The Third Annual Jody-intz Awards (My Take on the Best Young Adult Books)

This year I almost didn't make a list of my favorite books. This year I'VE got a book out and I thought it might be weird to judge the um, competition.

But it doesn't feel weird. Maybe because I don't view other books as competition.

There's room for lots of good books out there. When I read a really good book, I'm thankful for it, inspired by it, grateful that I live in a world where good books are floating around. Now, with my own book floating around, the grateful feeling is exponentially amped up. I walk into a bookstore or a library, and I see my little book on a shelf next to books by writers I admire. (And I must say here that the shelf real estate in the C section is particularly fine. Rae Carson!! Kristin Cashore!! Jennifer Castle!!) I don't think I will ever get used to the idea that something I've written is parked next to books by these authors. And if I ever do, someone, please, slap me.)

Now without further ado--here are the books that I loved last year--the ones that got me thinking and feeling and swooning and sighing and crying--

1. In the nail biter/page turner category The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey. Yikes is all I can say about this one. Aliens have taken over the world and gone all Invasion of the Body Snatchers on us. This book's got action and heart. Warning: clear your calendar. Once you open the first page, you will not be able to put the thing down until you reach the end.

2. Best Beginning of a Series. Tie between Divergent by Veronica Roth and The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater. Okay, first--Divergent. (Yes, I have come late to this party. The book was released several years ago but for whatever reason it was not on my radar. If you haven't heard of it, you will soon. The movie's coming out in March.) The Raven Boys. Oh, Maggie Stiefvater, how I adore you and everything you have written. Just got back from a long car trip and listened to the second book in the series, The Dream Thieves. Adored that one too. For the uninitiated, this series has action and lush writing and moments that will stop your heart. I was hooked from the very first line: "Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she'd been told that she would kill her true love."

3. Best END to a Series. Hands down winner The Bitter Kingdom by Rae Carson. This trilogy blew me away. I'm not a fantasy fan, typically, but the strong female lead Elisa drew me in and the complex and non-stereotypical love interest Hector KEPT me in.

4. The Writer-I-Just-Discovered-and-Read-Every-Book-She-Wrote-in-a-Row Award goes to Courtney Summers. JEEZ is the word that sums up Summers. The woman knows how to worm her way into the mind of a tormented and tormenting teen girl. I've read criticism of Summers' books--that the female leads are unlikeable. Maybe. But oh man, you will be viscerally pulled into these girls' stories. My favorite was Some Girls Are. I stayed up half the night reading about how the tables are turned on a "mean" girl.

5.  The Double Punch of Brilliance and Heart Award is a three way tie between September Girls by Bennett Madison, 17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma, and Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos. These books made me FEEL and THINK and had the added bonus of making me forget I am a writer, by letting me simply fall into their stories.

6. I was going to mention Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell in that last category but I think it deserves a category all of its own. I rarely cry while reading books, but this one got me tearing up after reading the Dedication Page. (I'd write the line that made me cry, but if I did, I'd start crying again. So, sorry. You will have to pick this book up yourself and see what all the fuss is about.)

7. Best Twist: What I Was by Meg Rosoff. This book was written several years ago but seems to have fallen off the radar. The main character's a troubled boy at a remote boarding school who develops an intense friendship with another boy, an orphan who lives alone. Things--and people--are not what they seem.  I must mention here that Meg Rosoff's newest book Picture Me Gone is on my TBR stack and I keep hesitating to pick it up--not because I don't want to read it, but because I like knowing that I've got a Meg Rosoff book still to be opened and treasured.

8. Book That Flew Under the Radar and Deserves Wider Readership. The award goes to Jennifer Castle's You Look Different in Real Life, which also wins the coolest premise award. Here's the blurb I wrote on Goodreads:
"Five teens chosen to appear in a documentary film every five years... but it's the voice of the main character, Justine, that pushes this novel into what will surely be readers' Top Ten of the Year lists. Justine is insightful and brilliantly observant--mixed with a bit of biting snark. What's it like to grow up on film? To have your childhood memories edited and manipulated? Is it ethical to portray people's most intimate and heartbreaking moments for an audience's entertainment? Absorbing read that you'll be thinking about long after you finish."

9. And finally, last but not least, in the category of Book I Wish Existed When I Was a Kid Award: Gary D. Schmidt's Okay for Now. This book came out in 2011 and was one of the runners up for the National Book Award--deservedly so. Main character Doug's just moved to a new town, a dump, he thinks, and he's far from thrilled. He's far from thrilled about most things. His crappy family life. School. What looks like a dead end future. The narrative voice is funny, though, so all of this isn't too unbearable. Slowly, readers are sucked into Doug's new life in his new dumpy town, and slowly, he (and we) see that maybe the place isn't such a dump after all, and maybe too, it's how we view ourselves and others that makes all the difference.

PS: Yesterday the American Library Association gave out the official Printz Award for Best Young Adult book of the year to a book I haven't read yet but undoubtedly will:

Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick

Lost Boys/Lost Girls: Coming of Age in YA Fiction

When I was in college I rarely had time to read for pleasure, so if a contemporary novel made its way onto my radar and into my hands, you can bet there was a huge cultural buzz around it.

Now that I think of it, the only two novels I read back then that weren't required school reading were by Bret Easton Ellis: Less than Zero and the follow-up, The Rules of Attraction. These books were not termed young adult--the young adult pickins' were slim in the 80's--but I think they both would be classified that way now.

Ellis wasn't much past his teen years when they were published.

Both novels sort of blend together in my mind, but from what I remember, they feature college age kids floundering around with friendships and sexual relationships (including some questioning of sexuality), experimentation with alcohol and drugs, and rebellion against parents and societal expectations. Also, there's a very cool present tense, stream of consciousness narration that I had never seen before.

My early 20-something self thought these books were brilliant and truthful, hilarious and heartbreaking. And I totally bought into Ellis' cynical, subversive vision of 1980's America.  It was like the guy was speaking to me and my friends, waking us up to how things really were. And weirdly, instead of feeling depressed about it, we felt a gleeful defiance.

I'm not saying that Ellis explicitly was calling anyone to action or trying to be the voice of his generation, etc. (or maybe he was. Who knows?) And I haven't read the books in years, so this is all filtering through a haze of memories, but my takeaway feeling after reading the books was that this messed up world I was about to inherit didn't have to be that way. I could do things differently. I could change things, reject the numb, boring, cruddy, ridiculous lives of my parents' generation and do it all better. I am Generation X, damn it!

(I say this with a bemused, weary sigh, which I suspect means that I am way beyond YA and firmly in MA--Middle Age. ha ha.)

Here's something funny about coming of age books: they scare the crap out of adults, one of the reasons you'll see articles lamenting the "darkness" in YA literature. We old fogies who've forgotten what it feels like to BE A TEEN don't want our kids to read about scary stuff that happens in our world.

We don't want them to even know about it.

But I think kids need these books, books they can carry around with them and pass on to each other, books that speak to their lost, floundery, scared, angry selves.

The classics in the Coming of Age genre are books like Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and A Separate Peace. I read Of Human Bondage recently, and let me just say: Whoa. Talk about dark. Talk about exploring the depraved tendencies that lurk in the human soul. Talk about books we should keep out of impressionable teen hands.

That book, published in 1915, features (SPOILER) a main character who rejects the uptight Christianity of his childhood and tries on other lifestyles for size before settling on a new way of thinking that would likely make his dead parents roll over in their graves.

I suspect the book was banned big time.

Some others good Coming of Age books of past generations off the top of my head:

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar 
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Secret History by Donna Tartt  (fun fact: Donna Tartt went to school with Bret Easton Ellis)

Since I am not a teen, I can't say which novels published today are likely to resonate with teens, but a few I've read recently might strike a chord:

Everything John Green has written. Latest: The Fault in Our Stars. (But my fave, still, is the first novel I read of his, An Abundance of Katherines.)
Story of a Girl, Sara Zarr
Thirteen Reasons Why, Jay Asher
How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff. Also, an undiscovered masterpiece in my opinion: What I Was
All You Never Wanted, Adele Griffin
Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos
The Beginning of Everything, Robin Schneider
Where Things Come Back, John Corey Whaley

and the one I finished just the other day...
September Girls by Bennett Madison

Like the very best of coming of age books, it's got a lost kid at its center. Sam is a depressed, cynical mess trying to make sense of his life. His mom's taken off before the start of the book, apparently on a quest to find herself. Sam says she ran away to a place called Women's Land (which I thought was a metaphor, but turns out it is an actual place. I'm picturing a feminist commune where weary moms don't have to clean up dishes or launder their sons' smelly socks. Sad fact: I sorta related to the mom here.)

Sam's dad is lost too, and as a way of grappling with the loss of his wife, he takes Sam and his older brother, Jeff, a stereotypical Animal-House-style frat boy, to the beach, to that mysterious realm known as "The Outer Banks in North Carolina." And this is where the magical realism of the story kicks in.

There are beautiful girls EVERYWHERE, sexy blonds literally throwing themselves at Sam (and not, strangely, at Jeff.) So this is all new and interesting for Sam, who's pretty inexperienced when it comes to women, and honestly, a little freaked out by the attention.

I'm not giving out spoilers except to say the Girls are not what they seem. Which is not to say that the girls are "bad."

The brilliance of this book lies in the way it makes us question our assumptions of gender roles--how girls and boy are expected to act and to relate to each other in a society that flings so many mixed messages at them.

Look for it on the Printz Award list this year.

Also, on the list of books that concerned, outraged parents will want to ban.