YALSA drops it's Best fiction for Teens list like it's hot! And it is!

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) has announced their best of lists.  You can read their best fiction list here and their best graphic novels list here.  Below are their top teen fiction books and our call numbers.  Check them out!

Carson, Rae. The Girl of Fire and Thorns YP FIC CARSON

Cohen, Joshua C. Leverage YP FIC COHEN

King, A.S. Everybody Sees the Ants YP FIC KING

McCall, Guadalupe Garcia. Under the Mesquite YP FIC MCCALL

Myracle, Lauren. Shine YP FIC MYRACLE

Ness, Patrick. A Monster Calls. Illus by Jim Kay YP FIC NESS

Sepetys, Ruta. Between Shades of Gray YP FIC SEPETYS

Stiefvater, Maggie. The Scorpio Races YP FIC STIEFVAT

Taylor, Laini. Daughter of Smoke and Bone  YP FIC TAYLOR

Zarr, Sara. How to Save a Life YP FIC ZARR

Walter Dean Myers named National Ambassador for Young People's Literature

But not everyone is happy about it.

Commentator and former public school teacher, Alexander Nazaryan has written a scathing rebuke of the choice in a blog for the New York Daily News, calling Myers work 'insipid'.  He claims that all Myer's work does is reflect the worst of life and failing to inspire or elevate beyond it.  Instead he believes kids and teens should be reading the classics such as  Homer's The Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid. However, he doesn't ever say why kids and teens couldn't or shouldn't read both classics and contemporary literature, which is something that Myers can do in his role as ambassador. The fact that Myer’s spends a great deal of his time traveling to juvenile halls, halfways houses, inner city schools, and many other places where teens need inspiration to encourage reading and education, shows that he already is an ambassador.

As a young adult librarian I have read many of Myer’s novels and personally think that Nazaryan is not just off base, but insultingly so.  The off repeated refrain that teens need to read the classics and not the ‘trash’ that they enjoy is a classic exercise in faulty reasoning. Of course teens should read classic literature, but if it is not preceded by a love of reading, it is doomed to fail.  How do you build a love of reading, how about by encouraging teens to read authors they already love? 

You can read Nazaryan’s missive here and decide for yourself if Myer's is the best choice for ambassador.  To help listen to this NPR interview with Myers himself here. Also, check out his wonderful books in our childrens, young adult, and biography sections.  Ask a librarian and he or she will gladly help you find our full holdings of his titles.

Maoh: Juvenile Remix by Megumi Osuga YP FIC OSUGA

Ando blends in.  He learned at a very young age the Japanese idiom “the hammer that sticks up, gets nailed down first,” was true.  Thus, he relies on his not popular/not unpopular enough for daily beatings status and tries to always have the same exact views and interests as his friends.  Everything changes when the Grasshoppers show up.  A group of young vigilantes pledged to saving the city led by a charismatic leader named Inukai, the Grasshoppers have a dark side that scares Ando.  This fear and admiration lead Ando to start standing up for himself and others and using his long secret gift: the power to make others say whatever he is thinking.  Unfortunately, his new found resolve and long hidden power also put him directly in the sight of the Grasshoppers and in the line of fire!

This is an exciting new series.  It has very dynamic and exciting art (however some of the female designs are gratuitously fan service to a degree that birders on self-parody) and I quite like the character design.  The art is nicely detailed and it feels like a premium title.  The story has a very Deathnote feel, special powers, mysterious deaths, teen violence just under the surface of a normal city, etc., but that’s not a bad thing.  This manga may not be the most unique I’ve read, but it moves fast, has excellent art, and has a truly intriguing mystery. The main character is a very believable coward.  I certainly wouldn’t want to get brutally beaten for sticking up for fellow classmates and I DEFINITELY wouldn’t tell my high school chums that I have Special Secret Powers!  It was one of the better examples of reluctant hero that I’ve seen in manga in a while and I hope the series can keep up the realistic character growth, because it really helps ground the more fantastic elements.  Check it out otaku, it might become your new favorite series!

Big Questions, or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand is it Anyway? by Anders Nilsen YP FIC NILSEN

A staggering, surreal fable in which birds, an owl, a snake, a bomb, a crazed pilot, and an idiot struggle with Big Questions and try not to die too horribly while pondering them.

Asmomatognosia is a disorder in which your brain doesn’t recognize the sensation of one or more limbs. It’s a fitting subtitle to this book in which most every central character loses one’s self or life searching for a greater meaning. This is a 600 page epic of over 15 years work.  The art style is haunting and stark.  Nilsen’s simple designs make his largely animal protagonists indistinguishable from each other, but this has a larger thematic point.  This book uses animals to look at the deepest philosophical questions humankind face, but as the title suggests, this tome contains big questions not big answers. A must read for fans of comics as an artistic medium, but probably a little dry and offbeat for fans of the average manga or superhero comic.  Check it out and give it a chance, it just might wrinkle your brain a bit!

Mangaman by Barry Lyga Illustrated by Colleen Doran YP FIC LYGA

Ryoko Kiyama is not your typical transfer student.  He isn’t from Japan.  He’s from Japanese comics.  Now he’s stuck in a world that he doesn’t understand, a world that fears and distrusts him: high school.   When he meets Marissa Montaigne he falls in love and has a dilemma: go home or stay with Marissa. 

This is a great concept.  Eastern comics meeting ‘realistic’ Western comics.  Ryoko has all the manga clichés we know and love: speed lines, giant sweat drops, deformed features in response to emotion, etc.  You can see how seeing these things from a person in real life would be very upsetting.  All this would make for a fun examination of some of manga’s sillier tropes, but Lyga does more with this story.  He uses it to examine the fabric of reality and the nature of the comic medium.  This is an absolute must read for manga fans and I think non-manga fans will enjoy it as a parody of manga.