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 >>>