Good Reasons to Hope | Recent YA Fiction

Listen to John Green introduce and read from The Fault in Our Stars.

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By Joyce Adams Burner, Curriculum Connections–School Library Journal

War, terminal illness, grief, depression—the teen protagonists in these recent young adult titles face dire circumstances and difficult personal dilemmas with honest candor and courage, choosing to live with hope, seeing possibilities in the midst of despair. Never sentimental or maudlin, ever inventive and realistic, their stories reference historic touchstones and human vulnerability in strikingly voiced narratives sure to capture readers’ hearts and minds. They offer myriad themes to explore and writing opportunities in classrooms across the curriculum.

Choosing a Life
Studious Kate, 18, has secretly set her heart on studying medicine at Stanford, while her sister Mary, a gifted painter at 16, thrives quietly at home, in Francisco X. Stork’s Irises (Scholastic, 2012; Gr 9 Up). Set in El Paso, the girls’ strict family life, centered on caring for their long-comatose mother, shatters when their father, a fundamentalist minister, dies of a heart attack. The church wants them out of the parsonage to make way for an ambitious young successor; their dwindling bank account puts Stanford out of reach; and Mary loses her artistic vision, as the two face an uncertain future.

Stork skillfully shifts viewpoints in his nuanced portrayal of two distinctly strong young women grappling with grief, faith, and sustenance. Kate’s steady boyfriend offers the financial and emotional stability of marriage, but the handsome new pastor is also tempting, and unexpected attraction develops between shy Mary and an intriguing young artist with a violent past. Themes of death, faithfulness, and family swirl around the girls as they face the painful decision to prolong or end their mother’s life. “‘It’s Mama who keeps us together.’ “No, it’s us that keeps us together, what we do for each other…’ ‘Your problem is that you lost hope. You don’t believe in miracles, but miracles happen. Mama could wake up again.’ ‘Oh, Mary. Maybe I don’t believe in miracles as much as you do, but I do have hope.’”

Surviving the Killing Fields
“I…see in the field the Khmer Rouge hitting one boy, very skinny, very sick…These Khmer Rouge, they are monster. I watch this boy fall and for one minute I feel like happy, relief that this boy is now the one in trouble. Then one minute more and I think: Maybe now I am monster also.” In Never Fall Down (HarperCollins, 2012; Gr 9 Up), Patricia McCormick relates the horrific true story of Cambodian human rights activist Arn Chorn-Pond, in a novel based on extensive interviews and research. Torn from his family and marched off to a labor camp, Arn, 11, endures abuse, rape, starvation, illness, and exhaustion, forced to bury the dead as the brutal Khmer Rouge eliminate the educated and professional classes. Arn volunteers to perform revolutionary songs for the soldiers, surviving the Killing Fields through wit and determination, then forced to become a child soldier before escaping to Thailand. Telling Arn’s story in broken English, McCormick skillfully portrays his resourcefulness and emotional turmoil, following him through his sojourn at a Thai refugee camp and subsequent adoption by a bewildering New Hampshire family, in a complex story seen through authentic eyes.

Arn’s provocative perspective will enliven studies in modern history, music, political science, psychology, and sociology classes, as he clings to the hope that his family survives: “But inside my head I keep a door, always lock, where I hide my family. Where inside is my aunt, my sisters, my little brother, all waiting.” Wandering the jungle with a small platoon, Arn encounters his little sister, attached to another band of soldiers. “Long time ago I kill all hope in myself. And live only like animal, survive one day, then one day more. Now here is my little sister. My family. Someone who love me. Alive. And I say, ‘Now I know you are still living, I will live, too.’” Introduce the book with a video conversation between author and subject.

Running Out of Time
“‘I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?’” Hazel Grace, 16, lives on self-isolated borrowed time, thanks to an experimental cancer drug, in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton, 2012; Gr 9 Up). Grudgingly attending a support group, she meets Augustus, 17, unmistakably hot and missing a leg due to osteosarcoma. Adventure and romance quickly ensue, Augustus wasting no time on coyness in his pursuit of Hazel, in a candidly masterful mix of humor and tragedy shot through with existential questions, adolescent angst, literary devotion, and even a trip to Amsterdam.

Green treats the difficult topic of teen cancer with no hint of sentimentality in his humane story of complexly mortal characters. Bring this one into literature classes as a fresh partner for J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye‘s equally skeptical and strong-voiced Holden Caulfield, or pair it with Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl‘s, whose home Hazel and Augustus visit. “‘Augustus Waters,’ I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.”

Feeling at Home
Jill, 17, is still reeling from her father’s accidental death when her mother announces she’s going to adopt a baby; to make it worse, teenage birth mother Mandy will live with them until she delivers, in Sara Zarr’s How to Save a Life (Little, Brown, 2011; Gr 8 Up). “I’ve tried convincing myself it has nothing to do with me. It’s Mom’s right to do this. Yet I can’t help thinking, Am I not enough? It has occurred to me that she sees the baby as a do-over. A chance to correct my failings.” Zarr seamlessly alternates first-person perspectives in equally compelling voices—hard, aggressive Jill defensively alienating her friends, and dreamy, naïve Mandy quietly soaking up a family life far removed from her own chaotic, sexually abusive past. Themes of grief, teen pregnancy, the concept of family, and the possibility of real change are plumbed as Jill’s tough shell fractures and Mandy ponders the life she wants for her daughter and herself. “‘Why didn’t you go through with [an abortion]?’ Jill asks. I shrug and touch my belly. ‘I wanted my life to change.’ I thought I could save this one, I think, feeling her roll against my hand. And maybe mine.” Prime discussion prompts abound for psychology, health, and family classes. For some behind the scenes insight into the author’s writing process, share this interview with the author.

Connecting Across Generations
“‘Could I talk to you?’ ‘Why?’ “You’re a writer?’ ‘And?’ ‘I need your help.’” So opens Aidan Chambers’s Dying to Know You (Abrams, 2012; Gr 9 Up), the quietly introspective story of two unlikely characters brought together in a journey of self-discovery. Karl, 18, has dropped out of school to work as a plumber’s assistant. His well-read girlfriend, Fiorella, insists he write her letters expressing his “inner secrets,” an insurmountable task for dyslexic, inarticulate Karl. Desperate to please her, he turns to the 75-year-old unnamed author who narrates the story, and an unusual relationship buds between the two. Chambers skillfully intertwines the elderly author’s elegant voice with text messages, emails, and plentiful dialogue, eloquently revealing their personal struggles: Karl’s unresolved grief over his father’s death, the author’s own fresh loss of his wife, both of them contending with depression.

Explorations of writing, set against the counterpoint of pubs crowded with working class rowdies and serene afternoons spent trout fishing in the British countryside, offer numerous discussion points for literature, art, and psychology classes, as a young man comes of age and an old man returns to life. Consider: “It might seem odd to talk of someone wallowing in pain, but I knew from my experience that people obtain a strange pleasure from their suffering. In depression, you’re keenly aware of every shift and shimmer of your body, every flicker and twinge of your feelings, every twist and turn of your thoughts. You are all there is. You are all that matters. In the deepest depths you are as high as on the strongest narcotics. It’s a self-generated, self-inflicted addiction, the cure of which only you can provide. The cure is called hope.”

Listen to John Green introduce and read from The Fault in Our Stars.

Related TeachingBooks.net resources »»»

This article originally appeared in School Library Journal’s enewsletter Curriculum Connections. Subscribe here.

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