ALA June 2023

It seems all so long ago! When I was excitedly planning my summer travels I thought - "I shall religiously keep a photo-journal the whole road trip so I don't forget a thing!" Well, that did not happen. But I will endeavor to put up some of the highlights before it is all just a blur in the partially cooked spaghetti squash that is my brain.  SO this is the part about the American Library Association Conference. My first!

 This is the first day in Chicago when Laura and I met up with my friend Julia (not pictured) who was a member of the esteemed Caldecott committee this year! We did, in fact, horn in on their fancy tea at the Russian Tea room. We talked of the awards process and libraries in general and it was a great start for our experience. 

This is the view from my seat on the floor during the opening event. Don't ask how long it took for me to stand back up again. When Judy Blume is speaking and the only seats are on the floor, you sit on the floor! She was fascinating and delightful and you can read all about it here - https://www.slj.com/story/Judy-Blume-Kicks-Off-ALA-Annual-Talking-Censorship-and-Thanking-Librarians

The vendor floor was massive and at the beginning was not the terrifying (yet invigorating) press of humanity it later became. 

For example, this was the line for Jason Reynolds' book signing. Well, and Jason Griffin, too. But I think we all know for whom the line winds! 

By the end of the conference it was just thousands of librarians carrying hundreds of pounds of free books, begging publishers for just one more tote bag!

One of the best parts of ALA is getting to talk to writers and I stood in line and got books signed and fan-girled with the best of them. These are three of the writers I got to meet and actually remembered to take pictures of them. 

Wendy Loggia and I chatted about the crazy number of interviews she had with Taylor Swift to write her Little Golden Book biography. (The crazy number was 0, but Wendy regrets nothing and stands by her research!) 

I told Jen Ferguson how I had to be hounded into reading her amazing SUMMER OF BITTER AND SWEET by my bossy friend Shilpa, and how we both became obsessed with her book and all the ice cream she mentioned and how we demanded its inclusion on the Mass. Teen Choice Book Award list. I mean, no one argued with us, but we were strident! 

I also got to meet the charming Ryan La Sala and tell him how much THE HONEYS freaked me out and he assured me that his forthcoming book THE BEHOLDER would put me in a coma.

AASL has its annual national meeting at ALA which Laura and I attended on behalf of MSLA. It was the whole reason we were there. And did I take any pictures? Well, yes! I was seated next to the head of libraries for the Lincoln Nebraska Public Schools and she was telling me about their amazing elementary school curriculum, so I took a picture of that. 

What can I say? I am a giant nerd.

There was some excellent professional development offered, including this one where we learned about pairing primary sources with graphic novels into the perfect slurry of research, history and student engagement. 

                                                                                                                                    Not to brag, but I tied for second place in Library of Congress trivia and won a very cool, and pretty, Library of Congress tee shirt (not pictured) that I have nearly worn to shreds already. 

And of course Laura and I represented MSLA with perfect decorum on all occasions. This include one of my lifetime dreams - to attend an after-hours party at an art museum. We attended the Rainbow Roundtable 50th Anniversary Gala at the Museum of Contemporary Art AT NIGHT!! (This is from a person who is rarely awake after 8:30 pm.) It was a wonderful event that celebrated this section of ALA that is the oldest professional association for LGBTQIA+ people in the United States. It figures that librarians came up with this first. We're just wonderful!

I will take this opportunity to tell you that, if attending a convention where everyone is as passionate as you are about all the amazing things about our job looks fun to you, you might just want to try to attend the AASL National Conference in Tampa this fall. 

It is the only national conference focused solely on school librarians’ unique and critical role in Prek-12 education, according to their website, and I believe it! Also, the Florida school librarians told us that having a huge group of school librarians descend on the city would be an eye opening experience for those in Florida who are indifferent at best and antagonistic at worst to what we do. 

Consider joining us!

Graphic Novels

Class Act, Heart Stopper Dragon Hoops, just like I asked for!

Craft, J. Class Act, (2020) New York, NY: Quill Tree Books, HarperCollins Publishers. 

Oseman, A. Heart Stopper, (2020), New York, NY: Graphics, Scholastic. 

Yang, G. Dragon Hoops, (2020), New York, NY: First Second, Roaring Brook Press. 

These are all very school-centric graphic novels and as a 18 year public school educator I can say with full confidence that they all get it 100% right. 

I have not read New Kid, Jerry Craft’s precursor to Class Act and I figured that if I was confused I would go back and read it, but Class Act pulled me in right away and kept me engaged enough to read it in one sitting. Craft deftly touches on different perceptions of race and class, the damage caused by microaggressions and the impact of socioeconomic difference among friends while keeping his characters adorably realistic and his story tremendously entertaining!

It is actually a law that every review of the book Heart Stopper has to use the phrase swoon-worthy, and with good reason. This first love story is just that. The feeling of uncertainty, excitement and longing is perfectly rendered. The fact that it is two boys in an English public school, one of whom is very straight-seeming, just turns the simmer up a notch. This book won the Mass. Teen Choice Book Award last year in a landslide. 75% of the students in my school who took part voted for it, and that was before the Netflix series was released, which has only broadened its popularity. If you don’t go directly from book one all the way through the available titles (and then go onto the webcomic for yet to be published panels) you are clearly dead inside. 

Dragon Hoops is a gift from Gene Luen Yang to librarians everywhere. The combination of high school basketball, real life teen issues and the graphic novel format makes this a sure sell. It is thick, which can put off reluctant readers, but as soon as they see the panels, they are sold. This is Yang’s story of making the leap from high school teacher to full time graphic novel writer combined with the 2014-15 championship season of the Dragons - the basketball team at the school where he teaches. You wouldn’t think those two themes would mesh, but they really do. It is a great look at the background of the team (including a shocking look into allegations against one of the coaches that is handled perfectly) illustrated by a man who is trying to decide the future trajectory of his life.

All three of these are great for hooking readers and enlarging their world views.

Illustrated Books for Young Adults

Starry.ai is not killing it here...

Myers, W. and Grifalconi, A. Patrol, (2009), New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. 

Preston, C. The War Bride’s Scrapbook, (2017) New York, NY: Ecco, HarperCollins Publishers.

Reynolds, J. and Griffin, J.  Ain't Burned All the Bright, (2022), New York, NY:Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

These were an interesting collection to read together. 

Patrol is a straight-up picture book by the great Walter Dean Myers that is based on his time in Vietnam. He also touched on his experience in his work Fallen Angels, which, likely due to its verisimilitude, is on ALA’s frequently challenged book list. 

The text reads like a sad, sad poem and even though it isn’t text heavy, it conveys a great deal. The collages by Ann Grifalconi are powerful and emotionally evocative. At first, I thought it would be easy for this work to be mistaken for a children’s picture book, but on the second page, the reference to how the enemy “knows I am here to kill him” would hopefully put off any kids too young to understand the context. 

Speaking of brief text, Ain’t Burned All the Bright has only three sentences. And yet there is a tremendous amount of power in them. I read this book in a brew pub waiting for a librarian meet-up to start and when my first colleague showed up, he found me with tears streaming down my face. The combination of the covid-era lock-down setting with the background of the ill father, the tense mother, the older sister who is longing to change the world, the little brother falling behind and the narrator observing it all makes for a tsunami of emotions in a beautifully illustrated package. 

Call me shallow, but The War Bride’s Scrapbook was my favorite in this very strong field. I first encountered Caroline Preston through the delightful Jackie by Josie and her work as an archivist was visible in that work. Here she takes her collection of WW2 era ephemera and turns it into a compelling and informative story. This and her other visual novel The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt (equally adorable, but without as much emotional heft) are both cataloged in my library consortium as adult graphic novels, but I believe they both have teen appeal.

BECOMING RGB by Debbie Levy, illustrated by Whitney Gardner

Levy, D. and Gardner, W. Becoming RBG, (2019),  New York, NY:Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Amy Santiago is one of my favorite fictional characters. She is a police officer on the show Brooklyn 99. Throughout the series, her character grew from a brown-nosing know-it-all to a fleshed out comedic delight. As a brown-nosing know-it-all, her character arc meant a lot to me. Hopefully, as we mature, we become more aware of how we are perceived by others and are able to reign in our more irritating attributes. 

I feel like Ruth, as portrayed in Becoming RGB, never managed to do this. She was PERFECT! And I adore RGB the human. And I actually really enjoyed this graphic biography. But I never felt like I got to like this Ruth. I think that the problem is that the secondary characters, primarily her mother and husband, were so fleshed out, where she was just brilliant, hard working and driven. Even Antonin Scalia seemed more like a real human than she did. 

This is not to say that this book isn’t fantastic, it is! It gives the facts of RGB’s life in an interesting narrative, I loved the look into her childhood and her marriage and the trajectory of her career. I know it is asking a lot of this format to bring her to life. 

Well, it is time for the SHUT MY MOUTH section of this response! I am a person who usually just focuses on text and doesn’t give much time to the pictures. Well, I just flipped back through the book to see if there was a part where I felt Ruth’s spirit on the page and I looked at the illustrations and there she was! The picture of her as a young mother sitting exhausted in a chair brings back the exact feeling of being a young mother sitting exhausted in a chair. Kudos to Whitney Gardner for making her emotions so visible. 

If you will excuse me, I need to go back and reread this with my picture glasses on!

HOW WE GOT TO THE MOON by John Rocco

Rocco, J. How We Got to the Moon,  (2020), New York, NY: Crown Books for Young Readers. 

This was a complete joy to read. The author/illustrator, John Rocco, spent much of his career as a Disney Imagineer and it shows. The illustrations are detailed and engaging. They have a feeling of movement to them that is ingenious. The text does its job exactly as intended and gives plenty of detail without being overwhelming. 

The book could easily be an entire course. As a matter of fact, as I read it, I started writing curriculum in my head. (What is wrong with me??) 

Rocco format changes up throughout the book in a way that will appeal to all kinds of readers. He features problem/solution scenarios, history, schematics, timelines, and he features individuals who were involved in the process out of the usual narrative sightline. He highlights people from groups that are not generally represented in the Apollo story. 

My husband is a giant NASA nerd and as a result, I know a lot more about the space program than I care about, but I kept coming across interesting details that were new to me. There is a strict “no reading out loud no matter how good it is” policy in my house, but my enjoyment of the book was so visible, that my spouse asked to look it over, which is nearly unheard of.

My only complaint about the book is the $30 price tag. Don’t get me wrong - it is worth every penny! But a class set would be completely unaffordable for any public school. But every school library K-12 would be well served to have a copy of this on their shelves.

ALL THIRTEEN: THE INCREDIBLE CAVE RESCUE OF THE THAI BOYS' SOCCER TEAM by Christina Soontornvat

Soontornvat, C. All 13: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys Soccer Team, (2020), Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. 

This book is excellent. I know this to be true. That being said, I could care less about it from a personal perspective. Luckily, I am not a 7th grader! I think those kids will eat it up. It won a Siebert honor and a Newbery honor which says a lot about the quality. The story is zippy, the text is a manageable size and the pictures are immediate and fantastic. The size of the book will likely appeal to the kind of kid who wants to look like they are reading big books, but it also has great readability. 

I don’t love that there doesn’t seem to be a paperback in the works, at least according to the publisher. So many great middle grade nonfiction books really drag their heels on the path to becoming more affordable. 

The book reads like an adventure story, but it factors in that there are a lot of areas that kids might be compelled to learn about in addition to that narrative. Sections on “Buddhism in Thailand” and “Human Responses to Levels of Oxygen Concentration” add interesting color to the rest of the story. 

This book would have made more of an impression on me if I hadn’t read it right after John Rocco’s How We Got to the Moon, which is a masterpiece. That being said, any elementary or middle school library would do well to purchase this. It is a great conduit to teaching kids about religion, the human body, diving, rescues, soccer and any number of other interesting topics in a slick, smart package.

WE ARE NOT FREE by Tracy Chee

Chee, T. We Are Not Free, (2020) Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

12 and up according to Amazon

If I had a dollar for every time a kid checked out We Are Not Free thinking it was a resource for their research paper about Japanese internment camps, well, I could probably get a grande latte at Starbucks at least. This book was on the Mass. Teen Choice Book Award list last year and everyone on the committee voted for its inclusion, which is extremely rare. 

The story is told in 14 different voices, each of them distinct and beautifully written. I listened to the audiobook version which was read by 11 different readers - all of Japanese descent. The characters’ monologues were interspersed with government documents and newspaper articles. The print version also had a handful of photographs, artifacts and illustrations. 

What I loved about this book is how it humanized all the kids and made them feel like real teenagers. Sure, they were being horribly treated by the government and their fellow citizens, but alongside that epic tragedy, they still had the everyday aspects of life - unsupportive parents, unrequited love, all the classics. And each kid felt like a real individual. I don’t know how much of that was the different voices and how much was the writing, but I believe they went hand in hand. 

This is a beautifully done book that was selected as a National Book Award finalist as well as a Printz Honor Book - and with good reason. I would recommend it for inclusion in any high school collection. It has been awhile since I read it, but I believe it is also middle school appropriate. From a curricular standpoint, it beautifully illustrates the impact of a draconian policy on teenagers in a way that would be accessible to modern teens.

CATHERINE'S WAR by Julia Billet, illustrated by Claire Fauvel

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1156451

Billet, C. Catherine’s War, (2020), New York, NY: Harper Alley, HarperCollins Publishers. 

Reading age ‏ : ‎ 8 - 12 years / Grade level ‏ : ‎ 3 - 7 according to Amazon

Catherine’s War is really Rachel’s war, but as a Jewish child trying to survive the holocaust, Catherine is a much safer name. The story is fairly linear and the visuals are amped up by the inclusion of Catherine/Rachel’s “photographs.” Generally when I am reading a graphic novel, I have to remind myself to consider the visuals, but this one demanded I look. 

The book was excellent at showing the depths of the war without being overtly violent. It looks more at the emotional trauma of a child survivor. The story is loosely based on Billet’s mother, who was much younger at the time, but was a student at the children's home in Sevres.

I have read a lot of YA and middle grade fiction about the holocaust, so there was not much here to surprise me except for the pedagogy of the Sevres children’s home. I loved it! The idea of students having so much autonomy over their education is fascinating to me. I was a little disappointed to discover this information on the school, “Great importance, then, was placed on personal observation, artistic expression, creativity, and individual autonomy. Yet the emotional shortcomings and artificial nature of this life without any contact with the outside world meant that many of its students had great difficulty adapting to adult life.” (Maurel, 2008).

I blame the war, not the pedagogy!

This book is an excellent work of historical fiction that got me thinking.

THE BLACK KIDS by Christina Hammonds Reed

Reed, C. The Black Kids, (2020) New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. 

grades 9-12 according to Amazon

“People glorify protest when white kids do it, when it’s chic, frustrated Parisian kids or British coal miners or suffragettes smashing windows and throwing firebombs at inequality. If white kids can run around wearing their bodies like they’re invincible, what do the rest of us do? Those of us who are breakable. Those of us who feel hopeless and frustrated and tired and sick of feeling this way again and again? Sometimes we just go ahead and break ourselves.”  

“I can’t tell if loneliness is being black, or being young or being a girl or if Lucia’s right and I need new friends. I don’t know. 

‘It might be lonelier / Without the loneliness,’ Emily wrote.

And she was white as shit.”

Those two quotes exemplify what I love about The Black Kids. 

This work of historical fiction, set in 1992 (when I was already an adult - please excuse me for a minute while I re-up on geritol and stool softener) looks at the Rodney King verdict and the response in Los Angeles through the eyes of a high school senior who is a black girl in a predominantly white upper-class school. Her parents are strivers who want nothing more than for their children to have a longer, sweeter childhood and better options for the future. They have achieved the American dream. Their kids are “soft.”

There is a lot going on in the book but what I loved is the way that the different threads strengthened each other. The parallel between Grandma Shirley’s likely mental illness and Jo’s is subtle but telling.  The way Ashley connects with Micheal vs. the way she connects with LaShawn is lovely. And the differences between Ashley’s old, gold mean-girl friends and the kind but messy Lana and the “black kids” is nuanced. 

I had to stop reading this for a couple days when I realized it was time for prom and the foreshadowing that something was definitely going to go down was overwhelming. The book didn’t pull punches. Ashley got a close up look at how racism is ingrained in society and it propelled her into a more thoughtful look at the burning of L.A. 

For a book about friendship where Ashley spends little or no time alone, there is a pervasive feeling of loneliness that seems to stem from her search for an identity that she can be proud of. 

This is a fascinating story set at a time in history that looked very different depending on your perspective. The differences between how Ashley perceives the riots as opposed to her formerly sheltered sister and her knowing cousin gives an excellent overview. 

This book broke my heart and educated me and it will do the same for teens who pick it up.

THE DAUGHTERS OF YS by M.T Anderson and Jo Rioux

Anderson, M. Daughters of Ys, (2020). New York, NY: First Second. 

13-17 years according to Amazon

I love M. T. Anderson! We have been friends for over 20 years. Okay, Facebook friends, but he would know me in real life! I have slept over at his house  - hell yeah, I’m going to drop that name! He is in the pantheon of talented YA writers and has such a breadth of topics that he is incomparable. Feed was a game changer for YA. His National award winning Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party is a masterwork. Heck, even his deceptively light Landscape with Invisible Hand was made into a film that premiered at Sundance this year. 

That being said, I didn’t love Daughers of Ys. 

It is beautiful to look at. Jo Rioux has so much movement in her drawing, and her color palette is perfect for showing the differences in the sisters. And the story is interesting and beautifully written. A review from NPR made a connection that I just loved - “Rioux also borrows the glowing lights and velvety shadows of Maxfield Parrish's work for certain scenes, including a wonderful interlude set inside a circle of standing stones.” (Lehoczky, 2020) It’s a feast for the eyes. I think it was just too murdery for me. 

The idea of two sisters, a dead mother, a father who is weak but plays strong - it has a lot going for it and according to Lehoczky, the original Breton tale is far more misogynistic. But I feel like Rozenn is too good to be true and Dahut is slut-shamed (and I guess murder-shamed) for things that are outside of her control. 

As I think back, I read this a few weeks ago when I had a bad cold and perhaps it wasn’t the right book at the right time. And flipping through the pages, I am practically reading it again with a much more enchanted eye. Perhaps I have erred and I do like it after all!

From a school library perspective, it makes me sad that the bare cartoon bums would be much more of a content problem than, you know, the murders, but that is the world we live in. Still, and art class could definitely benefit from looking at Rioux’s work and an ELA class could discuss this more feminist retelling of an old folktale. 

Lehoczky, E. (August 16, 2020) Feeling Deluged By News? Let 'The Daughters Of Ys' Wash Over You. NPR.

IF THESE WINGS COULD FLY by Kyrie McCauley

McCauley, K. If These Wings Could Fly, (2020), Katherine Tegen Books, HarperCollins Publishers.

13-17 years according to Amazon

I wanted to like this book. But I did not. If you are looking for extraordinarily books about teens surviving parental abuse, try N. Griffin’s Trigger, Nancy Werlin’s Rules of Survival or Rainbow Rowell’s damn near perfect Eleanor and Park. None of these books have the magical realism element of If These Wings Could Fly and I would argue they are the better for it. 

Neal Schusterman pushed child abuse into the speculative fiction realm with Unwind and Paolo Bachigalupi references it in Shipbreaker, but that is not the whole story in either of those novels. 

First, I should say that there were aspects of the book that I did like. The writing itself is strong and the middle sister in particular was an interesting and nuanced character. The romance wasn’t heavy handed and didn’t stand in the way of the story. And the crows were actually awesome. They are the only reason I kept reading. I was perusing Goodreads to see why people gave this book such a high score and many mentioned the crows, and damned if they didn’t add a nice aspect to the very rushed ending. 

I also liked the way that Leighton found an escape in her journalism. It was barely sketched out in the beginning of the book but the impact of her essay on people looking the other way at her family’s abuse was well done. 

Maybe I just didn’t like Leighton. She seemed bland and her snobbishness about state school rubbed me the wrong way. I am sure it was her father’s insistence she go that she was rebelling against, but it still seemed like a YA trope - going to NYU to get out of this oppressive town. If every fictional kid in a YA book that got out of their town by attending NYU actually went to NYU there wouldn’t be room for the actual human high school graduates. 

This was not a book that spoke to me. I know that not every book is for every person, and I believe that there are teens who would respond to this, but compared to the rest of the books I have been introduced to in this class, this one falls short. 

[Starry.ai didn't seem to like the book any better than I did if it's response to this possibly flawed prompt is any indication - "“A 17 year old girl, a 14 year old girl and an 8 year old girl are jumping off the roof of a house out in the country that is on fire and are caught by crows who help them get to the ground.”]

BLACK GIRL UNLIMITED by Echo Brown

 

Brown, E. Black Girl Unlimited: The Remarkable Story of a Teenage Witch, (2020), New York, NY: Christy Ottaviano Books, Henry Holt and Company. 

14-18 years according to Amazon

Thank God Echo is okay! This book was beautifully and delicately written, but I had such a hard time getting into it. The subject matter is so painful, and the “magic” aspect was confusing for me. I eventually gave up on reading it and listened to the audiobook instead and I was so glad I did. Echo Brown does an incredible job narrating her work. 

In the print version I was distracted by the mid-paragraph splits in the action and I was uncomfortable with the dialect of the mother’s speech in particular. But hearing Brown delineate the generations in this way was brilliant. According to her author bio she is an actor as well as a writer and it shows. 

There were so many rich character details in this book, which was surprising because it is all in Echo’s perspective. But her mother and the teacher who takes her in (a character that could have felt very white-savior and somehow did not) in particular were fleshed out just by their interactions with Echo.

The end of the book was as joyful as the beginning was painful and the balance definitely helped me love it. I appreciate books that understand that not everyone has the same kind of homelife and I think as an educator, it is particularly important for me to keep that in mind. 

This book is a definite pick for any school library (I just bought it for mine!) and would be an excellent bibliotherapy title for any kids struggling with family addiction issues, poverty or just the trauma of systemic racism. It also points to the liberation found in storytelling. 

Brown uses the movie Titanic as a conduit for a magical incident intended to help Echo’s brothers recognize the need to believe in themselves. This is a brilliant illustration of storytelling on top of storytelling! Black Girl Unlimited would be an excellent source for monologues for a drama class or illustrations for a creative writing class of unique methods of storytelling.

Speculative Fiction

Yes, I am just filling this blog with all my YA homework. Hey, I want to remember it! Here is my 250+ words about sci-fi, fantasy, steampunk and gaslamp -

My grandfather's binoculars from the 1920s, the goggles that my son bought in Poland, the USB jump drives made out of old glass tubes that my husband orders from Latvia - I am surrounded by SteamPunk and have lived like this pretty much since SteamPunk was invented. I started dating my husband in 1987, the same year that Jeter first described “a genre of speculative fiction in which steam, not electricity, drove technological advancements.” (Jeter, 1987). He was an Asimov-reading, Renaissance-Faire-attending hottie and he made it look cool. Which is the short answer to why these genres are popular with young adults - they look totally cool!

But wait, there’s more!

The idea of another world where the problems are so very, very different has always appealed to teens. Jules Verne and his Journey to the Center of the Earth, H.G. Welles poor Eloi being hunted by the Morlocks - these problems are so far away from the teenage problems of bad skin, evolving family relationships and friendship drama that have plagued teens since teenager-dom existed that they are a welcome escape. 

I have always defined sci-fi as spaceships and fantasy as dragons. If the technology is overwhelming it is steampunk. I was unfamiliar with gaslamp as a genre until reading Keyes’ blog post but I love the addition of supernatural elements. 

Brock’s chapter on speculative fiction seemed to mostly consist of recommended books and since it included three of my all time favorites - Kristin Cashore’s Graceling, Lanai Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer and Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows - I heartily approve. She also has an interesting section from Neal Schusterman about world building that taps into the real magic of this kind of fiction - escaping to a different universe, or a different version of the multiverse. 

But don’t get me started on the multiverse!

Brock, R. (2019). Young adult literature in action. Libraries Unlimited.

Jeter, K. (1987). Steampunk [Letter to the editor]. Locus Magazine.

Keyes, L. (2011, October 10). A past that never was. Enchanted Inkpot. https://enchantedinkpot.livejournal.com/104323.html

Finally - an explanation!

I just want to put this here so that I don't forget. 

In my YA course, the professor Dr. Catharine Bomhold made two points that finally gave me the language I needed to explain how I view YA. 

The first, when arguing about LITTLE WOMEN not being a young adult book (a hill on which she says she is willing to die) Dr. Bomhold said that it isn't YA simply because young adults did not exist at that time in American history - or really anywhere. You went directly from childhood to adulthood, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Brilliant and consice. 

The other point was explaining the difference between the Lamberts and duJardins and grittier books like THE OUTSIDERS. The point is that the "malt-shop books" were written by adults showing what a "perfect teen life" would be as opposed to showing what actual teen life was like - as teenaged Susie Hinton was able to do. 

I coined the phrase - "Suggest, rather than reflected" teen life. I really think it is going to catch on. 

It may seem that this theory doesn't leave room for more nuanced books like Cleary's FIFTEEN or the Betsy Tacy high school books, but I do think that, while they are much more emotionally rich, they are still constrained by their time. That bleaker honesty simply wasn't allowed. It was fine for Holden Caufield to struggle with mental illness as a teenager, as long his story wasn't marketed at teenagers. Yes, Jane could have her sad night watching the fog come over the bridge and Betsy could repent after Margarets eyelashes burned off, but ultimately, there was a happy ending. 

Even Tony, the Dally of the Lovelace stories, runs away, but writes to tell that everything has turned out FINE. 

There is more here, but I don't have time, but I want to revisit this. 

Everything Sad is Untrue: (A True Story) by Daniel Nayeri

Nayeri, D. Everything Sad is Untrue: (A True Story), (2020), Montclair, NJ: Levine Querido.

Ages 12+

I am in the midst of teaching a professional development series on how to provide services to EL/ML students in the school library and this book is what I opened the course with. Yes, Daniel’s English was excellent and his refugee experience was uniquely his, but the focus on storytelling as a means of making connections, even with so much resistance, was a great illustration about how communication isn’t just about the nuts and bolts of understanding the language, but rather it is about understanding your fellow human.
I listened to this book, rather than reading the paper copy and I had to pull over to write this nugget down - “Every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.” Good grief, I am crying a little bit just retyping it. And there are so many beautiful slices of philosophy.  “Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do. You speak someone else’s words to yourself, and hear them for the first time.” This description blew my mind.

Daniel, like Schererazade, is telling his stories to me, the listener (In the book, the reader, nice touch audiobook version!) and he says, ““Dear listener, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Schererazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last.  Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others. He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.” And Daniel does that for us as well. 

Finally, this book talks about faith in a way that makes it irresistible. From Daniels offhand comment, “But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw.” to his deconstruction of how his mother had to give up everything for Jesus, it is powerful stuff. 

I laughed out loud so many times, and I feel a little bad that all the taglines on Amazon talk about how powerful and heartbreaking it is, because it is also hysterical in parts. 

The cover art is absolutely beautiful and might have some young reader appeal, but this strikes me as one of those middle grade books that adults absolutely adore, but that needs to be a little bit pushed on actual kids. Starry.ai did a pretty good job with an illustration ( I needed to see Mr. Sheep Sheep.) but it was no match for the glorious tornado of story.