It’s Teen Read Week, which celebrates teens reading for fun. To commemorate, Hub bloggers spent some time reflecting on their favorite books as teens.
What was your favorite book as a teen?
Sometime when I was 16 or so, I ordered Over the Moon by Elissa Haden Guest from a Scholastic book order form. This author is best known for her Iris and Walter readers, but I adore this teen novel that she wrote in 1987. I re-read it so many times because it was such a quiet but powerful family story, and I hadn’t read one before that was so spare and lovely — not laying on the drama for page turns, but still exciting and sad. Today you have to ignore its unbelievably cheesy cover! Certain images still float through my head, like the one about the sister having “a wild streak” in her. If I wrote a book, I’d hope it would be as good as this well-kept secret. — Rebecca O’Neil
When I was a teen my favorite book was Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I read this huge book (1,037 pages) and fell in love with the Civil War and all of the characters in the book. Scarlett O’Hara was one of my favorites because she was such a strong woman. In the beginning you might think she would give up after everything she goes through, but she never does. I also love Rhett Butler because he is of course a bad boy and he always gets what he wants. But in the end, I think it was Rhett who was the one that lost out on the most. Scarlett just said “After all tomorrow is another day” and moved on to her next big thing. Gone with the Wind is such a classic book written in 1936, but I think that teens today would still enjoy reading this book. — Kimberli Buckley
I was just reminiscing about this with a friend! We didn’t have (correction, our school libraries never had access to) most of the YA books that were out in the mid to late nineties, so our YA choices were super limited. But we did have Christopher Pike. So at the time, when I was in high school, Fall into Darkness was probably my favorite book. —Stacy Holbrook
A Wrinkle in Time. This is still one of my go-to comfort novels even today. I loved the depiction of family life, how comfortable and loving the Murrays were. I also loved the adventure aspect, as Meg races to save her father and later her brother from an evil entity on a completely new planet. It is just a fun book that I will probably continue to read over and over and over. — Jancee Wright
I spent most of my teen years reading The Economist and philosophy. The only YA novel I actually read in high school was Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger, and it made me fall in love with Ani Difranco and stories of unrequited love. — Molly Wetta
What was your favorite book as a teen? Share in the comments!