Move over basketball fans. Young adult fiction fans have their own March Madness thing goin' on.
Four YA book bloggers have teamed up to create YA March Madness. Just like the NCAA's "Big Dance," this tournament features Selection Sunday, genre-related regional tournament brackets, and a Final Four. On April 2, YA March Madness hopes to crown the best YA read of 2011 with its National Championship voting.
As a library staff member who works with teens and teen lit all the time, I find myself constantly extolling the value of YA books to adults, whether that’s to my coworkers needing something to display or to customers looking for something to read or even to my friends and family when I’m off the clock. But I realized this morning that I almost never do the reverse, and I’m a little bit ashamed of that.
Remember when you were a kid and your English teacher handed you a list of recommended books for you to read over the summer? Did you read any of them, or just roll your eyes and throw the list away? If you threw away the list, you missed out on some great books.
As you might have heard, April 8th-14th is National Library Week, with each day celebrating an important aspect of the library world. The State of America's Libraries annual report was released on Monday. Tuesday provided an opportunity to celebrate the diligence of library workers and their efforts to facilitate access to the wealth of information libraries provide.
Once you’ve been coming to the Library for a while, it’s very easy to get stuck in a reading rut. You always check the Young Adult section for interesting reads, then maybe you move on to the Feature Films section, or you look for the new books released by your favorite author. But, what do you do when you can’t seem to find anything new?
So, you know all about this super cool thing happening at your Library this summer during which you get earn prizes for reading, right? (*cough* Teen Summer Reading Program *cough*) You’re ready to sign up for your account and start writing your reviews as soon as May 21st gets here, but you’ve run into a roadblock. You suddenly realize that you don’t know what to read!!!
Nineteen-year-old Sean Kendrick and sixteen-year-old Kate "Puck" Connolly share the same fierce passions for their home, the mystical island of Thisby, and their horses. But, there is a dangerous difference between Puck’s common mare and Sean’s capaill uisce--one of the man-eating water horses of legend--and all too soon, she will have to brave racing against dozens of the vicious beasts during the fatal Scorpio Races that claim the lives of so many each November on Thisby.
This summer saw the conclusion of several blockbuster young adult series. Like so many of our customers, I tracked my progress through the holds list on a daily basis, waiting for the anticipated conclusions to roll in. With that admission comes another if you hadn’t guessed it already. I am an adult who reads young adult fiction, and I know I’m not alone.
17 year old Amber Appleton is a peculiar sort of girl. She is an incorrigible optimist. She is the life of the party, she stands up for the weak, cheers up the elderly, and saves stray dogs, all with never-ending enthusiasm and positivity. Only, as you can expect, such an approach to life is not necessarily healthy. It is too much of a burden to hold up so many people. One day, after a particularly devastating event, Amber can't take it any longer and succumbs to depression. Will she be able to pull through?
Okay, so maybe young adult books are not for everyone (I don't think I will be reading excerpts from The Hunger Games at the next toddler storytime after all), but they are definitely appealing to a wider audience than just our teens.
