Books for Teenagers and Young Adults: Featured Novel

Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola first collaborated several years ago on Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire (Spectra, 2007). Now they are back with a second novel collaboration, one that looks likely to become a series. There is a terrific interview between Joe Hill (Heart-Shaped Box, Horns) and the two authors on Tor.com. It is especially interesting on the subject of illustrated novels. Can they do things that pure prose cannot?  What should (and shouldn’t) the illustrations try to accomplish? In the same piece, Golden names the novel’s (many) influences as “Sherlock Holmes and Houdini and H. P. Lovecraft and Dickens — to the less immediately obvious, which would be H. G. Wells and The Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger Francisca Goldsmith (with our second starred review of the week!): Russ Kick is not your typical comics geek, college prof, or earnest publisher who wants to show the uninitiated that sequential art is “real reading.” Instead, he does have some tendencies toward all three character types, but is an iconoclast out to put forward a project that is something close to the polar opposite of iconoclastic values: a pertinent, engrossing, and wholly genuine version of the literary canon on which we humans depend for a reality check with collective memory. Planned to be complete in three volumes, The Graphic Canon is startlingly brilliant: the limits of titles collected are not Western; the art styles collected Read more…

Kris D’Agonstino’s debut is an example of that rare animal, the funny, smart, well-written novel about family that will even appeal to boys. There is a short piece on the ReadingGroupGuides website in which the author discusses how much of his book is autobiographical. Here is a relevant excerpt, “The wackiest and thereby most vexing period of my life (so far) was my mid twenties. I found that handful of years, roughly from 23 to 26, and the extended period of post-college floundering around that went with them, to be stranger and far more coming-of-age than my teenage years. Much more so than high school (encapsulated for me by a white suburban upper-middle class bubble) ever was. I knew I wanted to try and Read more…

Ron Rash’s new novel is a mysterious story of forbidden love in which much of the story is told from a teen girl’s point of view. Rash once again showcases his beautiful writing and a North Carolinian, Appalachian mountain setting, earning an AB4T starred review. Rash is best known for Serena (Ecco, 2008), which was a PEN/Faulkner finalist. But a couple years before Serena came The World Made Straight (Henry Holt), a 2007 Alex Award winner. The YALSA annotation reads, “When 17-year-old Travis Shelton discovers a marijuana farm in the Appalachian woods, he begins a confrontation with the subtle evils within his rural world.” The World Made Straight is a really interesting combination of coming-of-age, crime Read more…

This poetry collection has been a labor of love for its editor, Jeffrey Coleman. In an interview on the Tavis Smiley show in April, Coleman talked about searching for poems related to the Civil Rights movement for a paper he was assigned in graduate school. The project continued from there. The full contents are available on the Duke University Press webpage. This is a perfect title to highlight during Black History Month or Poetry Month, and a terrific addition to school library collections all year round. COLEMAN, Jeffrey Lamar, ed. Words of Protest, Words of Freedom: Poetry of the American Civil Rights. 358p. Duke Univ. 2012. Tr $89.95. ISBN 978-0-8223-5092-7; pap. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8223-5103-0. LC number unavailable.   Adult/High Read more…

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith: Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem won the Best Comic Book Award this year at Angoulème, the premier international comics festival.  A Quebecois who now has his home in France but keeps on the move to such rarely touristed places as North Korea, Delisle is the perfect investigator into life on the ground in East Jerusalem.  As a foreigner (and nominal if unbelieving Christian) he had relatively free access to neighborhoods and historic sites ranging as widely as the Dome of the Rock to a bend in the wall that divides the city and bounds one man’s back yard (formerly a small farm), from a classroom at Al-Quds University to an Orthodox Jewish Purim celebration and an unexpected opportunity Read more…

  Iris Dupont’s life goal is to win the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism. Reeling from the death of her best and only friend, Dalia, she begins to converse regularly with her hero, Edward R. Murrow. Iris’s story begins in August 2012 when, on the advice of her therapist, her parents move the family from Boston to Nye, MA, where they enroll Iris in the town’s prestigious day school, Mariana Academy. Poorly equipped to make new friends, she gravitates to her biology teacher, Mr. Kaplan, whose narration alternates with hers. Jonah Kaplan grew up in Nye and attended Mariana with his twin brother, Justin. Jonah is more reliable than Iris, but he is hiding from the truth of the events surrounding his brother’s tragic death. He blames Read more…