Anna Dalin

Podcasts to Help You Build Your Teen Collection

Are you a library staff member responsible for purchasing teen materials for your collection? If so, I encourage you to include listening to podcasts about teen literature and other teen media as part of your research into what to buy. In addition to tools such as collection analysis, surveys of your teen user population and media reviews, podcasts produced by those who have a passion for teen materials are a truly valuable resource. Podcasts also have the advantage of fitting easily into a busy schedule — you can listen while you eat lunch, walk or do things around the house…or just eat again…dessert?

In my research for this post, I sampled several podcasts dedicated to teen literature. Finding teen literature-focused podcasts was the main object of my search, although a couple of the podcasts which I will recommend do include discussion of other media. My main criteria for selecting a podcast to recommend were that it be currently active, largely focused on teen literature/media and hosted by someone with a background in teen literature/media (and ideally some experience working in teen library services or teaching).

podcasts for fans of YA lit and graphic novels | YALSA's The Hub — CC image via Flickr User Patrick Breitenbach

The following is just a sampling of all the great teen literature podcasts out there—a place to start your listening. If you find that you enjoy a particular podcast, do provide feedback to its hosts to encourage them to continue their work! I also hope that you will add your own favorite teen literature or other media podcasts in the comments area of this post.

For each of the podcasts below, I have included a link to its accompanying Web site or blog. On each site or blog you will find links to podcast episodes as well as an indication regarding recommended listening apps to use. Continue reading Podcasts to Help You Build Your Teen Collection

For the Love of Cats: Felines in YA Fiction

Last month I wrote about canines in YA literature. This month I want to give equal time to the felines. Firstly because I had the joy of growing up in a household of cats. Secondly, there are dastardly cat gangs out there which watch our every move, and I don’t want to get on their bad side. Or so goes the familiar negative image of cats in some popular lore. However, anyone who has actually shared their life with cats knows that this is not at all the reality. Each cat, like each dog, has its own characteristics, whether affectionate or independent, forgiving or wary. With that in mind, in the following list I’ve tried to include fiction titles which I feel are well-suited to teens and which include feline characters in a variety of roles and with a variety of personalities.

Blacksad (Blacksad series) by Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido

The Spanish Canales and Guarnido originally created their Eisner Award-winning detective noir graphic novel series for French readers, but the setting is early 1950s U.S. This first volume collects the first three issues, which include a murder mystery and stories concerning the effects of white supremacy on individuals and the Red Scare. Private Investigator John Blacksad is an unforgettable feline. Lucia Cedeira Serantes, in her summer 2005 Young Adult Library Services article “¿Es un Pájaro? ¿Es un Avión?.…Spanish Comics for American Libraries” mentions two of the issues in this volume as being among the best in graphic novels and comics from Spain. (Adult Graphic Novel)

Book of Night with Moon (Feline Wizards trilogy) by Diane Duane

This is the first novel in a series which combines science fantasy, adventure, horror and even humor. There is a secret civilization of cats in Manhattan complete with its own language, a glossary of which is included in the novel. When the world is threatened with invasion by monsters from the “Downside”, four cats – Rhiow, Saash, Urruah and Arhu — seek out the wizard responsible for the dire situation. The cats make interesting observations about the differences between human and feline culture. (Adult Fiction) Continue reading For the Love of Cats: Felines in YA Fiction

For the Love of Dogs (and a Few Wolves): Canines in YA Literature

Image by NDPetitt. See: http://www.morguefile.com/creative/NDPetitt

This Valentine’s Day, because my husband needed to be away, my dog was my date. That evening she and I took a walk, had dinner and lounged on the couch together. I read while she dozed and snored. In other words, we had a perfect evening. This made me think that in this month of love, I’d like to honor our canine friends who devote themselves to us so unconditionally.

Below are several YA novels (and one adult novel well-suited to teens), some in print and some in graphic format, in which canines play a large part. They may be the main character’s best friend or arch enemy, or even the story’s protagonist. I’ve taken the liberty of including a few books with wolves. I’m hoping you’ll agree that the probable common ancestry of wolves and dogs — and also just the fact that these “wolf” novels are pretty great — justifies the inclusion of these works.

Make sure to also check out earlier Hub posts about dogs and other animals in YA literature. See Laura Perenic’s “Dog Days of Summer…Reading” (8/7/12) and Kate McNair’s “Animals Who Shine” (9/14/12).

Laika by Nick Abadzis (2008 Top Ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens)

This is a fictionalized account of Laika, the Samoyed-husky who in November 1957 became the first sentient being to leave Earth’s orbit, on the Sputnik II satellite. A dog who had survived on the streets of Russia, she was taken by scientists in order to further their space program, her life knowingly sacrificed. This is a powerful and poignant graphic novel which shows how politics can generate intense pressure on scientists to be first in their field. (younger teen graphic novel)

BB Wolf and the Three LPs by J. D. Arnold & Rich Koslowski (2011 Great Graphic Novels for Teens)

This graphic novel turns the story of The Three Little Pigs on its head. In this version, BB Wolf is a farmer and blues musician in the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s. When the pigs decide that they’re going to take his land, BB Wolf strikes back in revenge. There are parallels here to Jim Crow racial segregation and oppression and also to the life of the real Barnabus Benjamin Wolf, who influenced American Blues music and was executed for murder. (older teen graphic novel) Continue reading For the Love of Dogs (and a Few Wolves): Canines in YA Literature

2015 Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults: An Interview with Finalist Shane Burcaw

yalsa nonfiction finalist The YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction honors the best nonfiction book published for young adults (ages 12-18) during a Nov. 1 – Oct. 31 publishing year. The award winner will be announced at the ALA Midwinter Meeting Youth Media (YMA) Awards on Monday, Feb. 2, 2015. Join us for a live webcast of the YMA Awards press conference or follow I Love Libraries on Twitter or Facebook to be among the first to know the 2015 winners. The official hashtag for the 2015 Youth Media Awards is #ALAyma.

The five finalists for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction have been announced — and we’re featuring them here on The Hub. Today we bring you an interview with finalist Shane Burcaw, author of Laughing at My Nightmare, in which he writes about his experiences as a child and young adult with spinal muscular atrophy.

In your memoir, Laughing at My Nightmare, you write about your experience as a child and young adult with spinal muscular atrophy, taking us from your diagnosis at age two, through childhood, high school and college and up to the present. Your book is wonderful, honest, funny, insightful — in short, I was impacted very definitely by what you wrote. I wondered if you could share with Hub readers why you decided to write first your blog and then your book.

My reason for starting the blog was, on the surface, pretty lame. I was bored one summer afternoon and felt an urge to write. Looking back, I think I was battling a subconscious fear of being forgotten around that time in my life. I’ve been living with the reality that my disease will kill me someday since I discovered that truth in middle school, and leaving an impact on the world, making my time seem worthwhile, has always been crucially important to me. But none of that was at the forefront of my mind when I decided to write the first post. I just wanted to make people laugh. As the blog began to grow, and my followers climbed into the hundreds of thousands, I was in constant shock that people cared about what I had to say. Readers from all across the world were emailing me to thank me for inspiring them! That was never my purpose, but along the way I learned to accept that humor and positivity are powerful concepts, and I began to love that I could “help” people in that way. That’s where the book came from, wanting to take my story to the next level, wanting to share the benefits of laughter with the world. Continue reading 2015 Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults: An Interview with Finalist Shane Burcaw

2014 Teens’ Top Ten: An Interview with Joelle Charbonneau

The Teens’ Top Ten is a “teen choice” list, where teens nominate and choose their favorite books of the previous year! Nominators are members of teen book groups in sixteen school and public libraries around the country. Nominations are posted on Celebrate Teen Literature Day, the Thursday of National Library Week, and teens across the country vote on their favorite titles each year.

The votes are in for 2014, and the winners have been announced — and we’re featuring them here on The Hub. Today we bring you an interview with Joelle Charbonneau, who is on this year’s Teens’ Top Ten list for The Testing (first book of The Testing trilogy). The Testing is also a 2014 Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers.

I really loved The Testing and the way that you so vividly described your novel’s dystopian society, main character Cia’s life in it and her experience during the testing process for university student candidates. I wanted to ask you first about why you chose a dystopian environment to relate your story/themes, and whether there are any aspects of this environment which you see reflected in present-day society?

Thanks for reading The Testing! You have no idea how much I appreciate that. As for choosing the dystopian setting – to be honest, I didn’t set out to write a dystopian book. I teach voice lessons and have helped a lot of my students go through the college admittance process. Because of that, I’ve seen first hand how stressful the process has become and wanted to explore the stress of modern day tests and our society’s expectations for the next generation. However, as much as I wanted to set it in today’s world, I couldn’t find a way to up the stakes of the tests in the way that I wanted. So, I had to look to the future and a time where there is only one university and the expectation that those who attend it will be able to fix what is wrong with the world. That’s when the world of The Testing was born.

While The United Commonwealth and its issues are fictional, there are a great number of things about the world that do reflect our current society, especially in regards to our current education system. In the last fifteen years, our educational system has become very dependent on high stakes testing. So much depends on tests – school funding, teachers’ careers, and our students’ beliefs in their own abilities and futures. These tests were designed to strengthen our education system, but most teachers, parents and students would argue that it has done the opposite. While most would agree that the system needs to be altered, no one seems to know exactly how to make those changes or has the courage to say that the things we’ve been implementing over the past fifteen years are wrong. Cia’s journey in The Testing trilogy deals with those issues and explores what happens when people allow a less than ideal system to stay in place because it on some level appears to be working. Continue reading 2014 Teens’ Top Ten: An Interview with Joelle Charbonneau

Celebrate the Day of the Dead with These YA Novels

day of the dead by violetdragonfly — Image by violetdragonfly

In just a few days, The Day of the Dead (El DÃa de los Muertos) will be celebrated in Mexico, other Latin American countries and a large number of U.S. cities. Celebration dates vary from October 31st through November 2nd. On the Day of the Dead, people remember and pray for family members and friends who have passed. To celebrate the dearly departed, it is common to visit their graves and to create altars which often include marigolds, photos of the deceased and items that were important to them in life.

Communities, libraries and schools all over are currently making final preparations for their own Day of the Dead celebrations. I’ve attended the Santa Ana, California celebration several times, and am always amazed by the range of altars that families and local organizations create in honor of loved ones and various causes. The festivities also include Mexican folk music, face painting, sweet bread (pan de muerto) and Mexican hot chocolate. If you live near a Day of the Dead celebration yourself, I strongly encourage you to check it out.

You can also see The Book of Life, a beautifully crafted new animated film in current release which includes a Day of the Dead celebration. And of course you can always celebrate by reading one or more of the following YA novels (and one adult graphic novel) in which the Day of the Dead plays a role!

tequila worm viola canales In The Tequila Worm (2006 Pura BelprÃ© Award winner), Viola Canales writes a semi-autobiographical story about Sofia, a Mexican-American teen who has grown up in a Latino neighborhood in South Texas. Her excellent work in school earns her a scholarship to attend a prestigious and mainly white boarding school over 300 miles away from her family. Much of the novel centers on Sofia’s efforts to convince her parents to let her attend this school. Throughout the novel, family traditions and celebrations are described, including those connected with the Day of the Dead. There’s lots of humor in this novel, yet it also covers serious ground including discrimination, the difficulty of separation from family and death. Continue reading Celebrate the Day of the Dead with These YA Novels

A Small Smorgasbord of Scandinavian YA Lit

Over the past several years, Scandinavian and Scandinavian-influenced culture seems to be popping up everywhere. We’ve seen this during the past six to eight years in the popularity of authors such as the Swedish Stieg Larsson, who wrote The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, and the Norwegian Jo NesbÃ¸, who writes the Harry Hole series. Over the past few years you or someone you know has definitely played â€œAngry Birds,â€ a game app created by Finnish company Rovio Entertainment. (I admit that I myself facilitated an â€œAngry Birdsâ€ pom-pom craft at my library.) Recently, the movie Frozen, based in part on 19th century Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Snow Queen, took over the box office. To bring it back to young adult literature, the 2014 Printz Award and a Printz Honor went to two novels with Scandinavian settings, respectively Midwinterblood by the British writer Marcus Sedgwick and The Kingdom of Little Wounds by American Susann Cokal.

So this all inspired me to find out what’s been written in the past few years by Scandinavian YA authors. Read on for a sampling of recent popular and award-winning titles â€“ feel free to serve yourself!

From Iceland:

Boy on the Edge by Fridrik Erlings (sometimes written as â€œErlingsson’) is the story of Henry, a teen who stutters, has a clubfoot and is almost illiterate. A growing rage has also developed inside him and one day he lashes out physically at his mother. As a result, he’s sent to live at the â€œHome of Lesser Brethren,â€ a farm on a lava field on the Icelandic coast. Henry finds that he really enjoys working with the animals there, and this along with the compassion of the wife of the reverend who runs the farm somewhat lessens the difficulty of his new environment. Henry’s desperate desire to make friends affects his actions, sometimes for the worse, but sometimes for the better, such as when he becomes interested in reading and writing. This novel is based on the author’s actual relationship with the real Henry. Continue reading A Small Smorgasbord of Scandinavian YA Lit

Bookish Brew: Summer Smoothie Edition

I don’t know what the weather’s like where you are, but here in southern California we’ve had some pretty hot days recently. So I thought that for this entry in my occasional Bookish Brew series, a cool summer smoothie would be more in order than a hot drink. Make that two smoothies– one for each of the narrators of Sara Zarr and Tara Altebrando’s wonderful and authentic Roomies (2015 Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers Nominations List).

When Roomies begins, teens Lauren and Elizabeth are a couple months away from starting their freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley. They have just received each other’s names and email addresses from the campus housing office because they have been matched as dorm roommates. Lauren lives in San Francisco, California, which is not far from the city of Berkeley. In her loving two-parent family, she is the eldest of her siblings by several years. Her responsible nature may stem partly from her heavy child-rearing responsibilities. She is somewhat shy, concerned with honesty and aims to work in scientific research. Elizabeth, also known as E.B., lives in suburban New Jersey near the Shore with her single divorced mom with whom she does not have a close relationship. Elizabeth can be overly sensitive at times and is more impulsive than Lauren, as well as more outgoing. She plans to study landscape architecture.

roomies zarr altebrando Initiated by Elizabeth of course, the two begin an email correspondence over the summer. They share the details of their lives and soon after their feelings and frustrations about friends, family and boyfriends. This is not an epistolary novel, however; these emails are one component of a traditional narrative. The two girls alternate narrating chapters.

Initially Lauren and Elizabeth experience a mainly positive interaction, getting a feel for each other’s personalities, leaning on each other throughout a couple situations in their personal lives and sharing the joys of their respective first loves. A misunderstanding arises, however, connected to Elizabeth‘s estranged father, who lives and owns an art gallery in San Francisco. Both girls are challenged to look at the situation through the other’s eyes and decide whether reconciliation is possible. In an interview with Harvard Magazine (September-October 2014) Tara Altebrando describes how she and Sara Zarr wrote the book both separately and together over a period of three years and mentions that they are considering either a sequel or another collaborative project.

I highly recommend listening to the audiobook version of Roomies if you can, which is voiced by Becca Battoe and Emily Eiden. These two readers do an amazing job of vocally capturing the distinct rhythms and personalities of Lauren and Elizabeth, not to mention the differences in regional accents.

But now the time has come to blend! When choosing the ingredients for a â€œbookish brewâ€ I consider the setting and the essential traits or qualities of the main character of a novel. As there are two quite distinct main characters in Roomies, I’ve created two smoothies. Continue reading Bookish Brew: Summer Smoothie Edition

Get Inspired: Journaling in YA Literature

journaling_ya_lit_credit_Fredrik Rubensson_outline I’ve kept a journal on and off for years. Well, mostly off– but I would like to write more regularly. I believe that the first key to journaling is to set aside a certain time each day to write and stick to it. Sometimes that time is hard to find when you are working and/or in school full time. But now that it’s summer, if you’re someone who has a couple months off and a little extra time, this may be the perfect time for you to start a journal. And please tell me if you do, because that will inspire me to spend more time on mine!

With inspiration in mind, I wanted to recommend a few current and classic YA novels which are either written as journals or include journal entries.

Little Fish: A Memoir from a Different Kind of Year by Ramsey Beyer (2014 Outstanding Books for the College Bound List, Arts and Humanities)

Just before and during her first year at undergraduate art school, Ramsey Beyer kept a record of her experiences, including a Livejournal blog and a series of zines which included her own lists and illustrations.

Ten years later she published Little Fish, a compulsively readable memoir that pulls together these materials, including many of her original journal entries, and combines them with reflections from her older self. As Beyer writes in this memoir, it is her account of how she left the farming town of Paw Paw, Michigan and â€œâ€¦made the leap, packed up my life, and moved to Baltimore â€“ mixed in with the awkward college freshman experience.â€ Continue reading Get Inspired: Journaling in YA Literature

Summer Solstice Reads

photo by Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho on flickr

The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, or in other words, the twenty-four hour period with the greatest amount of sunlight. This year in the northern hemisphere the summer solstice will take place on this coming Saturday, June 21st, and in the southern hemisphere on December 21st. Just think of all those hours of natural light to read by in a comfy hammock! This definitely calls for a reading list.

The roots of summer solstice celebrations are pagan and over time also became associated with the Christian St. John’s Day. Currently, the summer solstice is celebrated by many, including practitioners of Wicca and also residents of northern Europe, where it is a secular festivity. The summer solstice is particularly important in the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the summer solstice, known as Midsummer, is even a public holiday occurring on June 24^th.

There are several young adult novels concerning or including the summer solstice, in particular a few which have been published fairly recently. The following are a sampling. Grab one this Saturday, go relax in the sunshine and enjoy!

Shadow of the Mark by Leigh Fallon

In the first book of the Carrier trilogy, Carrier of the Mark, American teen Megan, who has moved with her family to a small town in Ireland, learns that she is actually the human representation of air, one of the four elements. In book two of the series, Shadow of the Mark, Megan and her boyfriend Adam, who is the element of water, and his siblings Ãine (Earth) and RÃan (Fire) must get themselves ready for the summer solstice Alignment, a rite in which the four elements become one. There are various complications in the novel, including the fact that any union between Megan and Adam may end up killing him. There are also Druids and knights who are sometimes of assistance to the four teens and sometimes in conflict with each other. Megan herself must decide to take action if things are going to come to a positive resolution in this suspenseful paranormal romance. Continue reading Summer Solstice Reads