Tag Archives: young adult literature

This Is Not Your Typical Coming-of-Age Book

In exploring This Is Not the Jess Show by Anna Carey, I’m going to do something I normally don’t do. I’m going to start with a very brief summary. I’m playing with the structure of the blog a bit, and I really think this post lends itself to lists. So you’ll see a lot of them this week.

Summary: 

It’s 1998, and Jess is a junior in high school. She’s dealing with normal high school things: 

  • A crush on her best friend, Tyler
  • An unwanted date to the Spring Formal
  • Trying to get out of the house even though she’s grounded
Posted in Coming of Age | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

Because Girls Aren’t Funny

I get a lot of book suggestions from podcasts. If a book comes up more than once on a podcast or is mentioned on a few different podcasts, it immediately becomes something I check out (if it sounds like a book for me).

So when listening to Novel Pairings and Sara mentioned the book Unscripted by Nicole Kronzer at least twice, I knew I needed to get this book for my classroom library. Unscripted intrigued me because it was about improv–a topic I know I have no books about in my class library. The front cover boldly states, “Some jokes cross the line.” I knew going in this was going to be about a girl heading into a male-dominated world. I didn’t quite expect the toxic masculinity to cross into abuse. I definitely could have used those trigger warnings before I started reading the book.

Posted in Coming of Age, Empathy | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

Ben vs. Charlie

In my last post, I talked about Spy School, and I’m still wondering why there’s a definite gender slant towards this series. And that has led me to another question, what about Stuart Gibbs’ other books?

Last year, Stuart Gibs published Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation. I read and LOVED this book, and I’m really excited that the next Charlie Thorne book is coming out in March. Charlie is smart. She’s strong. She’s bold. She’s fierce. She’s not letting anyone push her around. She’s a girl who is not just smart, smart, but she’s also math smart. In a word, this is Spy School if Ben were a girl.

Posted in Guys Read | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

Thinking About A Definition…

I read a lot of YA–duh, this whole blog is about YA. But I don’t only read YA. In fact there’s a lot of contemporary adult fiction that’s sitting in my house waiting for me to read it, and I look at it longingly, and then pick up another YA or middle grades book because my kids need the exposure to books more than I do.

Posted in Definition | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

Preparing faces

“Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don’t know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right.”
This Song Will Save Your Life, Leila Sales

Full disclosure: I haven’t read This Song Will Save Your Life. I was merely looking for a quote about YA books, and of course, google gave me quotes from YA books, and a blog post from Barnes and Noble titled “12 YA Quotes that Perfectly Express the Teen Condition.” Now, I don’t know if the quotes do or not. It’s been a really long time since I was a teen. And while the biology of adolescence hasn’t changed, adolescent life today seems far more complicated than it was in the 80s.

Posted in Coming of Age, Mystery/Thriller | Tagged as: , , , , , ,
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