eMusic Bookshelf
Young Adult Books Adults Will Want to Read
Sure, your dog-eared Sweet Valley Highs were thrilling in middle school, but chances are they don’t seem quite as interesting now that you’re a card-carrying adult. Fortunately, young-adult fiction has come a long way in the past two decades. The best YA books today are smart without being dogmatic, literary yet entertaining, relevant to the teenage experience but not as singularly issue-driven as an After-School Special. Even if you no longer have to worry about zits or embarrassing younger siblings or who to sit with in the lunchroom, you would be remiss to ignore the current wave of YA books, many of which are great works of literature in their own right — but just as fun as the books you devoured back in the day.
On the Required Reading for Everybody list: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, a National Book Award-winning, Revolutionary War-era novel about a child slave who is held prisoner to brutal experiments in the name of science and “rational philosophy.” Then there’s the post-apocalyptic thriller The Dead and the Gone, Susan Beth Pfeffer’s terrifying account of a cataclysmic event that has brought the moon closer to Earth, catapulting the entire planet into an emergency state, and leaving a New York teenager to fend for his life and care for his family.
Grownups will find plenty of parallels to the social anxieties of adult life in books like Speak and Stargirl, which revisit themes of fitting in and finding security amid the high school food chain. Though the territory is certainly familiar, each offers a fresh perspective and a poignant narrative about the ways a vicious peer group can arbitrarily decide a teenager’s fate and how, in some cases, fighting against the conforming masses can pay off.
Other books here deal with family, love and personal responsibility, tropes that span all stages of life. In the moving novella The First Part Last, a teenage boy must decide what to do about a pregnant girlfriend. Lock and Key’s protagonist Ruby is taken from a broken home with an alcoholic mother to live with an estranged, wealthy sister. In this new setting Ruby has to define herself on her own terms for the first time.
Good YA novels can transcend their bookstore classification and appeal to all readers. Even when they’re presented in literary terms, topics like cliques, gossip, friends and frenemies, drugs and alcohol, virginity and the lack thereof are a guilty pleasure — especially when you’ve safely made it through the “young” part of adulthood.
-
Lock and Key
- Written by
-
Sarah Dessen
- Narrated By
-
Rebecca Soler
While other authors of fiction for teenage girls glorify Birkin bags or self-abasement in the face of sexy vampires, Sarah Dessen keeps it real. She has built a loyal following for her savvy, relatable books about ordinary girls faced with compelling dilemmas. In this, Dessen's latest novel, Ruby is whisked away from life as she knows it when her mother, an abusive alcoholic, abandons her, and her estranged sister Cora insists she moves in. Cora, who grew up with Ruby but escaped their difficult home for college, is now married to a wealthy internet entrepreneur who lavishes Ruby with a fancy new bedroom, new clothes and admission to a tony day school. But Ruby has trouble leaving her old life, burnout friends and her own substance issues behind and she has even more difficulty trusting that her sudden luck will last. In Ruby and Cora, Dessen creates sympathetic characters who struggle to make a fresh start while staying connected to their complicated past.
-
The First Part Last
- Written by
-
Angela Johnson
- Narrated By
-
Khalipa Oldjohn
On his 16th birthday, between the cheesefries and the cake, Bobby’s girlfriend Nia announces she’s pregnant. The inevitable debate begins — should they keep the baby, give it up for adoption or should she have an abortion? While Bobby begins to accept the responsibility, turning away from his Game Boy, college plans and his carefree childless buddies, Nia starts to have doubts, even as her pregnancy advances. Nia’s parents wonder if it would be better to send her away from the stresses of the city until she has the baby but Bobby doesn’t want to let her go. Despite their best efforts, neither Bobby nor Nia can prepare for the ultimate outcome. In spare, lyrical prose, Johnson convincingly acts as a ventriloquist for a sensitive and earnest teenage boy facing an unexpected but life-changing situation. And though Bobby’s is an age-old dilemma, emotionally honest writing gives his story surprising warmth and conviction.
-
Speak
- Written by
-
Laurie Halse Anderson
- Narrated By
-
Mandy Siegfried
Anderson perfectly captures the crisis of the outcast teen in her widely lauded debut novel. Melinda's high school career goes down the drain before it even starts when she calls the cops at a summer house party. Since then, her friends have refused to talk to her and she has become the object of ridicule across the school. Despairing, she retreats into an interior world and refuses to speak, expressing herself only through her artwork. While classmates see her as a freaky goody-goody she is in reality a snarky, self-aware teen with plenty of opinions about her classmates, teachers and home life. But Melinda could redeem herself if she could explain what really happened that night — if only she could force herself to accept the truth. As Melinda struggles to come to terms with her victimhood, Speak proves an incisive yet ultimately hopeful meditation on the cruelty — and stupidity — of crowds.
-
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1
- Written by
-
M.T. Anderson
- Narrated By
-
Peter Francis James
In the first volume of a brilliant historical series, Octavian, the son of an African princess, is raised in a New England home where a group of rational philosophers observe his every move. Though he and his mother are treated to fine clothes and a classical education, it's far from a conventional upbringing: everyone in the house is referred to by number, and Octavian is often asked to perform and parade himself in front of guests. As Octavian gets older, the philosophers’ bizarre experiments grow increasingly sadistic, and he comes to recognize that he is, in fact, a slave caught in a sinister eugenics study. Then the Revolutionary War breaks out and Octavian finds his chance to escape. M.T. Anderson’s seamless narrative weaves letters and diary entries into Octavian’s story, evoking the 18th century in fine detail. Like Anderson’s previous YA novel Feed, The Astonishing Life is a masterful example of genre fiction — a story that rivets, provokes and entertains while almost stealthily exploring profound philosophical questions.
-
Stargirl
- Written by
-
Jerry Spinelli
- Narrated By
-
John H. Ritter
Rather than rehashing the usual YA tropes of teenage angst and alienation, Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl cleverly distills the high school experience into a charming allegory. A sophomore new to Mica High, Stargirl is a quirky outsider. Like everyone else in town Leo Borlock can’t help but notice her cheerfully making the rounds with her ukelele and her pet rat Cinnamon as she cheerfully sings birthday songs in the cafeteria and compassionately reaches out to assist people in their small community. Stargirl quickly becomes an It girl of sorts and Leo falls hard for her, but such nonconformity, celebrated by some, eventually brings out the hostility in others. This is high school, after all, a social institution that thrives on intolerance for uniqueness. Leo has to choose between his first love and his own quickly plummeting social status, and here Spinelli takes his deceptively simple morality tale to a painfully real conclusion.
-
The Dead and the Gone
- Written by
-
Susan Beth Pfeffer
- Narrated By
-
Robertson Dean
Forget about prom — in this companion novel to Pfeffer’s Life as We Knew It, the world is on the brink of collapse and a teenaged protagonist wonders how he will survive. New York high-schooler Alex Morales is going about his business when an earth-shaking astrological event knocks the moon closer to Earth, thereby throwing the entire planet out of balance. With Alex’s father away in Puerto Rico and his mother called to the hospital where she works to assist, Alex is left alone to take care of his younger sisters Briana and Julie. Meanwhile massive flooding, rioting and looting breaks out in the streets and a shortage of money and supplies forces a state of emergency. Alex begins to wonder if his parents have been swept away forever and how they will survive as a family on their own. Pfeffer’s bone-chilling novel charts Alex’s fight to stay optimistic in the bleakest of situations.
© 2008 Muze Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved.