Teen/YA

Several years ago I started noticing references to a new YA novel that was enjoying sensational sales, especially among adolescent girls.  As months passed, excitement ...

Peak by Roland Smith.  Harcourt: 2007, 246 pages.  Reading Level: Middle Grades, ages 10-12 Recommended for: Ages 10-12 and up One-line summary: Fourteen-year-old Peak Marcello's ...

Escaping the Tiger by Laura Manivong. HarperCollins, 2010. 210 pages. Reading Level: Middle Grades, ages 12-14 Recommended for: Ages 15-18 Bottom line: The experience of ...

Once upon a time there was no such thing as YA in the publishing world.  That may be because there was no such thing as ...

Few literary cries have echoed down the ages as persistently as that one: the ultimate impassioned plea from the ultimate gothic romance, which stands as ...

“Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for ...

The Perilous Gard, by Elizabeth Marie Pope.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001, 288.  Age/interest level 12-up. Reading Level: Teens/Young Adults Recommended for: Ages 15-18 Bottom line: ...

The Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud: The Amulet of Samarkand (Hyperion/Miramax, 2003), The Golem's Eye (2004), Ptolemy's Gate (2005). Reading Level: Young Adult, ages 12-14 ...

The Ring of Solomon, by Jonathan Stroud.  Hyperion/Disney, 2010, 398 pages.  Reading level: Middle grades, 10-12 Recommended for: Ages 12-14 One-line Summary: The witty narrator ...

Percy Jackson and the Olympians, by Rick Riordan: The Lightning Thief (Hyperion/Miramax,2005), The Sea of Monsters (2006), The Titan's Curse (2007), The Battle of the ...

The Book Thief, a literary novel for teens and adults, explores Nazi Germany and the Holocaust through the eyes of a child, in prose that ...

Annexed is the fictionalized story of Peter van Pels, Anne Frank's fellow inmate, who offers a moving account of the Holocaust for teens, but no ...

Part One. Part Two. What's the problem with a glut of grim, futurist fiction on the YA bookshelves? Maybe nothing. Youth is resilient, and most ...

(Find Part One here) Besides being uniformly grim, there are other traits the current crop of dystopian novels share: A post-apocalyptic future--the story opens after ...

Part One How's this for a scenario: In the future, the USA has been divided into thirteen districts, and the most prosperous oppresses all the ...