Michael Schofield’s nonfiction account of his daughter’s schizophrenia has similar appeal to titles that have drawn teen readers in the past. Think Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar and perhaps especially Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction by David Scheff. Next week I will [...]
Bryan Mealer’s exploration of football and poverty in one small Florida town brings to mind other books about high school sports, such as Friday Night Lights and Michael D’Orso’s Eagle Blue. You probably know Mealer’s previous work, even if you don’t recognize the name. He wrote The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind with William Kamkwamba, [...]
Tom Reiss’s childhood fascination with the novels of Alexandre Dumas led him to read Dumas’s memoirs. He was blown away by the superhero-like adventures of Dumas’s father and determined to uncover his larger-than-life story. In an interview with CBS News, Reiss states, “As an equal fan of history, superheroes, and adventure stories, I was enthralled.” Why [...]
“Full Body Burden” refers to the amount of radioactivity which can be safely tolerated by a human body through its lifetime. Kristen Iversen‘s memoir combines life within a dysfunctional family and the investigation of a nuclear weapons program cover-up that took place in her own backyard. Teens will be outraged by the government’s willingness to hide [...]
British author Rosamund Lupton’s much-anticipated second psychological thriller has even more potential teen appeal than her first. Lupton is a master at both plotting and characterization, using close family relationships to ratchet up the suspense. Her debut, Sister, made several “best of” lists last year; our own AB4T review was enthusiastic. The paperback cover (pictured here) [...]
Jay Heinrichs new book follows his first, Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion (Three Rivers, 2007). Word Hero is a colorful paperback original with a sense of humor and its own website. Heinrichs also publishes an impressive language blog, Figarospeech.com. For teens working [...]
Welcome to October, the month of Halloween and horror fiction. We begin with a ghost story by Chris Bohjalian. Justin Cronin, author of The Passage, wrote a guest review on Amazon.com. Just what is The Night Strangers? “It’s a psychological thriller. It’s a domestic drama, the story of a family coping with the aftermath of dislocation and [...]
For her latest mystery, the consistently excellent Lisa Unger returns to The Hollows, the small town setting of Fragile, which we reviewed here last year. UNGER, Lisa. Darkness, My Old Friend. 368p. Crown. 2011. Tr $24. ISBN 978-0-307-46499-6. LC number unavailable. Adult/High School–Unger’s follow up to Fragile (Crown, 2010) takes place in the same [...]
Roland Merullo’s latest novel is far from your typical coming-of-age novel. Consider the conclusion of Carolyn See’s Washington Post review, “But this isn’t just another story about an unfortunate girl escaping terrible circumstances or a gothic mystery about missing children, and it’s even better than I can make it sound. Set as it is in New [...]
Mary McGarry Morris’s latest is a coming of age novel set in a small New England town. Morris is perhaps best known for Songs in Ordinary Time (Viking, 1995), which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 1997. It too includes a young teen afraid to tell the dark truth about an adult in his life. (Although [...]
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