title and saw that it was written by two different authors (one is Norah's voice, one is Nick's). Each have a distinctive voice, but their writing works really well together; it could have been really distracting in less able hands. With both the Katherines and Nick and Nora, it was interesting to see a male writer offer the male view of relationships, something I don't remember being a part of adolescent fiction when I was reading it. I recommend Kiki Strike to any of you disgruntled Girl Scouts out there and look forward to introducing it to Nora when she hits those tween years.
The other two are more appropriate for folks a little bit older, which got Jason and I to talking about books we read in high school. I don't know that there really was "young adult fiction" or at least not "young adult fiction" like this. I read stuff targeted at young adults when I was in late primary/ jr. high (Judy Blume, Madeline L'Engle and a ton of other stuff), but by high school I think I was moving on to adult books because the young adult stuff really wasn't that realistic to high schoolers. Or maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places. Or maybe I thought I was too grown up for "young adult fiction" and what I find appealing now, wouldn't have been so appealing then, at least not if it was marketed as being for "young adults" But, part of me says that young adult fiction has grown up. I'm sure there's a lot of really unappealing stuff as well, but the above titles really held my interest. Check 'em out.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Booktalk
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2 comments:
I don't know these books, but I generally like the Unshelved recommendations that I have read. As to Young Adult lit, it has developed as a category. There was a time when one jumped for kids to YA (which was almost exclusively Judy Blume, Jack London, and dumbed down versions of classics) to adult. In the late 80s and early 90s RL Stine and a few others pushed what was generally considered grown up topics into YA books and sort of gave birth the Teen lit. That sold so well in part because the growing YA area was developing readers with nothing to read. Once Teen was established (and bear in mind that the categories are always wrong YA is really elementary school, Teen is really pre-teen) the pubs began to realize that there was an untapped market here. They began to buy more books that used to be unsellable as neither fish nor fowl. Then... Harry came. And all hell broke loose. Now Teen/YA books are generally speaking quality books written by real authors and sell better than most front list grownup novels. The key is of course bringing in younger readers early and keeping older readers longer. I'm sure this final Potter book will be read by more 20 and 30 somethings than teens by a factor of 10. Anyway, the reason we only remember Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the like is mostly because that was just about it on the market. Things have changed a lot in the last couple of decades.
I'm sure this is far more than you were interested in... I ramble a bit.
John Green's --Abundance of Katherines-- is very sophisticated and has impressed me greatly halfway through. His bluntness at points (even footnotes) disguises the way he lets things happen (changes in feeling).
Encyclopedia Brown was embarrassingly lame. Often we weren't given the detail he cites in the final section. Also, perpetrators respect his sleuthing so much that they turn themselves in!
And I turned to EB to find genius!
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