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?

————————–
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

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!

* * *

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
——————————————
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 >>>

Post Contributed by Denise Ryan
———————————————–

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!

 —————————————————-
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.

In my place of work, there is a centralized fund used to purchase teen materials for the branch libraries and those purchases are usually based on starred reviews in journals. Unfortunately, these starred books tend to be the types of materials that teens in my community are not interested in. Instead, they hunger for urban books, high-interest non-fiction, and manga. There are also requests for the best sellers that don’t necessarily get starred book reviews, such as James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series. And I also have some classic readers that are gearing up for college.

Thankfully, I have an infill budget that can be used to build the collection beyond starred booklists. Herein lies the challenge. With a modest amount of infill money, where should you start? Should the money go towards building a core collection? This can be especially pertinent if the collection is lacking core materials and balanced genres. Should it be spent on high-interest materials that will fly of the shelves? The missing college-bound classics that a handful of teens are requesting? Best sellers that aren’t stocked by the publication date because they weren’t starred in a review journal? Selection lists from the Young Adult Library Services Association? As a children’s/teen librarian with a modest budget, I must make the best of the allocated funds to provide teens with a balanced collection.

Here’s what I did to meet this challenge:

The first year I worked here, I purchased core materials for the collection. Authors such as Sharon Flake, Sharon Draper, Walter Dean Myers, and Jaqueline Woodson were missing, possibly because they were initially available but never returned. To get ideas for what makes a core collection in an urban library,I browsed book blogs on the internet, recommended reading lists on Amazon.com, and articles published by YALS and VOYA. I spent the remaining money on high-interest materials and manga. Teens in the library eagerly provided me with a list of manga series to order. And YALSA’s Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers is an excellent resource when buying high-interest materials for teens.

During year two, I have focused on acquiring urban books, which includes the Bluford High Series and the Kimani Tru Series. I’ve also run into a dilemma with the manga collection, in which most of the material acquired from year one is permanently missing. In other words, about 40% of the manga has been stolen. At this point I had to decide between purchasing new manga series that our animanga club has suggested, and reordering missing titles. I chose to acquire the new series and year three collection money may focus on missing titles.

At the end of the budget year, I plan to use YALSA’s Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults and Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers to get up to date with new high-interest materials. I usually poke around in the other YALSA selection lists too, including Great Graphic Novels for teens.

I think the key to building any collection is to have a game plan and teens should be involved in the process of developing the plan. I based the way I built the collection on the interests of teens in the community. I did surveys that asked about their favorites subjects and I also take notes from reader’s advisory interactions. That’s how I found out that urban books, high interest fic and non-fic, and manga are the materials most likely to be checked out.

With a modest budget, you can’t have the perfect teen collection. You can only build towards it. So you have to make decisions about what aspect must be focused on. I chose high-interest materials because I want the books to be read. But I balanced out that focus by purchasing core authors that teens from the inner-city would be required to read for book reports or just because their friends told them about it!

Resources

Core Collection
YALSA’s Outstanding Books for the College Bound

Urban books for Teens
Crazy Quilts Blog - 2007 list for teens of color
Crazy Quilts Blog - 2006 lists

Selection Lists
YALSA Selection List

Manga
TokyoPop
DelRay

Addendum: Readers, if you have any good resources you use for collection development, please share!

During our peak business hours on any day of the week, it’s common for a teen to meander up to the circ desk every 5 min to inform me of the boredom or new drama in their lives. What begins as a game can quickly become distracting for the patron I’m currently assisting. I’m sure that you too are familiar with the various ways harmless teen behavior becomes disruptive or escalates to more serious issues. In an attempt to create a positive environment for teens to interact outside of programs, I struggle to find the right type of activity to sustain their interest as well as occupy a good amount of their spare time. Because it’s hard to break into conversation with some teens, I’d like to share a few practices I’ve tried which have shown to influence constructive relationships between teens and books as well as teens and myself.

When displaying “Pep Rally” found in Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems by John Grandits, I’m greeted with gaffaws as teens gaze upon the wry stick figured cheerleader illustration. The word ‘air’ fits within a large O for a head, ‘ridiculously thin waist’ bends to form the torso, ‘bOObs’ cross the mid-section, and ’stupid little skirt’ collapses upon itself as it swishes side-to-side. In this collection of 30+ poems, language acrobats across pages, zig-zaging, and curling as hair might on a “Bad Hair Day.” These clever word pictures accompany the opinions of a mistrusting high school teen who eventually learns to confide in someone like “Andrea, a cheerleader who turned out to be a regular person- annoyingly pretty, but a regular person.” It doesn’t matter if teens read all of the poems, for they just might open up towards you.

You can use prompts found in the Write Brain Workbook: 366 Exercises to Liberate Your Writing by Bonnie Neubauer to get teens thinking outside of typical first person stories. On a strip of paper type “Without looking down, describe what, if your feet had eyes, they’d see right now” or other various excerpts to litter your teen area, create a bulletin board display, or slip them inside books during checkout.

Hopefully you’ve picked up a few good hints to assist you in your interactions with teens. As I discover other helpful practices, I’ll give ya a holla and share. For more inspiration, follow these links: Immersed in Verse: An Informative, Slightly Irreverant & Totally Tremendous Guide to Living the Poet’s Life by Alan Wolf OR Poetry is Contagious: How I Teach My Students to Write Award-Winning Poetry by Betsey Coleman.