BOOK RIOT

I think the young adult books that spoke to you when you were 11 and pre-pubescent (awful word; we now call it tween, which is possibly more awful) form your adult tastes. For me it was Madeline L’ Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time with a side of Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion. It was a direct path from here into fantasy, sci-fi, adventure stories and animals.

Give me some Call It Courage about a cannibal island or Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf. Also The Yearling. A Separate Peace. Charlotte’s Web. The Phantom Tollbooth. And now I’m re-reading these things.

Why do this, when there are so much great new books to discover? 1) I have kids and they are just getting into the American Y.A. canon, and 2) I believe T.S. Eliot when he said in Little Gidding (which I learned is a place, and not as I had thought, a little girl), “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.

“

—	Reading Young Adult Literature in Middle Age

Potential Husbands from YA Fantasy: A Comparison Chart

There’s a lot more where this came from! See the rest at Book Riot.

Can you name authors who had 3 or more film adaptations of their work made? Come play Name Those Authors! and enter to win a copy of TAKEN by Erin Bowman.

Eager writers will be able to meet the authors at BEA, local libraries, and non-profit writing centers, like Philly’s Mighty Writers and Chicago’s 826. These are all free, one-on-one workshops they’re offering, with the goal to give back the writing community. They’ll give talks, answer questions, and leave young writers feeling pretty psyched.

“

—	Four YA Authors Hit the Road on the “Young Authors Give Back Tour” This Summer

Revenge Stories: A Reading List

We asked you to share your favorite stories with characters seeking vengeance against those who have done wrong. They take things into their own hands, and they make the wrongs right again. Here are the titles you shared:

Medea by Euripides

Titus Andronicus and Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Countess Orczy

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

Acts of Revision by Martyn Bedford

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Revenge by Stephen Fry

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison

Atonement by Ian McEwan

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

The Taker by Alma Katsu

“Reeling for the Empire” in Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

The Mistress’s Revenge by Tamar Cohen

The Sun Sword Series by Michelle West

The Kate Daniels Series by Ilona Andrews

What’d we miss?

Giveaway: SCARLET Gift Box!

Genre Kryptonite: LGBT Young Adult Novels

Pick your next reading with the mini-reviews in Buy, Borrow, Bypass!

Bella “hates it” on this campus. She says it’s too hot here and that “you guys don’t offer enough night courses for me to be full-time.” I asked why she was unable to attend classes during the day; she dodged the question but muttered something unintelligible about her boyfriend. I asked if another school appealed to her more, but she said she would “follow him wherever because my chest caves in like every two minutes when we’re not together.” (She learned this when he took a soul-searching trip to Italy without her.) I referred her to the counseling center to work on what sounds like unhealthy attachment and Student Health to get answers regarding the chest-caving-in thing. Considering a two-year college that caters to students with non-traditional needs.

“

—	Advising Notes: The YA Character Sessions

Scarlet is on her own and determined to find her missing grandmother….then she crosses paths with Cinder (hello, cyborg Cinderella!). Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles roll on with SCARLET.