At the beginning of the month, I made a note to gather the last of Susin Nielsen's books. Because I absolutely loved Word Nerd (2008) and The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen (2012). Tundra Books, 2008 Not realizing that the characters overlap, I started with the most recent
When I was in high school, I read Fran Arrick's Steffie Can't Come Out to Play (1978) more than once. I even wrote a book report on it in the ninth grade, when the assigned reading included J. Meade Falkner's Moonfleet and Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners. (Wanted: female characters.)
How fully can an author inhabit an addict's world and still spin a story coherent enough to engage the teen reader? Margaret K. McElderry Books(Simon & Schuster Books), 2004 In the 1970's, kids might have turned to the anonymously penned Go Ask Alice (1971), which was billed as
At the beginning of the novel, where an epigraph might appear, is a note from the author, explaining that Uglies was shaped by a series of email exchanges between Scott Westerfeld and author Ted Chiang about his story “Liking What You See: A Documentary”. At the end of Ted Chiang's
Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, Claudette Colvin, fifteen years old, stayed in her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. It was March 2, 1955, but in the intervening years, this story has been all-but-forgotten. Phillip Hoose's work is essential reading.
