October is an exciting month for any YA lit fan, because it includes Teen Read Week! In honor of this annual celebration of young adult literature, YALSA invited book-loving teens all over the world to apply to share their enthusiasm for reading in a guest post for The Hub. Thirty-one talented young writers were chosen, and we’ll be featuring posts from these unique voices all month long. Here’s Alyssa Finfer from New Jersey.
Let’s play a game. I’ll list some books, and you tell me which one doesn’t belong.
- The Catcher in the Rye
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Jane Eyre
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- The Hunger Games
I bet most of you picked the last one. Why? These books are all well written and powerful, and I bet many of you have read most or all of them, some even multiple times (I admit I have). Because of their popularity, Hollywood has made movie versions of all of them, though some are admittedly better than others. Despite this, people traditionally study the first four in English class at some point in high school or college, but rarely the last one. Also, even though all these books fit the definition of young adult literature, “literature for and about the young adult,â€[1] you won’t find the first four in the YA section in Barnes and Noble. What’s up with that? Continue reading The Fault in Our Novels