The Catcher in the Rye

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1951.

Annotation: In a fit of disgust with his surroundings and circumstances, Holden Caulfield wanders around NYC alone for a couple of days.

Justification for nomination: Holden Caulfield is a quintessential teen, caught like a fly in a web of adolescent developmental hallmarks. Heightened acuity coupled with high idealism and increased sensitivity to criticism lead to his emotional and intellectual distress. The rollercoaster of his thoughts and emotions is essentially the plot in this story - the action and interpersonal exchanges take second stage to Holden's incessant evaluation and criticism of the world.

Holden recollects his misadventures in New York City as an incident that happened one year in the past and necessitated some sort of recuperative care. "I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy," he tells the reader on the first page. He'd gotten kicked out of his third expensive prep school since he was failing four classes. Filled with disdain for society and "phonies", Holden leaves the school ahead of schedule and takes the train to New York City, where his family lives. He doesn't go home, however. He gets himself a room in a sleazy hotel and wanders around the city, at the mercy of his discontent. Eventually, his thoughts bring him to a pivotal event, revealed to the reader in discontinuous bits. Holden had witnessed the suicide of a fellow student at one of his previous schools. Salinger leaves it to the reader to decide how this affected Holden and refrains entirely from didacticism in any form (unlike Keesha's House!). This makes it a fine book for discussion, but perhaps not the best book for an individual teen to read. Nonetheless, given its groundbreaking and significant status as perhaps the first YA title ever published, I can't NOT nominate this book for a Mock Printz.

Genre: Edgy/coming-of-age.

Fiction Presentation Defense

We are a world at war. In these abundant times, it’s easy for anyone – including and perhaps especially teens – to lose themselves in pop culture’s innumerable offerings, from music to clothes or MySpace dramas and reality TV. how i live now is a startling story, told in the raw voice of a teenager shocked out of her insular urban world into a gritty and uncomfortable new realm where the only thing she has any control over is her attitude. Rosoff’s literary skill is evident in the breadth of experience presented in this spare book set in the enemy-occupied English countryside. Daisy lives through some typical teen experiences - first love, illicit sex, family troubles - starkly cast upon her desperately tenuous and endangered new home. Rosoff's tale is a significant contribution to the body of literature that serves to keep readers aware of how quickly our precariously arranged, deceptively reassuring cushy lives can crumble, thus reminding us to be attentive to the things that truly matter.

Presentation Defense for Red Scarf Girl

Red Scarf Girl gets my vote for the non-fiction award. Ji Li Jiang has written an exciting tale that’s well-paced, interesting, and true. This is the sort of history that breathes life into dull textbook readings and chalkboards full of names and dates. The Chinese Cultural Revolution, as seen through her eyes, is a fascinating but horrific study in mass hysteria, the power of well-executed propaganda, and the inevitable result of attempted thought control. All of this, plus the universal experience of adolescence as she questions her own identity against the backdrop of her family’s.

As China rises to the status of superpower during this age of globalization, it behooves us to educate our youth about the incredible changes the past century has wrought upon this ancient civilization. Red Scarf Girl provides one step of that journey.

looking for alaska

Green, John. looking for alaska. New York: Dutton Books, 2005.

Annotation: Lonely and bored, Miles leaves his Florida home for boarding school, looking for "the Great Perhaps." There, he finds real friends, real love, real fun, and real grief.

Justification for nomination: Alaska's a beautiful, tortured soul - a sixteen-year-old girl that Miles Halter, this story's protagonist, can neither get enough of nor understand. When Alaska's reckless behavior and frequent drinking eventually kills her, the friends she leaves behind aren't sure if her death was an accident. They also bear some responsibility, as none of them stopped her from driving off to her tragic end in a drunken stupor .

This story's been done before. Boarding school setting, friction between the insulated rich and the scrabbling poor, a talented kid dying some sort of thoughtless death..I'm thinking "Dead Poet's Society" or "A Separate Peace", for starters. Nonetheless, I loved this book. John Green's interweaving of Miles' adolescent desires, both known and unknown, with the lectures and questions of an aging "World Religions" teacher is deft and nearly perfect. Religion is how humans have always dealt with the underlying mysteries of life (gender, sex, death, love, to name some of the big ones) and I'm completely grateful to the author for writing this beautiful and honest meditation on the subject.

Genre: Printz/coming-of-age/edgy.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2007.

Annotation: Junior's decision to leave the reservation school in pursuit of big dreams is only the beginning of a very difficult first year of high school.

Justification for nomination: Countless times while reading this book, I thought to myself "Did Sherman Alexie take Literature 332 at Metro with Adela?" His first young adult work is nearly a textbook example of what makes YA lit YA..yet it overflows with natural and seemingly effortless storytelling magic.

Multicultural? Yup.. Junior, the main character, is a Native American living the poor rez life in Washington state. Young narrator? He's 14. Are there adults helping him struggle through his first year as the only poor Indian in an all-white school? No, they're too busy drinking. Does it cross genres and subjects? Part comedy, part tragedy, a sports story, and illustrated with great cartoons, it definitely does. Fast-paced? Both my son and I read it in one day. Is it optimistic with admirable characters? Junior stutters, sports congenital deformities and thus serves as a scapegoat amongst many of his fellow reservation-dwellers. His decision to go to an all-white off-rez school exponentially intensifies his ostracized social status. Instead of acting the pain out on himself or his family, he channels all his anger and fear into drawing comics and playing basketball. Alexie doesn't shy away from grimness and shocking tragedy in this story, but he kept me laughing all the way through.


Genre: Multicultural/coming-of-age/problem/realistic.

Keeping Secrets

Lyons, Mary E. Keeping Secrets: The Girlhood Diaries of Seven Women Writers. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1995.

Annotation: Mary Lyons presents brief biographies of seven turn-of-the-century American women, all authors and diary-keepers. The secrets these women only revealed to their diaries are her focus.

Justification for rejection: This is a decently organized, well written book. Showing great depth of understanding, Mary Lyons draws clear, seamless connections between the prevailing social attitudes of the times and some of the pivotal life events of her subjects. The author used the women's original diaries as source materials whenever possible, providing a well-researched peek into their private thoughts. The "peek", however, serves as a major shortcoming. The excerpts she includes are exceedingly brief - often just one or two words, rarely even a complete sentence. I was left frustrated by this and wanting more. Even a well-chosen paragraph or two per woman would have let me hear their individual voices and aided my own interpretation. Instead, Mary Lyons keeps the reins in her own hands. Thus, while the theme of finding and developing one's identity and voice amidst formidable opposition offers developmental appeal to teen readers, her unwillingness to let the reader fully in on the "secrets" themselves prevents me from nominating it.

In spite of my rejection, the book has much to offer teens with a specific interest in either the history of women's rights and/or the biographies of writers. The awe-inspiring lives of the admirable women included in this book are contextualized into other important events in American history, such as the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, and the spread of yellow fever. A good read, but not for everybody.

Genre: Nonfiction/biography/multicultural.

Keesha's House

Frost, Helen. Keesha's House. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.


Annotation: Seven teenagers run away from home for seven different reasons and all wind up at Keesha's house, a fellow runaway..

Justification for rejection: I love poetry - when it's short and a little bit odd (or a lot...), but not so much as a storytelling device. Keeping this bias in mind, I approached Keesha's House with extra care but still, I disliked it - as an adult reader. The teen I was would have loved it. Here's why:

I found the menu of troubled teenage tribulations present in this work to be overdone - having homosexuality, drug dealing, incest, pregnancy, murder, and alcoholism all touched on very briefly in a short book is too reminiscent of "True Confessions" magazine for me to respect it. As a young teen, however, I loved "True Confessions" because I could vicariously experience someone else's tragedy through its sordid stories and thus escape my own. Frost's use of poetry has potential to counteract this tabloid effect, but she didn't pull it off. The seven teenagers' voices didn't vary enough to bring them into full focus as individual characters and eventually they all blurred into one in my head, sounding like the same brave-and-hopeful-yet-resigned and grown-up-too-fast victims for me to distinguish each from the other. Had there been more anger and/or more flaws evident in the teens that all found their way to Keesha's house, I'd feel differently. Instead, Keesha's House takes the same narrow and sentimental approach to too many complicated issues at once and doesn't provide remarkable insight into a single one as a result.

Genre: Problem/poetry/edgy.