OFTEN THE CRITICAL QUESTIONS of the adolescent years revolve around three areas—sex, religion, and politics. Sexual questions have been addressed in books for teens since the 1970s, and religious and spiritual issues have become a current favorite topic in books for adolescents. But if a Martian read the body of books for adolescents, he would be convinced that they hung out in shopping malls, with no political or social connection to their society. Rarely do books for teenagers show them engaged in larger issues or focused outside themselves.
There are some exceptions to this trend, and all the books cited here give an idea of what authors might choose to write about. It can only be hoped that they address this last taboo in young adult literature. At a time when teens have been observed in increasing numbers to volunteer, work for a politician, or argue about issues such as the environment, their literature needs to reflect their increased participation in the community and society.
***
JULIA ALVAREZ
In the Time of the Butterflies
14–18 • Algonquin • 1994 • 325 pp.
In the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship, the Mirabal sisters became heroines in the cause of freedom; in 1960 three of the sisters were murdered for their part in an underground plot to overthrow the government. Julia Alvarez breathes life into the stories of Patria, Minerva, and Maria Terese, who were known as "las mariposas" (butterflies) in the underground. Beginning with the recollections of the surviving sister, the novel develops each of the sisters in her own distinct voice. Alvarez builds the narrative gradually, allowing readers to empathize with the characters. These ordinary children consciously take action and become heroic because of their choices.
Alvarez brilliantly captures the terror-filled atmosphere of a police state. But this rich story, filled with a strong sense of place, has been steeped in actual events and filled with hope and love.
AVI
Nothing but the Truth
12–14 • Orchard • 1991 • 179 pp.
NEWBERY HONOR
Freshman Philip Malloy wants to be on the track team, but his failing grade in English makes him ineligible. In a class with the teacher he wishes to escape, Miss Narwin, Philip begins each morning humming "The Star-Spangled Banner" when the students have been asked to remain silent. Suspended from school, Philip finds that things quickly go out of control when his minor infraction becomes a national scandal.
Taking place over a few weeks and structured as a series of diary entries, memos, letters, radio transcripts, and dialogues, the novel shows the events from different points of view. Hence the reader serves as the detective, trying to discover where the truth really lies.
Widely read in schools, Nothing but the Truth naturally encourages class discussions about freedom of speech, the Bill of Rights, censorship, and piecing together the truth from media coverage. But it also works for independent reading—a powerful, entertaining novel from beginning to end.
CAROLYN COMAN
Many Stones
12–14 • Front Street • 2000 • 158 pp.
PRINTZ HONOR/NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
Berry Morgan's older sister, Laura, has been murdered in South Africa; she went there to teach to try to help Nelson Mandela's new government. Obliged to travel with her divorced father for the memorial service, Berry does not look forward to their trip. But after she and her father encounter South Africans who search for ways to forgive apartheid, Berry realizes she must begin her own reconciliation. Her problems, in fact, begin to decrease in size the more she realizes what has happened to those in South Africa: "Nothing I know comes close to being a matter of life and death."
In a quiet ode to the grieving process that connects the personal and political, Many Stones focuses on the inner landscape of a confused and unhappy teenager, grappling with the issues of a foreign country in transition.
ROBERT CORMIER
I Am the Cheese
12–14 • Pantheon • 1977 • 234 pp.
"I am riding the bicycle and I am on Route 31 in Monument, Massachusetts, on my way to Rutterburg, Vermont, and I'm pedaling furiously." With these innocent words, Robert Cormier begins a story of deception and lies. Next an official transcript appears, an interview between fourteen-year-old Adam Farmer, the protagonist, and Brint, an interrogator. The narrative shifts again, to a third-person omniscient voice. Skillfully weaving these three points of view, Cormier builds a story full of tension, mystery, and secrets. Living in a small New England city, Adam begins to realize that something seems odd about his family. He then discovers two birth certificates in his name and begins to wonder about his family. His father reveals that they have lived under an alias because of his testimony at a special Senate committee. On a trip to Vermont to avoid their enemies, a deliberate car accident kills Adam's mother. Adam is transported to a "confinement facility," where he is constantly drugged and brutally interviewed about details his father may have revealed. Only in his own mind does he ride the bike, in freedom, to Vermont; in the end, the reader understands that Adam's first-person narration has been completely unreliable.
Disillusioned by Nixon and the Watergate era, Cormier chose to write about a corrupt government agency. He actually published his own telephone number in the book and got thousands of calls from his fans over his lifetime. Often they just wanted to speak to a real writer, but sometimes they needed to discuss serious problems; Cormier loved having a personal connection with his readers.
Brilliantly executed, I Am the Cheese explores how evil often is inflicted on the young and the innocent. A sophisticated, cunningly developed psychological thriller, it raises important questions about the misuse and corruption of government.
CHRIS CRUTCHER
The Sledding Hill
12–14 • Greenwillow • 2005 • 230 pp.
Eddie Proffit loses both his father and his best friend, Billy, in freak accidents within weeks of each other. He's also about to lose his favorite class, Really Modern Literature, taught by an almost-militant but likable librarian. To make things even worse, his mother has been spending time with the nefarious Sanford Tarter. A repressive, bordering-on-sadistic English teacher at Eddie's school, Tarter is also the manipulative minister at the fundamentalist church that Eddie's mother has embraced. When a Chris Crutcher novel taught in Really Modern Literature is challenged by one of Tarter's minions, a campaign begins to rid the library of all of Crutcher's books.
The novel is narrated by the dead Billy—in a manner reminiscent of Alice Sebold's Lovely Bones. A lot of issues are covered: one Youth for Christ member comes out of the closet, and Crutcher presents his view of censorship and reading in general: "Stories aren't good or evil ... just reflections of one person's perception of the world. One kid might read that story and feel recognized, might find a connection. Another kid might read the same story and be offended or angered or bored. If those two students got together and talked about their reactions to the story, they'd know each other a little better."
Ultimately, a group of determined young people speak about this particular book and censorship. Their impassioned speeches give another dimension to the novel, presenting adolescents who take action that has political consequences.
The Kite Runner
14–18 • Riverhead • 2003 • 372 pp.
A deeply flawed protagonist, Amir—a writer raised in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1960s and 1970s—moves to California and becomes a successful novelist. He remains haunted by a childhood incident in which he betrayed the trust of his best friend, Hassan, the son of the family servant; consequently Hassan was brutally beaten and raped by a neighborhood gang. In 2001 Amir learns that Hassan and his wife have been murdered by the Taliban and their son, Sohrab, needs to be rescued. As it turns out, the boy has been enslaved by the head of the gang, now a prominent Taliban official.
Although the book chiefly delineates the culture and politics of Afghanistan, it also serves as a deeply personal story about how choices made in childhood affect adult lives. It is rare that a book can be so brilliant from a literary point of view yet so timely. Often disturbing, The Kite Runner begs to be discussed with other readers. For that reason, it often gets chosen for parent-teen discussion groups or for an entire school or town to read.
NORMA HOWE
The Adventures of Blue Avenger
12–14 • Holt • 1999 • 230 pp.
On the morning of his sixteenth birthday, David Bruce Schumacher, a modest and ordinary boy, legally changes his name to Blue Avenger. Blue, the secret champion of the underdog who even looks taller, can easily tell Omaha Nebraska Brown that he loves her. He then in quick order saves his principal from killer bees and helps his best friend, suffering from terrible skin problems, get free treatment. He even manages to get bullets outlawed in Oakland, California. Wonder of all wonders, Blue creates a lemon meringue pie that doesn't "weep." Throughout these adventures, Blue and Omaha, now a duo, discuss free will versus fate, a topic dear to both of them.
Funny, fast-paced, with two delightful protagonists, The Adventures of Blue Avenger takes comic book sensibility into the novel format. Because Blue fancies himself a hero, he willingly disturbs the universe and rights personal and social wrongs. His wild story, with many extraneous details, is wrapped up beautifully at the end; the tale continues in Blue Avenger Cracks the Code and Blue Avenger and the Theory of Everything.
KEN KESEY
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
14–18 • Viking • 1962 • 272 pp.
Narrated by the paranoid Chief Bromden—a huge man of mixed Native American and European blood who fakes being deaf and mute—the story takes place in an Oregon psychiatric hospital where the Chief has lived for ten years. A swaggering former Marine, Randle Patrick McMurphy, arrives; a prison farm inmate, he has had himself committed to a mental institution to avoid work. Soon McMurphy engages in a power struggle with "Big Nurse" Ratched, a twisted administrator who gets patients to attack one another so that she can stay in control. Although McMurphy wins some of the battles, ultimately, the nurse has him lobotomized. At the end of the book, Chief Bromden, now a sane individual, escapes from the hospital and makes his way to Canada.
Although the title comes from a nursery rhyme ("One flew east, one flew west, and one flew over the cuckoo's nest"), the book works best with sophisticated teens or adults. Based on Ken Kesey's experiences as an attendant in a psychiatric hospital just after graduating from Stanford's creative writing program, the novel inspired an Oscar-winning movie, starring Jack Nicholson. Through the years, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has been read by adolescents as an allegory about repressive institutions in America that pretend to be benevolent.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
The Poisonwood Bible
14–18 • Harper • 1998 • 653 pp.
In 1959, an evangelical Baptist minister's family moves from Georgia to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) for three turbulent decades. Nathan Price's determination to convert the natives to Christianity turns out to be both foolhardy and even dangerous. A church angel and house devil, Price abuses his wife and daughters both physically and emotionally, and he refuses to understand why river baptism offends the natives in the village of Kalinga.
The story evolves through the points of view of Orelanna Price and her four daughters, each of them beautifully delineated. Fifteen-year-old Rachel resents her separation from normal teen life. Adah, who does not speak because of a birth injury, shrewdly observes the world around her. Leah, Adah's passionate and idealistic twin, throws herself into their new life, but the realities of the Congo erode her religious faith. Five-year-old Ruth May, excited and frightened, ultimately pays for this excursion with her life. Through the eyes of the women, we observe how the American and African cultures collide. The family saga takes place against the world backdrop of the election of Patrice Lumumba, the involvement of the Eisenhower administration in his assassination, and the dictatorship of Joseph Mobutu.
Barbara Kingsolver, who spent part of her own childhood in the Congo, took almost a year to hone five distinct narrative voices to represent different philosophical positions. Basically, she wanted to write a book that addressed the question: "What did we do to Africa, and how do we feel about it?" The women's responses represent extreme guilt, denial, social activism, empirical analysis, and spirituality. Even the title of the book contains a compelling metaphor. A poisonwood tree grows near the Prices' African home; although beautiful, it causes rashes and boils on the skin.
In Kingsolver's novel, the characters emerge as quirky, fallible human beings. Readers become swept up in their experiences, their observations, and their tragedies. Few modern novels have ever blended the political and the personal so brilliantly. Older readers often lament that they did not read The Poisonwood Bible in their high school English class; now many of this generation do.
GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ
One Hundred Years of Solitude
14–18 • Harper • 1970 • 383 pp.
With no single plot or timeline, One Hundred Years of Solitude moves in circles. Both the history of Macondo, a small town in South America, and the founders of that town, the Buendía family, serve as protagonists; the story follows seven generations of Buendías and the rise and fall of the town. The patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, marries his cousin Úrsula Iguarán; their fear of bearing deformed children lingers throughout the story.
Their children become both land usurpers and rebels during a period of civil war. Although Úrsula lives so long she cannot remember her age, none of the female Buendías matches her fortitude. Later generations combat foreign imperialism and set up banana plantations. In the end, the older generations are lost in nostalgia; the young people, in debauchery and isolation. The novel reflects the political, social, and economic ills of South America but contains fantastic events as well.
Having had a vision while driving one day, Gabriel García Márquez wrote the book barricaded in his study in Mexico. He imagined the entire story that had been plaguing him since 1942 and knew that he had to tell it the way his grandmother used to tell tales: she had an uncanny talent for relating the fantastic with deadpan seriousness. Fifteen months later, García Márquez emerged with a manuscript—and his wife presented him with a stack of bills. To write his masterpiece, García Márquez drew on memories of his grandparents, who married despite being cousins, and their household. But he mixed his personal experience with his political beliefs and concerns, and the economic history of Latin America became part of the novel.
An immediate commercial and critical success when it appeared in 1967, Cien Años de Soledad sold 50,000 copies in its first two weeks. Since then, the book has been translated into thirty languages, has sold over 30 million copies, and led to the Nobel Prize for literature for García Márquez.
With a labyrinthine structure and epic scope, the book has made its way onto summer reading lists across the nation; for most students, it provides a door to the incredible world of Latin American magical realism. According to one reviewer, it "is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."
***
The Plot Against America
14–18 • Houghton Mifflin • 2004 • 392 pp.
In his first foray into alternate history—or uchronie, time that doesn't exist—Philip Roth envisions a mesmerizing alternate world. In 1940 Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the presidential election, and young Philip, age seven, and his family face the consequences in their Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. Lindbergh's blatant anti-Semitism leads him to sign a nonaggression pact with Hitler; he holds a dinner party for von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister. Enacting new laws, the isolationists create an atmosphere of religious hatred, which ultimately leads to pogroms in America.
But the eerily logical narrative also provides a family portrait as the Roths respond to events that divide them personally and politically. The stable Jewish neighborhood descends into a nightmare of confusion, fear, and unpredictability. Written in the first person, with the adult Roth looking back on his childhood, the narrative alternates between his intensely personal world and these horrific national events.
Although Roth altered the presidential election, he tried to keep "everything else as close to factual truth" as he could in the years 1940–1942, the framework of the book. Historical figures such as Henry Ford and Walter Winchell inhabit this world. Roth uses, verbatim, Lindbergh's 1941 America First speech in Des Moines, Iowa. The end of the book contains pages of historical and biographical information, the true chronology of those years. In the book, however, Roth challenges how we look at history: "Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we school children studied as 'History,' harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides."
In this novel Roth forces readers to assess aspects of the American culture—its worship of celebrities like Lindbergh, its support of government policy, no matter how wrong, and its willingness to descend into prejudice and hatred of various groups. Suspenseful as a thriller and one of the most accessible of Roth's recent books, The Plot Against America provides a wealth of material for classroom discussion.
The Gospel According to Larry
12–14 • Holt • 2001 • 227 pp.
Claiming that a manuscript was handed to her by a young man, Janet Tashjian presents his story to the reader. Seventeen-year-old Josh Swensen sees his mission quite clearly: "I've only wanted one thing my whole life—to contribute, to help make the world a better place." Josh sets up a Web site (www.thegospelaccordingtolarry.com) that delivers sermons against consumerism and about returning to nature. Although he's the son of an advertising executive, Josh owns only seventy-five possessions, so his sermons reflect how he actually lives. His best friend, Beth, whom he loves secretly, becomes an early advocate of the Web site; fan clubs are set up, the rock band U2 endorses Larry, and a huge Larryfest occurs. Suddenly, through Larry, Josh has become a celebrity. Although he tries to hide his identity, his nemesis lands on his doorstep with cameras, and Josh is hounded by the press day and night. In the end, Josh goes so far as to fake his own suicide, to give himself some space in his life. Fortunately, this utterly engaging protagonist returns in Vote for Larry.
Geekish, independent, longing for his mother (who has died), Josh wins over his readers quickly, and Beth proves an equally dynamic and believable supporting character. Josh's desire to make a difference, his inventiveness, and his passion make him a unique protagonist in the young adult canon. The book is ideal for adult-teen book groups and classroom discussion.
MARKUS ZUSAK
I Am the Messenger
14–18 • Knopf • 2005 • 359 pp.
PRINTZ HONOR
Nineteen-year-old Ed Kennedy, a cab driver, drifts aimlessly through life. His father has died of alcoholism; his mother verbally abuses him whenever she gets a chance. Only an attachment to an aging, odiferous dog and three friends with whom he plays cards connect him to the human race. But one day Ed inadvertently stops a bank robbery, after which strange messages are delivered to him in the form of playing cards. As he follows the instructions from his mysterious correspondent, he ends up helping people, entering the lonely or broken spaces of their lives. He rescues a woman who gets raped nightly by her drunken husband, reads to a widow who believes him her long-dead husband, and helps a priest gain Sunday attendance by throwing a huge party with free beer. As Ed completes his assignments, he grows in wisdom and humanity, and in the end, he starts to be a positive force in the lives of those closest to him.
Brilliantly structured, with four sections organized as a deck of cards, the story tracks the change of a very likable protagonist from a loser to someone readers would like as a friend. Ed has learned to take action in his own community and now understands that social conscience begins with those around him.