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1. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson means so much to me. I teach Speak when I teach English I, both with my Honors and Regular English classes. The students are always shocked that I am “allowing” them to read a “new” book, and they are instantly captivated by the internal monologue from Melinda, the book’s main character. I never fail to captivate the minds of teenagers with this book. Sometimes, the book really touches someone in profound way, and many times it is a guy who is touched after seeing the first hand account of the inside of a girl’s brain. Several students have reported instances of abuse after learning about what happened to Melinda when she kept it all locked up inside. The conversations my students and I have during and after reading Speak are priceless. This is why I love to teach!

   Jessica J.

   20 Dec 09 at 6:24 pm
2. Hi Lizzie! I’m resending something I submitted before to Fine Lines – this book just haunts me and it’s one to which I can trace back so many of my obsessions: ‘Two Blocks Down’, written in 1981 by sixteen-year-old Jina Delton. Here’s the back cover copy:

   “HER PLACE TO HIDE AWAY
   Sixteen-year-old Star outshone all the kids at her new school, attracting their attention, yet not even aware they existed most of the time. Why should she care about dumb kids like Justina and Leslie, who lived across the street, or like Roddy Mix, who couldn’t keep his eyes or his mind off her? She had more than enough special friends among the offbeat crowd that hung out at the Vagary. In the Vagary’s back room she was safe and secure, able to shut out whatever she didn’t want to think about – like high school parties, dating, or the need to fit in with kids her own age.”

   Star is gorgeous but disheveled and weird, obsessed with the Stones, and papers her bedroom walls with Cosmo covers. The girls across the street are horrifyingly shallow and written so spot-on. The Vagary Bar crowd were everything I hoped I’d have once I escaped school – art-school fags and girls dressed in leather and vintage. To this day I reference Meggie when I wear felt hats in fall.

   The denouement occurs when she grudgingly decides to introduce the highschool kids to her real friends…

   I devoured this when it came out – then waited in vain for anything else by Jina Delton. Maybe she just had one terrific book in her. No matter, to me this one will do for one lifetime!

   sophie carsenat

   20 Dec 09 at 7:15 pm
3. I read so many YA books — I always say that I never read a book as an adult that I loved as much as the books I read as a child, and I still believe it. There’s only one choice for me in response to your question: The Silver Crown, by Robert C. O’Brien. It’s a wonderful fantasy, adventure story with a 10 year old female main character, who basically goes on a quest to find out what happened to her family (gone missing the morning of her 10th birthday), and to solve the mystery of the silver crown she found on her pillow that same morning. She has help along the way, but what struck me at the time, and still retains its hold on me now is that she was 10, and yet was strong enough to make her destiny. She escapes from many evildoers, solves an ancient mystery, and rights a massive injustice. She is a hero, and yet is still always herself, Ellen, a 10 year old girl. I loved it, re-read it for years, and when the time is right, plan on giving my battered copy of the book to my own two daughters. I hope they take away the message that self reliance is powerful, and while not the only thing they need to succeed, is a necessary component of success in anything they try to do. Here’s a link to a description of the book:

   http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=61-068984106x-0

   Laura Derouin

   21 Dec 09 at 11:30 pm
4. My favorite YA read of all time is the Betsy-Tacy series, especially the high school books in the series. The series follows Betsy Ray from the age of 5, growing up in turn of the century Minnesota through to her marriage. She and her best friends Tacy and Tib share adventures as young girls growing up in small town America, riding in the first autos, discovering the library and adventuring around their town. When they hit high school, things really start cooking with the introduction of boys, dances and the resulting hijinks. Betsy aspires to be a writer is most often also the author of her Crowd’s schemes. The final two books in the series follow Betsy on to a tour of Europe just prior to the outbreak of WWI, and finally, home to Minnesota. I have read and reread these books for, oh my, 30 plus years! Here’s a link to my breakdown of the books in the series. The final 6 have just been reissued in 3 2-book sets, with forewords by Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman and Anna Quindlen.
   http://bit.ly/16S9nz

   Book Club Girl

   23 Dec 09 at 11:15 pm
5. I loved the Beany Malone series by Lenora Mattingly Weber. Like me, she was Catholic, one of four children (three girls and one boy), worried about money, had crushes on the wrong boys, had great ideas that turned out to be not so great, and got by with a little help from her friends. If you haven’t read Beany yet, you should start!

   Lillian

   23 Dec 09 at 11:43 pm
6. I also am a huge fan of the Betsy-Tacy series. My favorite is, I guess, an offshoot – Emily of Deep Valley which follows Emily from high school graduation through her first year without her friends who all went to college leaving her behind to care for her aging grandfather. We see how she finds new friends and interests and grows because of this. Emily, an essentially shy person,is famous for mustering her wits and moving forward.

   Many of us Betsy-Tacy fans identify with one character or another. While I have some of Betsy’s traits, such as writing and list-making, I identify more with Tacy who is extremely shy. But Emily really has my heart because I cannot count how often I must muster my wits, especially these last few years.

   mikki karotkin

   24 Dec 09 at 9:56 am
7. Although a huge fan of the Betsy-Tacy series mentioned above, an entirely different book has become my YA favorite of late: Long May She Reign by Ellen Emerson White. This 2007 book caps off the Meg Powers series that began with The President’s Daughter in 1984. Discovering and reading this book was like catching up on long-lost friends, albeit one who was the daughter of the first female president, who not long after her mother survived an assassination attempt, was kidnapped by a terrorist group (the kidnapping and Meg’s struggle for survival occurred in the third book of the series, Long Live the Queen); six months later, Meg is still struggling with the ramifications of what happened to her life.

   The characterizations, deep emotions and humor of Meg, her family and her friends(including one of the characters from the Friends for Life series) are compelling and have led me to more than one reread. Although Meg was initially created in the age of Tab, she has been seemingly effortlessly updated to a more contemporary age of Internet, blogs, and cell phones. But she is still Meg, and I’ll still keep pulling Long May She Reign off my bookshelf again and again.

   Joanne Stein

   24 Dec 09 at 10:14 pm
8. I read so many of the Norma Klein, Judy Blume and Lois Duncan books as a kid, in addition to so many more (including the Sweet Valley High series!). The books that stick out in my mind are Starring Sally J Friedman as Herself by Judy Blume; Stranger With My Face by Lois Duncan; Ballet Slippers; Diary of a Frantic Kid Sister by Hila Colman; Domestic Arrangements by Norma Klein and of course, Harriet The Spy. These are the books I read over and over again.

   In all of these books, the main characters are girls who are really bright and independent and striving to find their way through young adulthood, amid different circumstances and situations that are presenting themselves in their lives at school and at home. You could say that Starring Sally J Friedman As Herself and Stranger With My Face are as opposite one another from a plot standpoint as two books can get, however, I enjoyed them equally when I was younger. I liked how Sally J was obsessed with her cream cheese and jelly sandwiches and basically stalking some poor old man that she thought was a Nazi in hiding. And I loved the theme of astral projection, however creepy, in Stranger With My Face. There’s a recurring theme of acceptance in many of the YA books from the 70s and 80s. While I haven’t read that many YA books, I did read the Twilight series and while entertaining, it didn’t seem to have the same spitfire energy that I remember growing up with.

   Melissa

   28 Dec 09 at 4:16 pm
9. At the risk of sounding common, I must admit that the YA work that means the most to me is “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret.” I read it for the first time in 1977, during an era when there was no Internet or cable TV. I had cleverly figured out the Dewey Decimal System and that books in the children’s room had much more interesting counterparts with similar numbers over in the adult area (e.g. “Where Did I Come From?” similar number to “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask”). However, no one else wrote about the experience of being an adolescent girl its accompanying hopes and fears the way that Judy Blume did. I also cherished the book because I was also only child with a dear grandmother who used to take me downtown on public transportation and get lunch with me. I didn’t get to kiss a boy in a closet until I was much older, but I always felt that Margaret (to borrow a phrase from Anne of Green Gables) was a “kindred spirit.”

   Annabella Gualdoni

   28 Dec 09 at 9:13 pm
10. I have to nominate “Doll Face” by Deborah Hautzig as a YA book I loved. Ms. Hautzig was a late 70s/early 80s writer who was very underappreciated, maybe because she only ever wrote two YA books. (Second Star to the Right about anorexia being the second. She also did some younger children’s books.) Doll Face is an interesting book because it’s about two heterosexual girls in a very close relationship, and they start to think they might be lesbians. I read it before I realized I was a lesbian, but even at that time when I read it, when I was so unaware of my sexuality, I related to the story, to the closeness these two girls had, to the confusion of not knowing if you’re gay or just really good friends. Hautzig made her characters so real–no cookie-cutter Gossip Girl stereotypes here. These were funky New York girls who went to thrift shops and stayed up late at night talking to each other during sleepovers. I’m not doing the book justice at all with this rather sloppy review of it, but to put it simply: This book was a major factor in me realizing my sexual orientation, and just a fantastic book all around, and so, for that reason, I will never forget it.

    Gena Hymowech

    30 Dec 09 at 8:34 pm

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