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So You Want to Read YA?: Guest Post from Swati Avasthi

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This week’s “So You Want to Read YA?” guest post comes from Cybils-award winning author Swati Avasthi.

Swati Avasthi is the author of SPLIT (Knopf, 2010) which received the Cybils Award, the International Reading Association Award, a silver Parents’ Choice Award and has been nominated for 13 state awards.  Her second novel, CHASING SHADOWS (Knopf, Fall 2013), is a part graphic novel/part prose hybrid—her attempt to use an innovative form. Visit her at www.swatiavasthi.com.

 

No Bow Required
About 10 years ago. I was browsing in a Children’s bookstore with my three-year-old son who adored books, who sat and “read” them for long spans, turning the pages, talking to them, “reading”/saying all the memorized words. And, after two hours of him reading and browsing, I was bored. (I know, I know, a shorter attention span than a three year old, yep.)
I wandered over to the YA shelves and a cover caught my eye.
But I hesitated.
Like many YA writers, I grew up when YA wasn’t a category or a section in the bookstore. I thought of “teen lit” as Sweet Valley High romances and shunned attempts to home in on the teen experience in Saturday Afternoon Specials with their sloppily-tied bows on the end. The weren’t honest; they were just … lessons, thinly disguised.
But then again, there was that cover! (Yes, in truth, I started reading YA and then writing YA based on a cover. Thank you marketers; apparently, your awe-some powers can be used for good).
I gobbled it at home, making my poor son impatient.
I didn’t know books for teens could talk to them honestly. Jane Resh Thomas says, “I think it is a sin to tell lies to children about the world as a place of sweetness and light or about the world as a place of misery and agony.” I didn’t know contemporary realism could tell kids the truth: life is ambiguous and no emotions are simple. Stick a bow on that.
Until recently, I hadn’t reread Speak, afraid that the book that drew me to the genre would pale on rereading, that after teaching writing and learning to look for cracks in the techniques, it might not withstand my scrutiny.
But I re-read it anyway. And now … I love it more now because I see how hard it was to do.
Contemporary realism knocks me out when the form—the structure, the time management, the evolution of the character—mimics the emotional journey of the protagonist. That way the reader’s experience is linked to the journey and the honesty in the piece resonates. I love novels that take big risks and find a new way to tell a story, novels that innovate making novels well…novel.
Check out how John Green uses time in Looking for Alaska; how Pete Hautman varies point of view in Blank Confessions; how A.S. King alternates time periods in Please Ignore Vera Dietz; how memory can be captured in a painting in Brian Farrey’s With or Without You; how Gene Huang incorporates myth and story and identity in American Born Chinese. Or what Larbarstier does to the unreliable narrator in Liar. Or how Julie Schumacher’s Blackbox creates punch-to-the-gut chapters that are a single sentence long.
Laurie Halse Anderson (author of Speak) said once, “One of the things I most love about writing for teens is that they are open-minded and embrace new narrative techniques. I love playing around with new stuff.” I love books that love that play, that innovation.
YA is a form filled with innovation, and why not? It’s a form that is written for teens (like my still-avidly-reading son), who are the definition of innovation, who are in the process of self-evolutions, who are seeking honesty as they try to make themselves new—no bow required.

So You Want to Read YA?: Guest Post by Kate Hart

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This week’s “So You Want to Read YA?” post comes from the crazy talented queen of infographics, Kate Hart. 

Kate Hart is a YA author and blogger extraordinary, represented by Michelle Andelman of Regal Literary. She blogs at katehart.net and she’s a regular contributor to YA Highway.  You can find Kate all over the internet (you may recall her infographics about YA book covers, among other things), and she tweets @kate_hart.

My presents are never much of a surprise. Holidays, birthdays, baby showers, or any other gift-giving occasion, I’m like Oprah: “YOU get a book! And YOU get a book! YOU ALL GET BOOKS!”

Which is why I relish opportunities to foist YA on unsuspecting adults, whose minds are consistently blown by the fact that “young adult” doesn’t mean “dumbed down” or “written in teen slang” or “vampires 101.” At least I get to surprise them a little. But for the sneak attack to work, I have to consider the recipients’ particular interests. Here are a few category suggestions to help you plan your own YA ambush.

For the Wanderlust-er

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins: Paris.

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly: Paris with history nerd bonus.

Wanderlove by Kirsten Hubbard: Beautifully-written and illustrated backpacker romance that traverses Central America.

Red Glass by Laura Resau: Love and family on both sides of the Mexico border.

Going Bovine by Libba Bray: Road trip with a garden gnome. (I mean really, what more do you need.)

Tearjerkers

If I Stay by Gayle Forman: Two tissue minimum.

Before I Die by Jenny Downham: Get the whole box.

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green: Might as well break out a bedsheet.

For People Who Think YA Can’t Be “Real” Literature

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater: It takes a lot to make me like a book about flesh-eating horses, but Stiefvater somehow did it.

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff: It takes a lot to make me root for a cousin couple, but Rosoff somehow did it.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson: Unflinching look at anorexia that manages to neither glamorize nor trigger.

The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson: Found poetry plus a little heartbreak.

Lips Touch Three Times by Laini Taylor: Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a critical darling, but this short story collection is the one that almost killed me with writer jealousy.

For the Dirty South

Hourglass by Myra McEntire: This time travel romance has just the right touch of contemporary southern city life.

Knights of the Hill Country by Tim Tharpe: Heavy on the east Oklahoma dialect, but the on-field football scenes are exciting even for non-sports fans.

Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement: A fun combination of north Texas, lost mines, and campy witchcraft.

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley: Having characters named for Arkansas towns was distracting to me, but Whaley shows a great balance of the good and bad of a small I-40 town.

For Badasses (or Badass Wannabes)


Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi: Working in southern Louisiana heat is tough enough, but Nailer has a whole cutthroat post-apocalyptic world to deal with on top of it.

Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers: Mean girls on steroids. (The story, I mean. Not the girls.)

Ashfall by Mike Mullin: Darla is a badass where Alex is not, which is always helpful when you’re trying to survive deadly volcano fallout.

Divergent by Veronica Roth: Tris chooses to be a badass when she doesn’t have to, which gives this dystopia an interesting twist.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie: You think you have it hard? Try Junior’s rez life on for size.

Will Grayson Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan: Two words: Tiny. Cooper.

So You Want to Read YA?: Guest Post from Andrew Karre

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This week’s guest post for our “So You Want to Read YA?” series comes from Andrew Karre.

Andrew Karre is the editorial director of Carolrhoda Books, Carolrhoda Lab, and Darby Creek, imprints of the Lerner Publishing Group. He’s had the pleasure of editing a diverse cast of YA creators over the last seven years, including Maggie Stiefvater, A.S. King,  and Blythe Woolston among many others. He bears the scars of his teenage years as best he can in St. Paul, MN.
Let me help you.
Young adult books are about adolescence, not for adolescents. If you bear the scars of your teenage years, then YA is for  you. (And if you don’t bear the scars of your teenage years, you did something wrong—or you didn’t do enough wrong).
There. Now that there’s no shame or bullshit about what’s “appropriate” for anyone to read or whether adults should read YA, we can move on to aesthetic bliss, the end goal of all fiction. Here are three vehicles for said blissdom:

“What’s it going to be then, eh?”

This is the first line of Anthony Burgess’s masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange, a great novel almost always overshadowed by a great movie (one of those rare instances of the two works occupying the same level of achievement). I would argue that, if Salinger’s Holden Caufield is the father of all YA protagonists, then Burgess’s Alex is their wicked unacknowledged uncle. “What’s it going to be” is, not coincidentally, also the main question of adolescence. It’s a question one asks when one has leisure, education, and the expectation of some rapidly approaching but ultimately unknowable future. Clockwork also captures the pure linguistic inventiveness that is native to teenage experience. You need only read the first page to get  a sense of Burgess’s powers in this regard.

“Why don’t you want to go to college?”
She was the third person who had asked me that question is as many days, and I felt I was getting worse instead of better at answering it. My grandmother waited patiently for my answer. She pretended there were crumbs on the table that needed brushing off.
After a moment I said, “It’s hard for me to explain why I don’t want to go. All I can say is there’s nothing that appeals to me. I don’t want to be in that kind of social environment, I’ve been around people my own age all my life and I don’t really like them or seem to have much in common with them, and I feel that anything I want to know I can learn from reading books—basically that’s what you do in college anyway—and I feel I can do that on my own and not waste all that money on something I don’t need or want. I think I could do other things with the money that we would be better for me than college.”
“Such as?” my grandmother asked.
(See what I mean about the central question of adolescence?)

Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You does many things brilliantly, but perhaps what it does best is capture the absolute loneliness of adolescence, which is, paradoxically, one of the most universal and collective experiences of modern life. If you don’t want to throttle and hug James Sveck at nearly every turn, you, gentle reader, have no heart.

“It’s the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.”
Lest you come to believe that I think YA encompasses only boys narrating either gruesome, unpleasant futures or angsty, future-fearing presents, I implore you to take up the utterly timeless The Scorpio Races. There’s no great need to read this as about adolescence. You can simply give yourself over to Maggie’s powers as a storyteller, which reach an impressive zenith in this novel. But if you remember for a moment that Puck is a teenager and so is her older brother and that the future that awaits them is equal parts thrilling and terrifying, then I think you’ll find yet another impressive facet on this gem of a novel.

There. I humbly submit this as a delightfully circuitous path to adolescent aesthetic bliss. 

So You Want to Read YA?: Guest Post from Courtney Summers (+ Giveaway)

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This week’s guest post for our “So You Want to Read YA?” series comes from Courtney Summers. In addition to sharing her picks, Courtney has generously offered up a giveaway of a paperback copy of Nova Ren Suma’s IMAGINARY GIRLS for one reader (details at the end).

Courtney Summers lives and writes in Canada.  She is the author of CRACKED UP TO BE, SOME GIRLS ARE, FALL FOR ANYTHING and THIS IS NOT A TEST.  Visit her at http://courtneysummers.ca and follow her on twitter: http://twitter.com/courtney_s

One of the questions I get asked most as a YA author is, “Why do you write YA?”  I don’t mind it at all because it’s a chance for me to reflect on how great the work and the community is.  As a writer, I enjoy exploring brutal coming-of-age elements and I like the sense of immediacy and intimacy that those stories often demand of me.  But most of all, I write YA because that’s what I LOVE to read.  It’s undeniable that this is a really great time for young adult fiction.  Watching the YA section at my local bookstore expand over the last four years alone has been a great source of joy for me.  Knowing that the books on those shelves hold some of the most brilliant, important and innovative stories out there right now has been an even greater one.  I’m thrilled Stacked has given me the opportunity to share a (very small!) sampling of some of my faves with you, alphabetically by author.  If you, as a reader, are ready to plunge into the YA pool (clever reader), here are seven titles that will make you glad you did:

THE CHOCOLATE WAR by Robert Cormier
This book is a YA classic and it’s a classic for a reason.  It’s a relentlessly sharp examination of how easy it is to be a terrible human being.  Robert Cormier is never afraid to confront a reader with an unlikeable main character, and the way he does it is genius:  more often than not, he makes them just like you and me.  It doesn’t always make for a pleasant reading experience, but it’s a brave and compelling creative choice.

MY BEATING TEENAGE HEART by C.K. Kelly Martin
Martin is one of my favourite YA authors.  Readers who want to be right inside the heads of some of the most painfully realistic protagonists you’ve ever met need search no further than her body of work.  My Beating Teenage Heart is a masterpiece.  A raw and gorgeous look at death through the eyes of two unforgettable narrators.  It forces you to think about the time you have, the life you make for yourself, and what you’ll leave behind when you go.

IMAGINARY GIRLS by Nova Ren Suma
When Suma’s YA debut exploded onto the scene, I don’t think readers knew what they were in for.  The beautiful cover suggested something special to be sure, but you don’t realize how special until you are fully immersed in Ruby and Chloe’s secret and unsettling world.  A sophisticated and literary mind-bender that will chill you to the bone, Imaginary Girls is for the reader who isn’t afraid to be challenged by a story, a reader who wants to marvel at the possibilities of words.  Novels like this don’t come along every day, so be sure to pick it up.

RATS SAW GOD by Rob Thomas
Before he created the (awesome) Veronica Mars, Rob Thomas wrote a YA novel!  No matter how seasoned a YA reader you are or aren’t, this is a book you’ll want to check out.  The pop-culture references may be pretty dated–it’s set in the 90’s; you’ll be right with the characters when they hear about Kurt Cobain’s suicide–but it features a male protagonist with a voice that remains fresh.  It’s a funny, slice-of-life ode to outsiders that won’t bum you out.

THE MOCKINGBIRDS by Daisy Whitney
Whitney’s debut is a hard to put down, hard to forget story about a girl who turns to an underground, student-run justice society after she’s date raped.  The Mockingbirds is a book loaded with things to talk about–the emotional repercussions of rape, the definition of consent and when or if vigilante justice is appropriate–and Whitney explores each of them with care.  Her portrayal of a girl trying to understand what has happened to her, why it’s not her fault and what to do about it is sensitively handled.  This book is a great example of how YA doesn’t shy away from tough questions and forces to think about your own answers to them.  Be sure to check out the sequel, The Rivals, too, which is a thought-provoking and powerful follow-up.

THE SPACE BETWEEN TREES by Katie Williams
A wonderful and undersung debut, in my (humble!) opinion.  The Space Between Trees follows a very memorable unreliable narrator.  It’s easy to keep up with the lies Evie tells but it’s hard to watch her tell them.  This is a wrenching coming-of-age tale that captures the big and small heartaches of growing up during a dangerous and mysterious time.  You want atmosphere?  It’s right here.

ONCE WAS LOST by Sara Zarr
I love all of Sara Zarr’s books, but Once Was Lost is my favourite.  There’s so much to admire in this profound exploration of a crisis of faith.  To me, Once Was Lost (and really, all of Zarr’s books) is a great example of how YA novels can make us feel less alone.  Zarr has a knack for dealing the kind of emotional truths you might be too afraid to say out loud–but what a powerful thing to see them expressed on a page.

**
Courtney’s offering up a paperback copy of Nova Ren Suma’s IMAGINARY GIRLS for one reader who lives in either the US or Canada. We’ll pick a winner June 30.

So You Want to Read YA?: Guest Post from Catie, Flannery, and Tatiana of The Readventurer

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This week’s guest post for our “So You Want to Read YA?” series comes from the ladies at The Readventurer. This is one of my favorite book blogs, and these three sharp readers cover everything from YA to adult, films and audiobooks, and more. Welcome Catie, Flannery, and Tatiana and the most impressive flow chart I have seen in a long, long time.

Tatiana is an unapologetic Goodreads addict and a lover of yoga, British TV, and books of many genres. You can find Tatiana at The Readventurer, Goodreads or on Twitter. 
Catie is a voracious reader and science nerd living in Northern Virginia. When she’s not reading, she’s training up the next generation of reading addicts, geeking out about random things with her equally nerdy husband, and taking ridiculously long walks. She can be found at The Readventurer, Goodreads, and Twitter.
Flannery only started reading YA in college (unless you found her and her friends’ obsession with Judy Blume’s Just As Long As We’re Together in high school!) but that genre takes up a lot of her reading schedule these days. When she’s not reading, you’ll find her doing her part to keep King County Library System the highest circulating system in the country, doing outdoorsy things, or watching sci-fi television and movie marathons. You can find her at The Readventurer, Goodreads, and she runs the main Twitter account for the blog @TheReadventurer.

The three of us have only been blogging together for a short time and we’ve never actually met in real life, but all of us are around the same age (in the adult years…other than that we’re not commenting) and we all love to read young adult literature.  In fact, that’s pretty much what brought us together – that and an obsessive love of Goodreads.

While brainstorming ideas for this post, we realized that almost all of the young adult reading adults that we know (including ourselves) were initially hooked by one of three books:

a)      Harry Potter
b)     Twilight
c)     The Hunger Games

More than one of us came into YA this way and we’ve each had experience (lots of it) recommending books based on these three entry points. So we wanted to explore the avenues that we all traveled from there. Flannery brought her evil genius flow-charting skills, Catie drew a few pictures, and Tatiana made sure we had all the best books.  

Are you brand new to YA?  Have you tried one or two books?  Or is it all just old hat to you now? No matter where you’re starting out, use this handy flowchart to navigate the world of YA.  All of the recommendations are outlined in blue.  Obviously this is not an exhaustive chart (although it’s pretty darn elaborate, if we do say so ourselves) but we recommend every book on this list.  

Follow the steps to your next young adult read…and have fun!
The New to YA chart that will blow your mind. Click here for a bigger image.
 
If you’d like to download the full chart in all its glory, you can do so here.