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.