To get the ball rolling I am posting two times.
I thought that this question might generate some interest:
What are your favorite YA books? Also, what qualifies as YA as opposed to a long kids' book? Is there a difference? What I really want to know is if Brian Jacques' Redwall books count, because if so, those are definitely my favorite.
10 comments:
I was a huge fan of "Hatchet" by Gary Paulsen. The whole ordeal was so rugged and scary and solitary. Kind of like me, I suppose.
I also really loved books by John Bellairs. He wrote really great scary books for young adults, and I think I came across his books when I was living in England. Come to think of it, I'd love to re-read some of these.
I don't have much to say on the genre of YA, but I know what I like and I like what I know.
What?
My favorite YA books were:
1. Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
2. True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi
3. Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson.
I LOVED books about girls with rich emotional lives faced with some sort of physical obstacle or adventure.
- EL
My favorite (YA) book of all time is My Side of the Mountain. If you haven't read it, then you can borrow that shit from me, because I brought it to Brooklyn when we moved. It's about a runaway who winters in a hollow tree with a pet hawk named Frightful. He makes his own clothes and creates a lamp from a turtle shell + deer fat. I wanted to be that boy so bad.
Ummmmmmmmm, "some dude" is Emily Price. I forgot that I had a fake blog identity associated with my email address.
Oh I was hoping that some dude had come along and shared his thoughts with us!
I loved the True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. Did you know they are making a movie? Morgan Freeman will be in it. I didn't recognize the name of the girl who is playing Charlotte.
I loved Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt. It's about a young girl whose mother abandons her and her three younger siblings in a car in a mall parking lot, and she decides to walk them to an aunt's house miles and miles away. It's an adventure story laced with sadness, and though the rest of the books in the series were a lot less remarkable, there are pieces of this one that still float back to me even all these years later.
Less well written but equally tragic was The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney. In this one a teenage girl sees a picture of a missing child on a milk carton and it begins to bring back odd memories that lead her to question whether or not she might have been kidnapped when she was younger. Clearly I liked a hint of the creepy as a young adult...
Other favorites:
1. Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
2. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
3.The Outsiders by SE Hinton
4. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Green
5. The Cay by Theodore Taylor
I remember one afternoon, freshman year of High School, being so wrapped up in "To Kill A Mockingbird", I missed my train stop and arrived at Avenue I, above the cemetery. I smoked a cigarette I had found somewhere between recess and last period, and thought about running away.
Moving my things around this summer led my sister and I across all our old books, with tea stains and rips and scab blood on the pages, and I wanted to take the piles and ingest them all. Top of the stack was "A Member Of The Wedding", "A Wrinkle In Time" & "Danny, Champion Of The World".
What an awesome set of responses. I love this blog!!!
I could be snarky and say that what differentiates a long-ish kid book from a young adult book is that little white and red YA sticker on its spine, but that just implies that all of the books i read growing up were from the library. in school teacher parlance, an long-ish kid book is considered a 'middle reader', but really.
In the 6th grade I read all the Redwall books and loved them so much. I remember we had this heater grate in our kitchen that I would sit on top of wrapped in a blanket, and I'd read Brian Jacques books until my jeans got so hot I had to move to the couch.
I also loved The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. I loved any book that involved girls in dramatic situations. I remembered reading "Slake's Limbo" in my 6th grade class, about a boy who lives in the subway tunnels. All I remember is that it kept referring to the 'subway platform,' and having never seen these in suburban PA, i imagined a giant box that people stood on before the train came. Thank god those don't actually exist.
ps this blog = such a good idea xoxo
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