OK, I’ve talked about this before (and I’ll probably talk about it again!). Not all nonfiction is narrative, and narrative non-fiction isn’t the only kind of non-fiction that teens will read. When last we spoke, I offered some statistics to (possibly) back that claim up. Today, I’m here to offer something much more substantial: three [...]
Weekly Reviews: Under the Radar
By on May 22, 2013
Last week, Angela talked about buzz books–those books that everyone seems to be talking about; this week, I want to talk about the other end of the spectrum–books that no one is talking about. None of the three books reviewed below has been reviewed (yet) by a library journal, nor have I been able to [...]
Weekly Reviews: Catching Up
By on May 15, 2013
Guest Post on Camilla Lackberg
By on May 10, 2013
Today we’re pleased to have a guest post from one of our regular reviewers Laura Pearle, who is here to discuss Camilla Läckberg’s fantastic series of mysteries. Take it away Laura: Readers of mysteries know that small towns are deceptive – they’re not the safe places they should be. Just look at St. Mary’s Mead and [...]
Weekly Reviews: Stranger Than Fiction
By on May 6, 2013
A possibly insane man who was acquitted of murdering his wife’s lover because the jury found it to be justifiable homicide, and then went on to play one of the most crucial roles in the early development of motion pictures. A teenage assassin who has been blamed (both then and now) for igniting the precipitating [...]
AB4T First Encounters: Kate Chopin
By on May 3, 2013
In our continuing series on the first adult books we read as teens, one of our newest reviewers, Meghan Cirrito, talks Chopin’s The Awakening, a book that I had trouble reading as a college sophomore. Go Meghan! It is difficult to remember when I stopped reading books for kids my age and when I started reading [...]
Life After Life: A Dialogue
By on April 30, 2013
Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life is one of the most buzzed adult books of the year so far. It has starred reviews from Booklist, Library Journal, and Publisher’s Weekly. Outside of the library world, it’s gotten glowing reviews from Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and many others. And it [...]
AB4T First Encounters: Harlequin Romances
By on April 26, 2013
In our ongoing series about our first encounters reading adult books, reviewer Amy Cheney discusses many of her favorites as a young teen, but offers a special shout out to the power of Harlequin Romances. For more thoughts on Romance novels, check out this fascinating article from The Atlantic, discussing the genre’s ongoing interaction with [...]
National Poetry Month
By on April 22, 2013
April is National Poetry Month, and unlike short stories, poetry is one form of literature that I, at least, have never had trouble getting teens interested in. Every April (except this one–my library is doing some construction) I try to hold at least one poetry event–an open mic, or a poetry slam–and they tend to [...]
AB4T First Encounters: Grocery Store Novels
By on April 19, 2013
In our continuing series on the first adult books we read as teens, reviewer Jamie Watson talks about the limited access she had to adult novels: When did I start reading adult books? I’ve thought about this question before, because I’ve used it as in icebreaker in workshops before. Especially in the “OMG the GOSSIP [...]
AB4T First Encounters: Smith, Smith, Mitchell, and Bronte
By on April 12, 2013
And now for another installment of Adult Books 4 Teens: First Encounters, our reviewers’ thoughts on the first adult books they read. Today’s guest post is from Sarah Flowers: I remember four books as my first adult books. They may not have been the very first I read (like Diane, I’m sure I read Readers’ [...]
Weekly Reviews: High Adrenaline
By on April 8, 2013
In The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction (ALA, 2009), Joyce Saricks divides genre fiction into four categories: Adrenaline Genres, Emotion Genres, Intellect Genres, and Landscape Genres (h/t to Jonathan Hunt for pointing me to this wonderful resource–and click through that link to read some fascinating commentary on the categories). I find this categorization much more [...]
AB4T First Encounters: Reader’s Digest
By on April 5, 2013
In our continuing series on first encounters with adult literature, here’s a guest post from reviewer Diane Colson: My mother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books was my first library. By third or fourth grade (circa 1965,) I had pretty much read all of the chapter books in our tiny juvenile section at the public [...]
Weekly Reviews: Graffiti
By on April 1, 2013
I fully admit that this may seem strange to many readers of this blog, but one of my favorite things to do after reading a historical novel is to read up about the facts of the history the novelist used. Similarly, if a novel I’m reading revolves around some particular subject–anthropology, math, whatever–I tend to [...]
AB4T First Encounters: Stephen King
By on March 28, 2013
Over on my personal blog, my mom, co-blogger, and Adult Books 4 Teens reviewer, Sarah Flowers, has a post up about a workshop on YA servives she’s teaching. As an icebreaker, she asked participants what books they were reading when they were 15. My response is somewhat muddled, because I don’t remember my reading from that particular [...]
Even More Weekly Reviews: Serial Killers
By on March 21, 2013
We have a huge backlog of wonderful reviews right now, so this week we’re giving you even more weekly reviews. The great film reviewer Jonathan Rosenbaum once commented that “it’s pretty safe to say that there are more serial killers in movies than there are in real life” and puzzled over why so many viewers [...]
Making Contact With the Outside World
By on March 11, 2013
Weekly Reviews: Postmodernism
By on March 7, 2013
Today we look at two examples of the postmodern novel. Postmodernism has gotten a bad rap–almost from the beginning–for being purposefully obscure, denying the existence of meaning, and encouraging moral relativism. But, while I concede that many postmodern works of art can be infuriatingly vague, for me at least the best postmodern novels (like the [...]
The National Book Critics Circle Award
By on March 3, 2013
Just a quick note of congratulations to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, which was announced as the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction on Thursday. This blog has been a huge supporter of Fountain’s novel, giving it a starred review and naming it one of the best Adult [...]
Phone Phreaks and Intellectual Property
By on February 27, 2013
On January 11, a young computer programmer and internet activist named Aaron Swartz was found dead of an apparent suicide. For those not familiar with him, Swartz, just 26 at his death, was involved in a huge array of groundbreaking information tools, such as RSS (which he helped design), Reddit, the Open Library, and the [...]
