Contributed By Ellen Anne

Personal identity and developing a sense of self are quintessential aspects of being a teenager. But how do you navigate the complex experiences of adolescence if you can’t even remember the names of the people you love? And is it even possible to cultivate a sense of self and plan for the future with no past? Does memory and experience ultimately shape identity or is it something deeper?
A few recent books have questioned the importance of memory in relation to coming-of-age and identity, exploring the dilemma of figuring out who you are when you don’t know—or remember—who you were.

Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson (2008)

Jenna Fox knows that she was once someone. She watches that someone as a little girl dancing in home movies, scrutinizing her movements on the television screen. But Jenna Fox has just woken up from a coma and she’s not sure she knows anything about herself anymore.

As she recuperates Jenna becomes aware that her body seems different and that there are abnormal gaps in her memory. She can’t remember simple words. She doesn’t recognize her family. Stranger still are the things she does without thinking, like recalling detailed historical facts and the urge to obey her mother, even when she doesn’t want to. Is Jenna really the person her parents tell her she is?

To unravel the truth about her own identity, Jenna has to push herself to the edge, to try and remember things she has forgotten, to uncover the secrets that seems to surround her—the strange isolated house her family moved to after the accident, the odd liquid she that is her only food, her parents’ unnatural fear of her doing anything normal like returning to school. But as Jenna pieces together the fragments of her past, she begins to realize it’s not what happened before the accident that changed Jenna Fox, it’s what happen after.

Kat Got Your Tongue by Lee Weatherly (2007)

All Kat remembers is a massive bang then she’s on her way to the hospital. After being examined by the doctor a confused Kat is told her name is Kathy and that she’s been in a terrible car accident. But Kat has no memory of the accident—or anything before it. In fact, she has no idea who she even is—she doesn’t recognize her mother, and when she sees herself in the mirror she’s certain it’s a stranger staring back.
As if adjusting to life after an accident with no memory weren’t hard enough, Kat’s return to school is mixed with the realization that the girls she’s told are her friends want nothing to do with her. Worse, they seem to be angry, fixated on something that Kat did before the accident, something Kat can’t remember.

Kat’s struggle to untangle the secrets of her former life unfold in alternating chapters, between entries in her journal from before the accident and her efforts after the accident to traverse the tricky world of someone who has no memory of who she can trust and what she can believe.
Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin (2008)
Naomi’s life is changed forever with a simple coin toss. When she wakes up in a hospital, four years of her life suddenly erased from her memory, she’s shocked to discover that she can’t remember her parents are divorced, she doesn’t recall her best friend’s name or why he calls her “Chief,” and she has no idea what happened on the night of the accident.

How can Naomi possibly recover and get her life back on track if she’s forgotten the simplest things about herself? Can she trust other people telling her what she was really like? It’s as if Naomi is living someone else’s life, someone she doesn’t quite understand, someone who kept a diary of all the food she ate, was incredibly organized, and would pick annoying, preppy Ace as a boyfriend.

As Naomi uncovers clues about the person she was, she’s surprised to discover that she might not be the old Naomi anymore, that perhaps her amnesia has a silver lining. Could she be a new, different person, a person trying to figure out what she wants—a person with one lucky chance to start over?

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About Ellen Anne

Ellen Anne is a teen librarian in Ohio who has also worked in childrens/YA book publishing. Here’s what Ellen has to say about being a librarian:

“I think one of the best parts of being a librarian is the moment when a patron asks for help finding a book and all they remember is that the cover is black and each chapter is written by a different author and you actually know what book it is! I also have a weakness for D.I.Y. craft books, graphic novels, book characters with mettle, and providing reader’s advisory to teens, especially the ornery one.”

A middle school teacher wants Leo Lionni books to teach her students how to make inferences. A historical preservationist is reinvigorated by Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House. Two teenagers flirt and read Wee Little Chick to one another. Picture books are not just for children anymore.

The graphic novel naissance—comics renaissance—has provided entry for a new way of seeing and engaging with picture books. The marriage of picture with text or picture with wordless narrative is no longer just the first step of the serious American reader. Illustrated books with and without words are accepted for all ages, thanks to the successes of the graphic novel. This brings us to the humble picture book and the ways in which graphic novels and picture books have been colliding and expanding and exploding conventions. When American Born Chinese, The Red Book, Zen Shorts, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and The Wall are award winners, we know there must be a sea-change.

I rediscovered picture books as a children’s librarian—no better way, perhaps. While I loved them as a child, I never thought of them as I traveled the typical reader’s trajectory: reading books for children, books for young adults and books for adults. I love children’s and young adult books because of my work. Most likely I would not have discovered their joys elsewhere. When people think of books—if they think of them at all—they adhere to a linear path linking human development and reading. Surely, reading picture books is regressing! Onward and upward, today Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, tomorrow Moby-Dick.

Like any range of literature, picture books can be gentle or challenging, in the terms of their language, themes, design, and images. Picture books can approach a difficult and complicated subject in a comforting and low-pressure way and they can provoke teen and adult readers to look deeply, intentionally, and closely at content that children might miss.

So what can result from interactions between teens and picture books? Teens can learn about book design in Black and White, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, and The Three Pigs; spirituality in Samsara Dog and The Three Questions; “wolves” in Wolves and The Woolves in the Sitee; animal biology (in rhyme!) in Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones; art elements in Hello, Fruit Face! The Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Nina’s Book of Little Things, and Voices in the Park; war and violence in Patrol:An American Soldier in Vietnam, The Letter Home, The Butter Battle Book, and Rose Blanche; and death in Michael Rosen’s Sad Book and To Hell With Dying.

Librarians must educate patrons that the picture book is a format not always prescribed for very young children. This is a challenge when we are constantly asked for the 4-year old, 6-year old, and 12-year old sections and we dutifully point to picture books, easy readers, and chapter books. But we can inform parents and teachers of the myriad ways picture books can be used with teens. Picture books can be microcosmic in the multitudes contained in their brevity. Jon Muth’s books sometimes seem to teach us all we need to know about Buddhism.

Picture books can be used with reluctant readers and visual learners, they can be paired with novels or nonfiction works in history lessons, they can initiate art and design projects, draw on art historical connections and critical thinking strategies, and rekindle the personal experience with literature. As students begin deciphering textual meaning, they can use picture book connections to learn about character development, language, and theme. While we think of storytime as an essentially preschool activity, collaborative out loud engagement with text and image can be pursued with teens.

For the picture book to fulfill its programming potential, it would be ideal to cultivate a young adult collection of picture books. This may be a cataloging or administrative challenge, but as we see graphic novels collected in up to three locations in a building, a home for young adult picture books seems possible. While many children’s picture books can be used successfully with teens, avoiding redundancy is probably desired. There are many picture books that work more deeply and better with teens than with children and would probably get more love in a YA division. Some resources to check out include: http://readwritethink.org, http://vue.org, http://www.picturebookart.org, and http://www.wiredforyouth.com/books/index.cfm?booklist=picture

Titles mentioned

Brannen, Sarah. Uncle Bobby’s Wedding

Browne, Anthony. Voices From the Park

Burton, Virginia Lee. The Little House

Decker, Tim. The Letter Home

Gravett, Emily. Wolves

Haring, Keith. Nina’s Book of Little Things

Heller, Ruth. Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones

Innocenti, Roberto. Rose Blanche

Lionni, Leo.

Lehman, Barbara. The Red Book

Macaulay, David. Black and White

Manos, Helen and Julie Vivas. Samsara Dog

Muth, Jon. The Three Questions

Myers, Walter Dean. Patrol: An American Soldier in Vietnam

Richardson, Justin. And Tango Makes Three

Rosen, Michael. Michael Rosen’s Sad Book

Scieska, Jon and Lane Smith. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.

Selznick, Brian. The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Seuss, Dr. The Butter Battle Book

Sís, Peter. The Wall

Strand, Claudia. Hello, Fruit Face! The Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Thompson, Lauren. Wee Little Chick

Walker, Alice. To Hell With Dying

Wiesner, David. Three Little Pigs

Wild, Margaret and Anne Spudvilas. Woolves in the Sitee

Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese

Here’s a contest that you might want to pitch to your 18 and over TAG/teens in your community as a way to encourage discussion about current communication technology issues and their effect on…well..the world and everything therein.  Heck, actually it’s a perfect contest for teen librarians to participate in.  How does high speed broadband effect our ability to do our jobs, to help teens in our community?

“Entries for the new contest, “President for a Day - How I’d Change the World With Broadband!” will be accepted until the September 30, 2008 deadline. Contestants are invited to share their best ideas for using high speed communications technology to address a wide range of issues and problems.  For example, do you want everyone to have access to health care specialists, even if they are located hundreds of miles away? How about telemedicine? Do you want to help solve global warming? How about a virtual conference to connect people and ideas? Do you want all citizens to be able to participate in the political process? Do you want all students to have the educational tools necessary to compete in a global economy?  How would you use high-speed communications technology to make the world a better place?”

Public libraries, especially, are a way for a community to utilize high-speed communications technology for free.  With it, teens can do research for school, they can participate in the political process (even if they’re not old enough to vote that can still participate in online discussion and express their opinions), they can become involved in volunteer/advocacy opportunities, they can connect with people from all over the world no matter how rural the area they live in, the list goes on…

We read to see ourselves reflected. Cameron’s new book has a great title and two lovely and perfect epigrams that I must quote. The first is Ovid: “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”

And Denton Welch (journal, 8 May 1944, 11:15 pm): “When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.”

And I’d like to brand those on my teenage self. Teens and those who never got over being teens need oils, talismans, quotations—above all, these fragments of literature that tell us “you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, it’s not your fault.” Reading books for or about young people as an adult is a displacing experience. We may wish certain books and characters had been available to us as teens or we may find a heady succor today in being transported to the adolescent past.

Our protagonist, eighteen-year old James Sveck, is infinitely quotatable and somewhat misanthropic, lonely, and sad. Not to mention nostalgic for another time— for Manhattan’s old Penn Station, for Trollope, Eric Rohmer, and Denton Welch. This is a potent nostalgia, a backward ache for a time that is not his own. The book’s references to the present—the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, 9/11—are jarring because James doesn’t comfortably live in the present. He doesn’t belong to his own time or the romanticized past.

Cameron has masterfully created a character who should be unsympathetic—a poor little rich white boy. But James is a supersensitive weirdo, oddball, iconoclast, combination of old man and child who has learned as a teenager, “You cannot always do and go what and where you please.” He is dealing with discoveries of his sexuality and his trauma. He is happily reminiscent though not derivative of Heide and Gorey’s alienated and unloved Treetorn and Melinda from Speak and the book evokes From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Squid and the Whale.

James’ experience at the American Classroom was so terrible and specific. I was reminded of my high school marching band horrors— feeling both superior and inferior to people your own age in a group who are having fun in literal lockstep. Dinners and dances are intended as gifts but are unbearable and solitary. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You will be loved intensely—most likely by adults who remember. The book is also significant for the subtle non-didactic depiction of a gay teenager.

“I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know…I felt that by walking away I was abandoning [them], that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.”

Now that your summer reading programs are in full swing, we’ve written a few booktalks to assist you in pushing young adult titles during your busy programs.

Big Fat Manifesto by Susan Vaught
book talk written by bloodymandy

“A study found that people would rather give up a year of life than be fat. Half of thousands of people asked in a survey agreed they would rather live a shorter amount of time thin than be fat. In fact, 15 percent said they’d give up ten years or more of life to avoid obesity.” Are you a part of this 15 percent? Well, neither is Jamie Carcaterra. Jamie Carcaterra already knows what it’s like to be fat and she’s about to let the world know. From investigating bariatric surgery to infiltrating designer clothing stores, Jamie exposes thin thinking in her newspaper column FAT GIRL. As her column begins to receive national notoriety, Jamie realizes she’ll have to decide which battles are worth the fight. Big Fat Manifesto will have you questioning whether or not size really matters.

You might consider promoting Big Fat Manifesto alongside other teen activist characters. See a review of Big Fat Maniefsto at teensreadtoo. Susan Vaught is also the author of Trigger which received starred reviews and is included on the ALA BBYA 2007 list.

The Joys of Love by Madeline L’Engle
book talk written by Denise Ryan, niseryan(at)hotmail(dot)com

Madeleine L’Engle’s posthumously published novel, The Joys of Love, about a small seasonal theatre in Maine, is the perfect summer book for teenage girls who like to read. And I mean perfect. L’Engle wrote the book in the early 1940’s, but its themes remain relevant today: friendship, first love, war, family expectations, artistic dreams, bohemian lifestyles, and the importance of character. I actually listened to book on CD last weekend and was in heaven. Here is a quick booktalk for the novel. Give it to thoughtful, slightly old-fashioned girls who like wistful romances and melodrama. This includes many Stephanie Meyer groupies!

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Elizabeth Jerrold is a 20-year old college graduate trying to fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming an actress. Both her parents are dead, and her guardian — the stern, Southern Aunt Harriet — “doesn’t approve of the theatre.” However, because Elizabeth has completed her Bachelor’s degree at Smith College, as promised, Aunt Harriet agrees to fund her niece’s apprenticeship with a professional company on the New England coast. There, Elizabeth works at the box office, ushers evening performances, takes acting classes, rehearses Chekhov monologues, and feels happier than she ever has in her whole life.

Even though I’m not an actress, I would love to have a summer like Elizabeth’s – living in a cottage with a bunch of zany apprentices, staying out all night on the beach, meeting famous performers, and making lifelong friends. Oh yeah, and there’s a page-turning romantic element to the plot that makes you want to shout at Elizabeth – “What are you doing with this guy, when this one is so much nicer and is clearly head-over-heels in love with you?”

Madeleine L’Engle wrote this novel when she was a young woman in the 1940’s. She died last year before the book was published. I’m so happy her granddaughters decided to bring this novel forward, finally. It’s a terrific treat. If you haven’t yet experienced the dreamy atmosphere and meandering pace of a Madeleine L’Engle romance, what are you waiting for? You have so much to look forward to!

Contributed by Eva the Librarian
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The verse-novel is a modern phenomenon—very modern. Although there are a few earlier examples, this type of literature first reared its genre-blending head in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The vast majority were published after the year 2000, and most are marketed to teenage audiences.

Verse-novels are characterized by the combining of narrative and poetry, but other than that it is a very diverse genre. They are historical (Out of the Dust) and contemporary (Make Lemonade). They can have one narrator (What My Mother Doesn’t Know) or several (Keesha’s House). They are about sports (Jump Ball: A Basketball Season in Poems), drug addiction (Crank), family tragedy (Walking on Glass), mental illness (Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy), racial conflict (Witness), and a variety of other themes.

Verse novels are a source of debate in many areas of library science. First of all, how to catalog them? Should they be classified as poetry, as fiction, or in a completely new genre altogether? Don’t look to the Library of Congress for help; even they are a little baffled as to what to do with these new-fangled hybrids.

There is also some discussion in the literary community about whether or not verse-novels are any good (the critics’ arguments sound suspiciously similar to those of the anti-graphic novel brigade). Personally, I am not a fan, but that is hardly the point. The point is that teens really go for them!

• The short, free-verse passages resemble song lyrics, which strikes a chord with the iPod generation.
• Interesting titles and bold, attractive cover art appeal to young audiences.
• Verse-novels focus more intently on raw emotion than do other novels, which appeals to emotion-exploring young adults.
• Verse-novels often deal with tough issues that teens themselves may be facing.

Verse-novels are also a less intimidating option for reluctant readers, because they typically have fewer pages and more white space than the average novel. These books can also serve to introduce the verse-adverse to the wonderful world of poetry. What better way to transition from A Separate Peace to The Raven than with something in between?

So, all personal feelings on the subject aside, verse-novels are an invaluable asset to libraries. The unique blend of poetry and fiction appeals to and young adults on many levels and simultaneously helps to develop their reading skills. Who can argue with that?

Click to view Novel in Verse resources >>>

Some quick news regarding the Alternative Teen Services Blog and web site:
YA Lit Content Moving to Main Blog
We are in the process of phasing out the Brave & Brass Book Blog, which was a separate blog with content about teen literature. Those of you that read the Brave & Brass Book Blog are familiar with the subject matter that covers book reviews, book talks, literature perspectives, and collection development.
We found that most of the readers of our Main Blog wanted lit-themed topics, and therefore, we decided to move content from the Brave & Brass Blog to our main blog. So please note that the blog is still going to be around, but in a different format. Lit-themed content will come through our main blog instead of being separated.

Readers subscribed to the Brave & Brass Book Blog feed will continue to get content from us when it is book-related. It is hoped that the phase-out process will be finished by June 2nd. For the few of you that didn’t want to see this change, so sorry! I hope that the scroll function works well for you, so that you can get directly to the content you want to read.

Personalize your Comments with Avatars
Would you like a customized avatar to appear next to the lovely comments that you create on our blog? We recently installed a plug-in in cooperation with Gravatar that does just that! By signing-up at the gravatar web site, you can upload an avatar that will be used whenever you make comments on our Blog. The avatar is associated with the e-mail address used when leaving comments. To sign up for your avatar, go to http://www.gravatar.com. Then be sure to come back to our blog and leave a test comment so you can check out the new flair!

Teen Crafts on Flickr

Click to enlarge!

Happy Summer everyone, and congrats on getting through all those book talks and school visits.

Are you a member of the Young Adult Library Services Association? Do you have opinions on what teens’ information needs are? What are the issues that teen librarians face? What needs to be addressed so that “teen librarianship” can progress as a profession? How can we support all types of library workers that serve teens? Is YALSA helping you support teenagers from a variety of social and class backgrounds?

Did any of these questions spark an interest in you? Then you might consider running for a leadership position within YALSA. Help ensure that YALSA continues to be an effective organization for teen librarians. Or maybe you think YALSA needs some improvement? Maybe you have ideas that will shake things up a bit…

I know it can be tough to step up to the plate and take a leadership role, especially due to the amount of time and resources that would need to be set aside for carrying out assignments and projects. You will be required to attend the ALA conferences, in addition to any other meetings required of the position. But someone has to do it. And if you feel that you can accurately represent the needs of teenagers and the librarians that serve them — then why not you? Why wouldn’t you be a good candidate?

The Young Adult Library Services Association is currently gathering candidates to run for the 2009 election. Positions open include:

• President-Elect (minimum of 2 candidates; 1 elected)
• Board Directors-at-Large (minimum of 4 candidates; 2 elected)
• 2011 Michael L Printz Committee (minimum of 8 candidates; 4 elected)
• 2011 Margaret A. Edwards Committee (minimum of 6 candidates; 3 elected)
• Division Councilor (minimum of 2 candidates, 1 elected)
• William C. Morris Committee - New Non-fic award. (minimum of 8 candidates; ? elected)
  

What would you do differently if you were in charge of YALSA Printz committee? If you were a YALSA Board member, what issues would you support for the organization?

To get more information on nominating yourself or someone else for an elected position, please visit YALSA wiki:
http://wikis.ala.org/yalsa/index.php/YALSA_Election_Information

Nominations need to be in ASAP, preferably before the nominating committee meets at the ALA annual conference in June 2008.

There you will find more detailed information and links to the nomination forms.

Please repost, thanks.

As a reader and frequent book store browser, I devote a degree of judgment towards book covers while downing an uppity-caffeinated beverage. When picking up an unfamiliar title, the presentation of a book is as important as appearing professional for a job interview. The book’s cover art introduces the reader to the story. Elements infused within the design, illustration, or photography heavily contribute towards the overall presentation and appeal. In fact, there are many times when a reader cannot recall the title or author, but is able to conjure a description of its cover. Once in a while, roles reverse and the consumer influences the cover. These titles become branded by the cover art due to momentous success i.e. Eragon, Twilight, Harry Potter. However, most titles receive a new makeover as the book transforms from hardcover to paperback to reprints, thereby creating a high expectation towards packaging.

Book cover art is a fine art as it attempts to attract its targeted audience. Those of us connected to the bookworld have a high regard for the efforts invested in printing high quality book covers, especially when we are booktalking titles to teens. Attractive and varied covers help us entice readers to expand their reading preferences. For publishers to package two different products with the same illustrations gives the impression of an impetuous company undermining current ethical standards. Whether copyright has been breached is not the immediate issue, rather consumers expect that their personal dollars are purchasing a unique product. To hinder the dystopian possibility that one day there may be several different titles displayed next to each other featuring the same cover art, please voice your opinions in the comments.

The Internet exists to teach us that we are never as obsessed as we think we are. There is always a more fanatical collector or expert on obscure 16mm film reels or paperback young adult novels, to show us we are but mere enthusiasts. On a recommendation from the YALSA listserv, I visited The Dairi Burger to read about the reissue of the execrable teen series Sweet Valley High. Witty and smart readers visit the site and demonstrate a remarkable memory of plots and characters that overwhelms my own. But we all have similar stories. Most of us read compulsively, sometimes under bedsheets with flashlights, and devoured books like cakes then and now. Some of those books were destructive to our impressionable psyches, but when we’re all grown up we hope they form a generational bond, a laugh, a deep roll of the eye or maybe even some critical analysis.
While the SV canon—and it is canonical, though sometimes flexible with fact and reality, with hundreds of titles and series within series—may seem benign and forgettable to most, Francine Pascal’s covert mission of normalizing repulsive, greedy, shallow, and extraordinarily sexist behavior has helped to socially condition most of her vulnerable young readers. At the outset of each book, Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, our heroic twins are always described in their perfect size six, tanned, sun-streaked blond glory, with eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean, even! What is intended to read variously as virtue, vivaciousness, ambition, magnanimity in the twins is really callowness, condescension, ruthlessness, self-righteousness. And what of the fat or single, LGBT folks, people of color, the poor? If they even exist in this world, they are tragically doomed or soon forgotten and they function as catalysts for the primary characters, eliciting pity and contempt.

This reissue is completely irresponsible and unnecessary. And the only reported edit is that Jessica and Elizabeth are now a perfect size four. I know that none of this is new, that we are all familiar with the evils of media for young people. Most likely children and teens today will not be interested in hoary Sweet Valley when they have young adult books like Gossip Girl, The A List, The Clique. The new offerings are mordantly self aware and cheeky and seem sometimes to have a hint of parody, even while they exist primarily to prop up the most garish and exclusive brands. In the SV books, characters are often kidnapped, raped, beaten, and tragically killed, but maintain a glazed innocence and mostly abstain from drinking, drugs, and sex, except for when it kills them to prevent others from indulging. At least the new naughty YA books aren’t pretenders.

And for illustrative purposes here are some choice quotations:

“There are a dozen fairy-tale princesses, Rose thought, and they’re going to make me a fairy-tale princess too.”

“He responded by turning his face to hers and kissing her hard, his arms crushing her against him, his mouth demanding what his body wanted to take.”

Lila, upon seeing Manuel: “I don’t know how she can date him. He’s so ethnic and working class.”

Contributed by Sarah Granville
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How does one celebrate the life, or rather death, of the undead? With the popularity of series such as Twilight, Vampire Kisses and Blue Bloods, throwing a vampire party is a great way to get teens excited about reading. But where to begin? In my mind, every successful party includes cake. And what better variety of cake to serve at a party devoted to blood suckers than red velvet? Even if you don’t have the budget to purchase a bakery cake, you can find red velvet cake mixes and mix it up yourself. If you are ambitious, there is a recipe in the February 2008 issue of Shojo Beat for a Vampire Knight Valentine’s cake that looks like it would be yummy anytime of year. Another option would be making cupcakes and then allowing each teen to decorate as they see fit with darkly colored sprinkles or icing. If you have access to Halloween cookie cutters, you could also decorate cookies in the shapes of coffins, tombstones, bats, or spider webs.

Music can also contribute to the success of a party. Stephenie Meyer has already done a lot of the work for us when it comes to selecting music for a vampire themed party. Begin with the playlists that can be found on her site and expand from there with additional music from those bands. The website allmusic.com can help you find other artists. Simply search for an artist and it will give you their influences, followers, and similar acts. Songs such as “Vampires Will Never Hurt You” and “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville” by My Chemical Romance and “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” by Concrete Blonde add an appropriately ghoulish atmosphere. Try having teens come up with their own vampy mix to share.

A few simple activities can tie the whole thing together. You could either make a quiz on general vampire lore or create separate quizzes for individual books, using each book as a prize. The most fun thing for the teens who are into vampires, is to make them a vampire for a day. Your local community theatre might have a volunteer who would be willing to come in and transform them into vampires. We had a staff member give people vampire bites on the neck using eye shadow and liner in shades of red, brown, blue and purple for appropriate bruising around the wound.

In my community, the majority of teens who love vampire stories tend to feel like they are alone in their interests. They are teens on the fringe, sometimes into the Goth and Emo scenes. Celebrating one of their passions can show them that they are not as alone as they think, and give them the chance to be outsiders together.

Opening Photo: be careful / Originally uploaded by girl interrupted. jess

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Post contributed by Sarah Granville

Sarah is the Teen Services Librarian at the Barberton Public Library in Barberton, Ohio. Sarah loves the new perspectives her teen customers bring her. Their enthusiasm helps keep her enthusiastic on rough days!

Contributed by Denise Ryan
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Right now I’m pairing new fiction with older books. Yup, right out there in valuable display space I’m putting elderly books with dated covers and silly titles like Fat, a Love Story (Barbara Wersba, 1987) and Secrets of the Shopping Mall (Richard Peck, 1979). But here’s the trick: Right next to these books I’m displaying hot new titles with similar themes. So, that’s the gimmick – old book, new book. How similar, yet how different! Why not read them both and compare?

For instance, with Fat, a Love Story, I’ve paired last year’s Huge by Sasha Paley. Both books are about weight, dieting, and love. I can’t keep Huge on the shelf, but Fat is really good too and it never moves. Never. The cover is just too…yesterday. (A girl with a bad haircut is eating a piece of cheesecake while a thinner couple drives by in a convertible. Back in the day, it was probably the coolest thing ever. Now? It looks like something your mother probably read.)

For a while now, I’ve been trying to get young patrons to read worthwhile older books, urging them to ignore the dreary decades-old covers in favor of plot, characters etc. But that’s been a doomed effort for the most part, and I’ve seen lots of patrons reject one edition of a book one minute, only to seize the exact same book – with a newer cover – the next.

So, I’m really excited that this “pairing” approach seems to be working. The kids still make fun of the unfashionable covers (that’s half the fun), but they’re taking the old books along with their newer counterparts. Somehow, the association between the two gives the older books credibility and they’re getting some attention again – just in time to avoid the “weed pile.”

Here is a short list of books I’ve paired, but possibilities are endless!

Theme: Social misfits
Freak (2007) by Marcella Pixley
The Seventh Grade Weirdo (1992) by Lee Wardlaw

Theme: Body image
Huge (2007) by Sasha Paley
Fat, A Love Story (1987) by Barbara Wersba

Theme: The mall
It’s a Mall World After All (2006) by Janette Rallison
Secrets of the Shopping Mall (1979) by Richard Peck

Theme: Sexual assault
Safe (2007) by Susan Shaw
Are You in the House Alone? (1976) by Richard Peck

Theme: Boarding school
A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003) by Libby Bray
And Both Were Young (1983) by Madeleine L’Engle

Theme: Future societies
The Declaration (2007) by Gemma Malley
The Vandal (1979) by Ann Schlee

Theme: Survival in the Alaskan wilderness
The Trap (2006) by John Smelcer
Death Walk (1991) by Walt Morey

Theme: Summer camp
Camp Rules (2007) by Jordan Roter
The Goats (1987) by Brock Cole

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Post contributed by Denise Ryan

Denise Ryan is a writer, a book reviewer, a YA librarian. She lives in Stamford, Connecticut where she’s currently reading One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke.

Yup.  Just two more weeks before April, which means Poetry Month is once again upon us.  Although I can’t write poetry to save my life I do love to read it.  It was this fact that was foremost on my mind last year when I planned my first Teen Poetry Program.  I wanted something low-key, educational but fun and settled on a kind of coffee house type program where teens could sip on coffee/tea and listen while others read their poetry outloud, slammed if they knew how, read someone elses poetry, then participated in a series of activities that would teach them some poetry skills. 

You can read all the details about the program on an old blog post.  We’re planning a similar event this year, however, we’ve invited a local published poet to come in and “open” the event.  If there was one thing I learned during my experience last year it was that poetry programs are a perfect opportunity to collaborate and network with your local high schools.  It was because of the poetry program that I managed to meet one of the school librarians and also an English teacher who offered her class extra credit for attending the event and extra points if they recited a poem.  If it wasn’t for her class I probably wouldn’t have had so many attend the program.  For some reason I always felt kind of down about that fact, that the only way we managed to get teens to come to our program was to essentially bribe them.  But looking back I realize that it’s all about perspective.  Despite how we got them through the door, they did come, they did have fun and I do believe that they brought something back from the experience. For me that is the very definition of a successful program.  Many of them were very shy in the beginning or acted too cool to read poetry in front of an audience but it only took a few brave souls and one amazing young lady who really knew how to slam to encourage the rest to step up.  Of course, the flavored coffee and chocolates probably helped too.

 Below is the slide presentation I used during the program.  Please feel free to use it, change it, as you like.  I found most of my activities from the IPL Teenspace poetry wiki but unfortuntately it doesn’t seem to be working right now so I can only provide the cached link. I would love to hear some ideas from our readers on various poetry programs, there are so many different ways to share and encourage a love of words and writing with teens.

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Post Contributed by Denise Ryan
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Every day, kids crowd around my desk to talk about Twilight, the novel by Stephanie Meyer about Bella, a teenage girl who moves to Forks, Washington and falls in love with Edward, a vampire who has been seventeen years old for more than a century now.

My screensaver, courtesy of my YA patrons, is a photo of a silver Volvo S60 R, the same kind that Edward drives. I receive emails from teenagers with addresses like “vampiregirl16″ and “edward4ever.” (Immediately, I know which “Edward” they’re talking about and it’s not a kid from town.)

Generally, these are girls around the age of 14, but not always. The kid who printed all the cast photos from the upcoming movie Twilight, based on the book, is a boy. He’s already planning a party at his house on opening night.

What is it about these books? How have they conquered popular culture? (Vampires were cool when I was a teenager too, although we were reading the Anne Rice series about Lestat and Louis.) Personally, I think it’s all about physicality and desire – desire for flesh – desire that is dangerous and must be quelled – desire that can kill.

Here, I’m talking of course of Edward’s desire for blood, but also of Bella’s desire for more ordinary human contact with the gorgeous guy she loves. In Twilight, both are potentially fatal; every time Bella and Edward get a bit too “hot n’ heavy,” they must break apart before Edward becomes too overcome with bloodlust and (literally) devours his girlfriend. The characters both crave and fear intimacy. In short, the book is full of sex without anyone ever actually having any – very much like the imaginations of many young teenagers!

If your patrons haven’t read the Twilight saga yet (there are three titles in the series: Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse), offer it to them. It will keep them busy for a while. Here’s a short list of other “Forbidden Fruit” fiction for readers who can’t get enough of vampires:

De La Cruz, Melissa: Blue Bloods

Hautman, Pete: Sweetblood

Klause, Annette Curtis: The Silver Kiss

Mead, Richelle: Vampire Academy

Moore, Christopher: You Suck: A love story

Rice, Anne: Interview with a Vampire

Sedgwick, Marcus: My Swordhand is Singing

Schreiber, Ellen: Vampire Kisses (with four sequels)

Vande Velde, Vivian: Companions of the Night

Westerfeld, Scott: Peeps

For more Vampire Fiction recommendations, visit the Teen Lib Wiki page about Vampire Romance Fiction!

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Post Contributed by Denise Ryan

Introducing one of our new bloggers for the Brave & Brass Blog! Denise Ryan is a writer, a book reviewer, a YA librarian. She lives in Stamford, Connecticut where she’s currently reading One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke. Denise can be contacted at niseryan @ hotmail.com.