35 Going on 13: The Best YA for Adults 2009

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Featuring Phillip Hoose, David Small, Kami Garcia, and Margaret Stohl

By Angelina Benedetti, King Cty. Lib. Syst., WA -- Library Journal, 11/19/2009

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The month of November brings some of my favorite things: the smell of baked pumpkin, the first gingerbread spice latte of the season, and the annual best-of lists.

More than a few review journals have already separated the finest wheat from the chaff. My own methods are less scientific; I like what I like. Some of the books here are among the best reviewed of the year, while others are here because they appeal to my personal taste. Some have appeared in past columns, while others are new to it. All of them have something that will appeal to adult readers of teen literature.

These are 12 books that will stay with me long after the New Year rings in another crop of great reads (click here for my picks of 2008).

Best Nonfiction

Heiligman, Deborah. Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith. Holt. 268p. ISBN 978-0-8050-8721-5. $18.95.
In a year that awarded nonfiction readers with a crowded field of superlatives, Heiligman’s wit and scholarship set Charles and Emma—a National Book Award finalist—apart. The Darwins’ story begins with Charles sitting down and writing out his reasons to marry or not marry—“better than a dog anyhow” vs. “less money for books.” His 43-year partnership with Emma Wedgwood proved to be much more—a marriage of love, respect, and intelligence made all the more interesting for Emma’s strict religious faith. [BookSmack! 4/17/09]

Hoose, Phillip. Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. Melanie Kroupa Bks: Farrar. 133p. ISBN 978-0-374-31322-7. $19.95.
Hoose never disappoints. While researching We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History (2001), he heard the story of Claudette Colvin, an African American teenager who refused to give up her seat nine months before Rosa Parks made history by doing the same. Smart and angry (and unlike Parks), Claudette was ostracized by her community for standing up for her constitutional rights. This did not keep her from joining a legal suit a year later, determined to end segregation on Montgomery buses. Hoose’s book—which last night won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature—grew from a series of interviews with Colvin. Hers is a fresh voice in the civil rights story and a powerful reminder that youthful idealism can change the course of history.

Best Marriages of Fantasy and Reality

Bray, Libba. Going Bovine. Delacorte. 496p. ISBN 978-0-385-73397-7. $17.99.
After being diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (colloquially known as mad cow disease), 15-year-old Cameron is sent on a quest to save the world by the angel guide Dulcie. Readers should keep their Cliff Notes for Cervantes’s Don Quixote handy as Cameron travels from New Orleans to Texas to spring break in Florida, accompanied by a dwarf and a talking yard gnome. Along the way, he makes peace with his family and learns to keep up the fight against futility. Bray went trolling for a big fish and catches the reader with an unforgettable fable for the modern age. [BookSmack! 8/20/09]

Taylor, Laini. Lips Touch: Three Times. Arthur A. Levine: Scholastic. 272p. ISBN 978-0-545-05585-7. $17.99.
A plain and precocious girl attracts a goblin’s deadly attention. A British diplomat’s daughter is cursed with a killing voice. And a girl learns the real reason that she and her mother never stay in one place too long. For each, fate twists on a kiss, the magical touching of lips. Illustrations by Taylor’s husband, Jim Di Bartolo, further enhance the magic of these memorable stories. My favorite is the second one, “Spicy Little Curses Such as These.” Set in post–World War I India, it is as much a lesson in the political tensions of the British Raj as it is a gripping love story between a sheltered girl and a worldly soldier. An unforgettable combination of language and storytelling reminiscent of Neil Gaiman and Margo Lanagan. Also a finalist for a National Book Award.

Best Products of Bad Parenting

Barnes, John. Tales of the Madman Underground: An Historical Romance 1973. Viking. 544p. ISBN 978-0-670-06081-8. $18.99.
Karl Shoemaker wakes for the first day of his senior year of high school, determined to be “perfectly, ideally, totally normal.” Over the course of four days and 500 pages, he learns that normalcy is overrated and impossible to achieve when you are a Madman Underground, i.e., a member of his school’s therapy group for teens in trouble. [BookSmack! 8/20/09]

Small, David. Stitches: A Memoir. Norton. 329p. ISBN 978-0-393-06857-3. $24.95.
Small is best known to librarians as a Caldecott Award–winning children’s book illustrator. Now he illustrates his own story with this graphic telling of his 1950s childhood as the sickly son of a radiologist. To “cure” David of his sinus problems, his father repeatedly zapped him with X-rays, giving him cancer—a cancer his parents did not treat for three years. The surgery left him with an uneven gash of stitches from his chin to his collarbone and minus a vocal chord, rendering him a mute observer in his angry household. There is some question as to the intended audience for the book. Published by an adult house, it nevertheless made its way onto the National Book Award youth category shortlist. Whether meant for teens or adults, Small’s story is a testament to the cathartic power of art.

Best Gentle Reads

Kelly, Jacqueline. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Holt. 338p. ISBN 978-0-8050-8841-0. $16.99.
“My name is Calpurnia Virginia Tate….That summer, I was eleven years old and the only girl out of seven children. Can you imagine a worse situation?” Or a better beginning to the story of an aspiring naturalist trapped by her gender in turn-of-the-20th-century Texas. Calpurnia’s careful observations in her notebook and her interest in Darwin’s Origin of the Species earn the attention of her grandfather, a member of the National Geographic Society. Together the two spend many an afternoon exploring the natural world and discover a new species of vetch. Smart tween girls, their mothers, and their grandmothers will all enjoy reading Calpurnia’s musings on her sorry state of affairs and her determination to do something that interests her more than cooking or sewing. The story moves slowly, all the better to experience Kelly’s way with language. I found myself re-reading passages to imprint them in my memory.

Stead, Rebecca. When You Reach Me. Wendy Lamb Bks: Random. 199p. ISBN 978-0-385-73742-5. $15.99.
Combine the best elements of A Wrinkle in Time and the TV game show The $20,000 Pyramid, and you have this strangely effective story of a girl whose ordered world becomes a little more interesting. Miranda’s best friend, Sal, stops talking to her after brooding classmate Marcus beats him up. Marcus is no dumb bully. He challenges Miranda with arguments about her favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time, finding flaws in L’Engle’s time-travel narrative. Then Miranda starts receiving notes from someone who seems to know the future. The author makes use of the book’s 1980s setting by giving Miranda’s mom a spot on The $20,000 Pyramid, but that is not the only reason to set this story 20 years in the past. At the end of this beguiling read, you might find yourself starting back at the beginning to learn how the author set you up from the first. [BookSmack! 9/17/09]

Best Excuses To Stay in Your Jammies All Day

Collins, Suzanne. Catching Fire. Scholastic. (The Hunger Games, Bk. 2). 400p. ISBN 978-0-439-02349-8. $17.99.
There are books, and then there are books you cannot put down. For those, it is best to resign oneself to the comfort of sleepwear, mute the phone, and dig in. This sequel to Collins’s The Hunger Games is just such a book. A few months have passed since Katniss and Peeta survived the arena and became the first joint winners of the Capitol’s Hunger Games. As with all winners, they are forced to make a “victory tour” of the losing districts, but this time Katniss’s defiance of the Capitol’s rules has made her a catalyst for rebellion. There starts a story as gripping as the first, ending with an even more perilous cliffhanger. Not surprising given that its publisher brought us Harry Potter. [BookSmack! 6/18/09]

Garcia, Kami & Margaret Stohl. Beautiful Creatures. Little, Brown. 576p. ISBN 978-0-316-04267-3. $17.99.
Ethan is bored to death with his small town of Gatlin, SC. Nothing ever happens, and everyone is the same, year in and year out. Then Lena Duchannes (think “rain”) comes to live with her uncle, the reclusive owner of Ravenswood Manor. Lena seems strangely familiar to Ethan; she has been haunting his dreams all summer. This witchy Southern gothic mixes modern spell casting with a Civil War curse. The result is the best in a large crop of supernatural romances, a suspenseful yarn in which Ethan learns that nothing, and no one, in his town is what he thought. Amazon surprised the reviewing world by naming this dark horse one of its top ten books of the year.

Best Character-Driven Novels

Standiford, Natalie. How To Say Goodbye in Robot. Scholastic. 276p. ISBN 978-0-545-10708-2. $17.99.
Some friendships change your life. When Bea moves to Baltimore with her professor father and weirder-every-day mother, she is sought out by the popular crowd at Canton, her new school, mostly because she is new and they have had no one but one another for so long. Alphabetical seating introduces her to Jonah, the “Ghost Boy.” He is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and Bea wants nothing more than to be his friend, especially after he introduces her to a wacky late-night call-in program. The “Night Lights” are a radio community of misfit insomniacs from all over the city. It is Bea’s relationship with them, and with Jonah, that starts the heart in her “robot” chest and helps her weather the changes that are coming for her family. From Ocean City to John Waters, Maryland natives (and fans of HBO’s The Wire) will recognize Standiford references to Baltimore and her clear love of the city, which is as much of a character in the story as Bea or Jonah.

Stork, Francisco X. Marcelo in the Real World. Arthur A. Levine: Scholastic. 320p. ISBN 978-0-545-05474-4. $17.99.
Marcelo experiences the world differently from most people. Crossing the street takes concentrated effort on his part, but religious philosophy and music interpretation come as natural as breathing. His father, a partner in a Boston legal firm, makes a deal with him. He can finish his senior year comfortably, in a school for children with cognitive disorders, if he will work a summer in the “real world ” of his father’s office. Marcelo learns that the real world is a complicated place when he finds a picture of a girl with half of a face that compels him to look more closely at a liability litigation involving the firm’s biggest client. Some readers are calling this the book to beat come award season. [BookSmack! 6/18/09]