Say you're writing a book about a teenage boy. You sit down, close your eyes, and start free-associating:
"Teenage boy. What do I think when I think teenage boy. Boners. Boners for sure, yeah. Aspirations. 'Why are my parents such idiots?' Okay, what else... stuck at home, but almost ready to fly away... good, good... Impatient for more autonomy, afraid of what he might do with it. Poor decision maker. Self-absorbed, defensive. Uncommunicative, distrustful. Wow. Teenage boys are kind of a-holes most of the time, aren't they?"
And I think it's this kind of honest introspection that has led to many of the most believable teenage boy narrators in realistic YA fiction of late. You've heard of the Unreliable Narrator? Well, I'm calling these kids the (Mostly) Unlikeable Narrator.
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(ooh, new paperback cover). And 
What did you think of this book?
, explained, 
by the author. And I know what is a book with a teenage protagonist who endures a terrible, traumatic experience. Although usually those are girls. It can be rough these days to be a girl in a YA non-fantasy novel. You might get 
, or 
, or 
, or 
, or 
or 
, and you will almost certainly be 
. I even know horror. I have read a lot of horror, especially when I was a very young person, and very unsure about things.
, who enjoy truly odd stuff like 
and 
and then wonder why there aren't more books like those.
is sitting on my to-read pile; I just finished Michael Grant's 
last night: plus we're listening to Mike Lupica's 
in the car, and holy god - not since I took one for the team and listened to 
, is what inspired the title of this post. By the way, if you have food issues, don't click that link, just watch them perform on Letterman, below.
? Of course you have. How would Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler react to having her files transcribed into database entries, so that they could be searched, shuffled, and read... by strangers?
, edited by Jon Scieszka, with stories by Mac Barnett, Eoin Colfer, Christopher Paul Curtis, Kate DiCamillo (admitted to the clubhouse on the condition that her contribution be epistolary in nature), Paul Feig, Jack Gantos, Jeff Kinney, David Lubar, Adam Rex, and David Yoo
was plain red with that little silhouette of a dog upside-down, and that told you that the book was possibly old-fashioned but definitely unexpected on the inside. The cover of boom! is the friendliest orange linen, with big lower-case letters spelling out the title and the author's name, and a cute lil' rocket done in nice thick lines. You just want to pick it up and put it in your pocket. Of course, I said the same thing about 
, which I find especially intriguing because it intrigues my 15 year old friend N, who usually restricts his reading to game guides... to David Ezra Stein's 
. The title alone tells you that this book is going to be a mega hit at storytimes for preschoolers on up. My son Zhou read it to us this morning - it's a star!
-- give me airships and gasmasks and zombies! (Seriously, is anyone but me getting sick of that stuff? Classic literature - Now Enriched with Humorous Gore! - it was funny once, maybe twice. I've never seen a better argument for maintaining the copyright on great-granddad's novels than 
. Ooo, cranky on a Friday, aren't we?)
, aka 
. So let me just get that out of the way. If you enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire, if you were not so distracted by its images of radiant children amid filthy squalor and nearly hopeless generational poverty that you were unable to enjoy the story, you will appreciate this book. 
if you want to know which one).
and 
.
just got handed their papers.
.
? I liked Rapunzel's Revenge. I voted for it for 
kind of guy, or a 
? Who cares if it gets hard to tell one book from another - that series is a comfortable, familiar choice for just about any second grader who walks in the joint. If I can't sell him on 
, I'll settle on handing him Magic Tree House.
by Patrick Carman. Squirrels in clothes. Cute? You betcha.
by Jessica Harper and 
by Charise Mericle Harper. Thank you, ladies, for having the same last name, because I see a lot of cross-pollination between these titles. A girl likes one, chances are she'll like the other.
by Melissa Moss. Page layouts chock-full of color drawings, lists, captions, speech bubbles, and step-by-step instructions for experiments... DANG.
. This time, Frankie is building a soapbox racer so that he can move up a rank in Possum Scouts. This is high-quality writing and drawing for the sophisticated younger reader.
and 
into that blender, push Pulse, and you might end up with something salty and sharp and entirely without nutritional value - the kind of cocktail that makes you feel like you're maybe going to sneeze and giggle at the same time. If that sounds good to you, you'll like The Sheriff of Yrnameer. If not, definitely you won't.
fans that they are, they are SOOOO hungry for funny adventure. So far, listening to the audio version in the car, they are alternately spellbound and laughing like something is actually tickling them.
with 
.
, but 
unreservedly (
," and my son said, "Babymouse! Well then you'll love 
!"
. I like how the pages are arranged, because it says, "I quickly peeked around the corner and then I saw..." and then you have to turn the page before you can see what he actually saw! And I would give it 5 stars because I like the story too. It seems really fictional. It's not funny so far, and not scary, and I like the picture on the front, because it tells you you're in New York and there's a dinosaur inside.
, but now I'm stuck on Jack Stalwart. Lightning Thief was a little hard, I think I'll practice on some more Jack Stalwart, and then I'll go back to Lightning Thief and see if my practice has paid off. Now I'm out of words. Words are buzzing through my head, I don't know which ones to use.
. Let's just say that the Hardy Boys are, well, great, and they start off as two kids of a famous detective. Usually he's away on other cases that somehow get connected to their case. There's always something new, something extra thrown in to the adventure. 
. Can you bring me 
home from work? 
for children, this book follows two siblings through a couple of days in an innocuous, unnamed suburban town that is new to them. There are perils - an old lady wants to eat them and the town librarian is untrustworthy. Notably, their own parents (who are not really their parents) want to get rid of them. Yes, it's Hansel & Gretel in the Twenty-first Century.
, Westerfeld's 
(and, naturally, Kenneth Oppel's 
), and the forthcoming 
to mind (GOD I love that book). We've got a 
witch type, a hands-free Vulcan mind meld, and Jedi mind tricks that even come complete with a seductive Dark Side. 
by 
stories or the Willoughbys at the beginning of 
are... unfortunate. 
. Or the 
kids. Heck, think of 
or the 
. They don't always agree, and sometimes a fit is pitched, but as far as I'm concerned, there's your verisimilitude. No hair-pulling required. 
-y book, a 
book, an avowedly 
book, featuring four children who discover a wall that works magic, and who must figure out how to use it and what it can do. Once they've got that sorted, the next step for each kid is to decide - what to wish for. What's YOUR heart's desire? Hard to say? Try making that decision when you're six. 
! The entire thing may well be an hallucination... dun dun DUNN! Maybe it says something about me - but also I think it says something about 
- parents schedule him for medical dismemberment
- becomes undead after having been doused with Mad Scientist Juice
) - her brain is transplanted into a supermodel's body
and 
twenty years ago, and who gradually introduced me to the hard stuff: 
, 
, 
.
, with green (a good choice) and I had to confess, when I first saw the yellow in the Lunch Lady books, I kind of winced. Pee-colored accents? Really? In a book with 'lunch' in the title? Well here is me being wrong. The yellow is bright and lemony, and I asked my 8-year-old, and he said that pee never crossed his mind when he was reading the books. Which has got to be some kind of record. 
for third graders, without the Spanglish. What busts this book to a higher level is Eric Wight's extremely confident pen and ink art. You can tell that he never has to stop and think before jetting Frankie off to a new setting - "Can I draw stalactites? Oops, how am I on trucks?" Gives the whole book a sort of... muscular vibe.
kind of way). The layout is readable but less programmed than in Stinky - kids can find their own path through some of these pages. And I'm going to stop gushing about the color. I am. After this: A rainbow of mid-tones! Underappreciated purples and browns! Excellent green accents! Somebody give this book an award.
is one of the most beautiful books I've ever had the good fortune to hold in my hands. 
, my go-to book at Iditarod time, and so I knew he could do landscape and, well, fur, which is not as easy as it sounds. But the colors in Little Devils make me want to go to Tasmania. The faces of the animals are alive and expressive. And, unlike some accomplished realistic painters (
), there's real movement to these paintings. 
hit the shelves this year. Many, if not most, of these books have been inspiring and beautiful. Many, if not most, have made me cry.
or try to explain to them the unique perspective represented by former astronaut Alan Bean's paintings in 
.
, 
, 
, and, er, 
) will know that the man researches like a maniac. 
is the one that I remember most clearly. And they had it all wrong, it’s really funny to see all that. Presumably, my stuff will be all wrong.
as Q's mom and 
is similarly sinuous, plot-wise, and also works in missing parents, a boy-girl team, and an overall sense of Trust No-one. Any kid who goes for that series will lap up 
's set in the White House!), groovy rock-star perks (Q can get tickets to the hottest show in town for people who help them), and, most of all, quick-witted cool kids who can think for themselves put this book right up there with the 
and other "realistic" adventure novels such as 
and the 
.
.
or 
? No. I am not. That was a rhetorical question by the way.
). Nowadays, romance novels feature women who are just as strong as, and on equal social footing with, the men, but in 
, the next book in the series, has just been published.
, will be out in early October.
, edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci
- AS IF YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT).
The first story is about what would happen if you were at ComicCon? and you were a Klingon? and you got real hammered and you woke up with your pants off in a room with a Jedi? You MAY have had to have seen the Seth-Rogen-on-Seth-Rogen fight scene in 
to truly grok the matter-antimatter reaction that such a coupling implies.
, and I'm using all the same references again. 
devotees, if I can get them past the dragon thing) coming back for more. In a sidebar, Vernon writes, "A school of potato salad can skeletonize a cow in under two weeks, assuming that the cow doesn't get bored and move."
, with pages of panels carrying the action in some places and pages of text doing the bulk of the work. There could be more graphic passages, I have to say. 
.
, 
), but in this case, the choice of grass green as a highlight color keeps that from happening, and it's a technique that is particularly appropriate and effective in the undersea scenes. The vertical panels that show the sinuous Edward diving or rising to the surface are unusually lovely. Page layouts are varied and interesting, but still quite simple and easy to follow.
with bated breath!
