Last month I started glomming Lorraine Heath’s books: fortunately for me she has a relatively small backlist. I had a bit of good timing, in that she had just released a new book for Avon’s young adult line: Samantha and the Cowboy. As with anyone in glom-mode, I snatched it up and read it. Samantha…
Mia Thermopolis (full name: Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo) is a fourteen-year-old, vegetarian, environmentalist, New-York-City-residing European princess. It has only been a few months since Mia learned she was heir to the throne of Genovia, and since she found this out, her life has been one catastrophe after the next. In order that she might…
When I am cleaning up the kitchen for what seems like the millionth time or coaxing a reluctant child to do her homework, I remind myself that parenting has its perks. Topping the list for me is the joy of introducing my children to books I loved as a little girl. Over twenty years ago…
When I was in fourth grade, I had opportunity to take home some books that were being discarded from a local bookstore. When I picked up Norma Fox Mazer’s When We First Met, I thought, what the heck? Seventeen years later, I’m still glad I did. Jenny Pennoyer is a pretty normal seventeen-year-old. She works…
I’m extremely partial to young adult fiction. I am, of course, a children’s librarian, so that’s not surprising, but I don’t think that you have to be a young adult or a young adult librarian to enjoy YA literature. It’s quite often well written, but almost never pretentious. It often deals with serious subjects or…
There is something about adolescence, those teenage years, that marks you and leaves its brand for life. It’s a time of an enormous breadth of feeling; breathless excitement, staggering humiliation, quivering expectancy. When you’re in it, it absorbs you, and when you’re past it, you never quite forget. Beverly Cleary paints a vivid portrait of…
Companions of the Night has a little bit of everything: action, adventure, suspense, and romance. It is written at the young adult level, so the gore and sensuality are more subdued, but it is fast-paced and interesting enough to keep any adult turning the pages. Kerry Nowicki is sixteen and the de facto caretaker of…
The closest I ever came to reading a teen romance was years ago, when I worked my way through the Beany Malone books. Since then it’s been a steady diet of the grown-up stuff. Thus when I received this book, I really didn’t know what to make of it. Fortunately (in this instance, at least),…