February 16, 2013

Adult Books 4 Teens: January 2013

 HAYES , Nick. The Rime of the Modern Mariner. illus. by author. Viking. 2012. Tr $32.. ISBN 978-0-670-02580-0.

Adult/High School–In cleverly constructed verse that echoes (without mimicking) Coleridge, Hayes presents the tale of a 21st-century explorer who has ridden the high seas in search of (illegally hunted) whale bone for scrimshaw. He has been sucked into the swirling mass of garbage in the north Pacific (see Rachel Hope Allison’s I Am Not a Plastic Bag by [Archaia 2012]) and eventually comes to a London park bench to [...]

Book/Multimedia Review Stars List: January 2013

Henry and the Cannons (Brown), ©2013 illustration by Don Brown

Henry and the Cannons (Brown), ©2013 illustration by Don Brown

Preschool to Grade 4

AHLBERG , Allan. The Goldilocks Variations . illus. by Jessica Ahlberg. Candlewick. p. 74.

BROWN , Don. Henry and the Cannons . illus. by author. Roaring Brook. Jan. 2013. p. 89.

BRYANT , Jen. A Splash of Red . illus. by Melissa Sweet. Knopf. Jan. 2013. p. 89.

HALPERIN , Wendy Anderson. Peace. illus. by author. S & S/Atheneum. Jan. 2013. p. 92.

HELQUIST , Brett. Grumpy Goat. illus. by author. HarperCollins/Harper. Jan. 2013. p. 78.

JEFFERS , Oliver. This Moose Belongs [...]

Fairy Tales

Fairy Tales

Adaptations of the fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers are among my great pleasures in life. They account for one of my favorite picture books, Trina Schart Hyman outrageously gorgeous (and even more outrageously out-of-print) version of “Snow White” (Little, Brown, 1974); one of my favorite YA novels, Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (Knopf, 2008), [...]

Fairy Tales

Adaptations of the fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers are among my great pleasures in life. They account for one of my favorite picture books, Trina Schart Hyman outrageously gorgeous (and even more outrageously out-of-print) version of “Snow White” (Little, Brown, 1974); one of my favorite YA novels, Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (Knopf, 2008), [...]

. . . And We’re Back

. . . And Were Back

Hooray!  We’re back online, and the new site looks great, though please let us know if you’re having any problems with it.  You may notice that there’s a new url for the site, and it will probably work best to update your RSS feeds with the new one: http://blogs.slj.com/adult4teen. While I play around with the new [...]

A Brief Hiatus

A Brief Hiatus

Dear Readers: Thank you for following our blog.  Beginning Wednesday, December 19th, the School Library Journal blogs are being migrated to a new server. Therefore, we will not be able to post for an extended period, perhaps until 2013. The same goes for commenting – if you try to post a comment after midnight December [...]

Booklist Editors’ Choice, 2012

Booklist Editors Choice, 2012

Booklist is the only other review source that publishes a best of the year list in our category. The Booklist Editors’ Choice: Adult Books for Young Adults, 2012 was released yesterday. Let’s compare to the AB4T Best Books of the Year, shall we? FICTION Of the 12 fiction titles chosen by Booklist, we overlap on 4 [...]

Weekly Reviews: Crime

In this week’s reviews, we delve into three takes on the everlasting American obsession with crime and criminals.  We start with Rob Deborde’s Portlandtown, which injects its paranormal underpinnings (and just “what is it with all this paranormal activity occurring in the Pacific Northwest?” asks reviewer Carla Riemer) with classic tropes from Western and Crime fiction [...]

Debut author interviews

Every other month we publish an interview with a promising AB4T debut author in the SLJ Teen Newsletter. Sometimes I conduct the interview; sometimes I invite one of our reviewers to take it on. As 2012 comes to a close, I feel the urge to look back on those interviews for patterns or themes that [...]

Nostalgia

Back when I asked our reviewers what they look for in terms of teen appeal, Sarah Flowers said something intriguing that I couldn’t fit in that post, but I’d like to talk about at greater length. Here’s what she said:
“Is there an important teen character or characters, and do they sound like teens? That [...]

Accuracy in Nonfiction

Accuracy in Nonfiction

On Monday, I discussed looking for more diversity in nonfiction for teens, but I didn’t even broach what might be the most important aspect of all when it comes to reviewing and recommending nonfiction: accuracy. While fiction can certainly have factual inaccuracies in it, and errors can even change our evaluation of the book, it [...]

Weekly Reviews: Fiction Set Around the World

This week we present three literary novels set outside the United States — in Mexico, Cambodia and England — that make great suggestions for mature teen readers. Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Mexico, where Down the Rabbit Hole takes place. At just 75 pages this novella is a powerful experiment in voice, one that would [...]

Weekly Reviews: Fiction Set Around the World

This week we present three literary novels set outside the United States — in Mexico, Cambodia and England — that make great suggestions for mature teen readers.
Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Mexico, where Down the Rabbit Hole takes place. At just 75 pages this novella is a powerful experiment in voice, one that would [...]

Adult Nonfiction for Teens

Looking at the New York Times’s list of 100 Notable Books of 2012, I was somewhat surprised and definitely disappointed to see that this blog had reviewed only two of the 47 titles the Times recommended (in contrast, we reviewed 12 of the Times’s 53 fiction titles). To be sure, we reviewed our fair [...]

Adult Nonfiction for Teens

Adult Nonfiction for Teens

Looking at the New York Times’s list of 100 Notable Books of 2012, I was somewhat surprised and definitely disappointed to see that this blog had reviewed only two of the 47 titles the Times recommended (in contrast, we reviewed 12 of the Times’s 53 fiction titles). To be sure, we reviewed our fair share [...]

Styled with Simplicity, Achieving Eloquence

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith:
No reader, teen or adult, need be an aesthete or an art historian to be aware of the multiplicity of styles imagery can take. Awareness is one matter, but when faced with a style that is abundant with detail, color, line and light/dark interplay, awareness is awakened to a [...]

Teens and Genre Fiction

On November 19th, Mark made his debut with a post titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Teens.” He made several terrific points, as did the contributing AB4T reviewers, but there is one thing missing in that discussion –the popularity of genre fiction among teens.
When a teen is a fan of a particular genre, [...]

Weekly Reviews: Short Stories

I love short stories.  I generally love anything that makes an effort not to waste my time, but I especially love the special craft of compression and power that short stories demand of their authors.  I also admire the fact that short story writers have so many more structural options than novelists.  Rather than being [...]

Best Adult Books 4 Teens, 2012

What a wonderful year of reading is reflected in the 2012 Best AB4T list. Fictional stories range from the end of the world to waking up in a new body, homesteading in Oregon to super-mean high school cheerleaders, from the Trojan war to the war in Iraq.
On the nonfiction front, we are continually curious about [...]

Best Adult Books 4 Teens 2012

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More  Bests

Best Books 2012

Bringing together the best reading of the year among 17 book reviewers resulted in a wonderfully varied group of titles that combines excellence and appeal to young adults. All of these books were originally reviewed on SLJ’s Adult Books 4 Teens blog, which can be found at blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/adult4teen.
There were a few trends in addition to the plentiful coming-of-age fiction and nonfiction memoirs. We ended up with three powerful debut novels about modern war–The Yellow Birds, Billy [...]