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.

Needles

Dominick, Andie. Needles: A Memoir of Growing Up With Diabetes. New York: Scribner, 1998.

Annotation: An Iowan girl learns the hard way that getting what you think you want can be a very difficult lesson when she is diagnosed at the age of nine with diabetes, just like her much-admired older sister.


Justification for rejection: This memoir spans a large portion of Andie Dominick's life, beginning with her early memories of playing with her big sister's insulin needles and ending with her wedding. Overall, the book lacked oomph in enough areas to not be a good candidate for the Printz award. First, Dominick's writing style lacks character - repeatedly, I felt I was reading an assignment for a creative writing class focusing on descriptive writing. Second, there's an overall cohesiveness missing (and admittedly it's one of the challenges of memoir-writing). The titular needles, daily necessities for Andie and her sister and dishing out lots of pain alongside their medicine, serve to focus the beginning of Andie's story. By the second half of the book, however, Andie moves on to the other challenges presented by her life with diabetes and the theme disappears, well before it was adequately presented. Third, young adult genre expectations are simply not met by this book: Andie's teen years don't play a central role in her memoir, nor are enough developmental issues addressed. Unavoidably, she comes to terms with her physical limitations; gets an abortion after an unplanned pregnancy happens in high school; and as an adult she suffers through her sister's early death. Her resulting vision is not particularly clear or remarkable, however, and I would only recommend this book to teens seeking out diabetes-related information.

Genre: Memoir.

Harley, Like a Person

Bauer, Cat. Harley, Like a Person. New York: Alfred A. Knopf: 2000.

Annotation: Ever think "those people CAN'T be my parents?" Harley certainly does - and with good reason.

Justification for nomination: Harley's freshman year in her suburban high school is a melodramatic time, brimming with classic adolescent firsts: her first dance, her first serious fight with a friend, her first encounter with drugs, her first boyfriend. Accompanying all these milestones, Harley's relationship with her family is growing ever more estranged. The future she imagines for herself bears no resemblance to her home life, and she's none too diplomatic in her attempts to communicate this (what teenager is?) to her parents. As she tries to make sense of who she is, where she's going, and how she's going to get there, the mystery surrounding her parentage (missing birth certificates, close-mouthed parents, whispering relatives, and odd attic discoveries) slowly takes center stage. Harley is an absolutely alive character - lovable yet terribly frustrating, sometimes downright unlikable and snotty. Her growth as she learns to accept the limitations of others (especially her family) is so finely tuned that I cannot help but nominate this, even if other aspects of the book are not so breathtaking. This is in spite of the frustration I felt when the truth of her lineage is brought to light. Not wanting to reveal a plot spoiler here, I'll just say this: it was too happy, or perfect. However, knowing my own bias against happy endings, I can't give my own opinion on the matter very much weight.

Genre: Coming-of-age.

Forever

Blume, Judy. Forever. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975.

Annotation: A couple of high school seniors fall in love, have sex, and then...graduation changes everything.

Justification for rejection: Katherine Danziger narrates this relatively graphic and yet somehow squeaky-clean story of a young couple's first adult romance. Katherine and her boyfriend Michael are the children of middle class, East Coast suburban, white nuclear families. Neither spectacular nor average (like most of us, really), their lives are remarkably free of stress or problems in any form. While this detracts from the overall quality of the book, it does allows their sexual relationship to take center stage. Understanding this novel as a groundbreaking work of its type makes it quite exceptional; however, relative to all the other YA fiction that's been published in its wake, the story is too didactic to merit an award.

Genre: Realistic/"edgy"/coming-of-age.

American Born Chinese

Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006.

Annotation: Born in America to hardworking Chinese immigrant parents, Jin seeks acceptance amongst his mostly white peers by shunning his heritage.


Justification for nomination: This story packs a big punch into a small, accessible package. Readers follow Jin's growth from a lonely, oblivious child into an even more lonely and oblivious young teen. He's aware that his Chinese heritage is fodder for the classmates that he'd like to be friends with, and so he accepts the friendship of Wei-Chen, a fellow Chinese boy, half-heartedly. Interspersed with Jin's life are vignettes from the age-old Chinese legend, the Monkey King. As the monkey's selfishness and vanity lead him into disfavor with divinity and a trap that he cannot escape from without assistance from others, so do Jin's understandable yet still selfish choices lead him into an utterly friendless existence.

Graphic novels, due to their proximity to the Sunday comics, are a virtually unintimidating format for those kids that shy away from novels full of words and no pictures, or those who believe themselves poor readers. Yang's drawings are simple, the action flows effortlessly, and many of his simple images convey universal teenage experiences with nary a word. The reader witnesses Jin's first date and his betrayal of Wei-Chen's loyal friendship thoroughly via just a few drawings.

Mixing up ancient legends, classic coming-of-age lessons, the difficulties faced by ethnic minorities in American high schools into an easy-to-read and brief story speaks to the high literary skill evidenced in this book. Savvy and/or guided readers can use the Eastern spiritual guideposts from this story to discuss the similarities and differences between Chinese and traditional American Christian cultural and philosophical beliefs. There's plenty of other issues to argue and/or discuss, too - for example, when Jin betrays his friend and then is drawn as a white person, is that how he really appeared, or was the artist only drawing him the way he saw himself? The reader has the final say. Given all of these qualities, plus the still groundbreaking significance of the comic form as a vehicle for literary work, American Born Chinese is deserving of the attention it received.

Genre: Printz; graphic novel; coming-of-age;multicultural.

My Heartbeat

Freymann-Weyr, Garret. My Heartbeat. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.




Annotation: Ellen's first love happens to be her brother's best friend. Only, maybe the two boys were more than friends...


Justification for rejection: Ellen's narration of her first year of high school is a well-paced and highly thoughtful story. A smart, quiet girl whose academic development is closely watched by her determined, exacting father, her only friends are her older brother Link and his best friend James. Ellen has had a crush on James since the seventh grade and when James and Link's friendship falters under the weight of questioned sexual orientation, James and Ellen's romantic relationship takes off.

The world these teens inhabit is an elite and privileged one. Ellen's father gives her Jane Austen and Edith Wharton novels to read; they watch foreign films and visit art museums; they attend a private Manhattan high school; money is not in short supply. This book takes on both homosexuality and the intense pressure that gifted and groomed teens endure as they face decisions about the shape their future will take. Link is the more obviously gifted of the siblings (he's a math whiz) and must bear the substantial weight of his father's hopes and expectations of great success. The possibility that Link is gay looms as a large and mostly not-talked-about elephant in the family room; their father couches his objections to homosexuality in terms of Link's future opportunities. Ellen learns a lot about love and sex as she comes of age, but the bigger lesson is her realization that the world is riddled with "unwritten social laws" that everyone must decide for themselves how to contend with.

This book is full of keen observations and "a-ha", quotable sentences - perhaps to a fault. All of the characters are so well-spoken and terse as to be slightly unbelievable, lacking some of the rough qualities that flesh them out of the literary world and into a breathing, imperfect and curious human. While it's certainly an intelligent and memorable treatment of many adolescent issues, it falls short of exceptional.

Genre: Coming-of-age/Printz/realistic.

how i live now

Rosoff, Meg. how i live now. New York: Random House, 2004.







Annotation:

Angsty and anorexic Daisy, a 15-year-old NYC girl, is sent to live with her aunt and cousins in the English countryside. As her cynicism begins to succumb to the peace and love she finds amidst her quiet, accepting, "mystical being" cousins, war comes to England. She fights to survive and succeeds, but not without losing nearly everything she'd finally begun to risk caring for.

Justification for nomination:

Daisy's first-person retrospective of her harrowing journey through love and war is narrated in a powerful, original and bracingly honest teen voice. Rosoff strikes an odd balance between beautiful writing and the actual speaking style of modern American teens, mixing overlong sentences, odd capitalization, and spot-on teen attitude into a compelling first-hand tale.

The object of Daisy's first love - her cousin Edmond - will certainly put off some readers. Daisy's crossing of boundaries isn't confined to illicit love, either...the story begins with her flight over the Atlantic. Edmond picks her up in his mother's truck from the London airport - another metaphorical border push, for Edmond is 14 and definitely too young to drive. Daisy is brought out of urbanity into her cousins' simple rural existence, complete with barnyard animals, swimming holes, and fishing excursions. Their mother (Daisy's dead mother's sister) "always has Important Work To Do Related to the Peace Process" and thus is out of the country lecturing on the "Imminent Threat of War" when, in fact, War happens, beginning with terrorist-like attacks in London. Borders are sealed and the children are left to fend for themselves. Before the affects of war spread to their area, Daisy briefly experiences profound happiness (sexual and otherwise, another possible sticking point for some readers).

The bulk of Daisy's story, however, deals with the unraveling of her life and her innocence that occurs when her adult-free bubble bursts and the war drives she and her cousins from the farm, in separate groups (based on gender). Separated from Edmond and by default the sole guardian of her nine-year-old cousin, Daisy is subjected to a crash course in hard-knock life. Part survival story, part love story, Daisy's quest back to Edmond and the farm brings the frightening state of modern day international politics out of the setting and into her story very effectively. The ambiguous end to this short and deceptively easy read leaves much of the final outcome up to the reader.

Genre: Printz, Coming-of-age, "Edgy".