The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ann Brashares

This book is both a guilty pleasure for me (I LOVE this series, and the movies) and also, to me, anyway, a reminder that young adult literature dealing with girls and written with girls in mind don't have to be all about sex, drugs, and cat fights. With series like Gossip Girl becoming so overwhelmingly popular and providing young girls with poor role models, I can't stress enough the value I find in a series like The Sisterhood. The four young ladies represented in the novel, Lena, Bridget, Carmen, and Tibby are models of honest, interesting, talented young girls who are perfectly happy being and acting the age that they are.

I wouldn't use this book as a class text, but I think it would be a good option to offer in a literature circle set up or to suggest as free reads and have in the classroom library.

Crank, Ellen Hopkins

Written by a mother, Crank is the story of Ellen Hopkin's daughter's downward spiral into drug addiction and destructive behaviors. Kristina is the protagonist, but her alter ego “Bree” shows us the ugly side of the innocent, successful, and attractive honors student that Kristina appears to be. The story's title, Crank, is a reference to the highly addictive drug crystal meth, referred to throughout the book as “the monster”, which leads Bree down a path of dangerous and deadly behaviors. The book is very disturbing in its gritty and emotional depiction of the impact drugs can have on an individual and on a family.

A cool quality of the novel is that it is written in verse form. The narration of Bree's downward spiral appears as a series of poems, with Hopkins emphasizing certain moments or words through creative word placement. There seems to be almost as much thought put into the content of the novel as there is into the appearance of it.

I would recommend this book only with a strong warning attached. Hopkins really didn't hold much back in this novel, and there are a lot of situations and incidents that deal with very, very heavy material, from drugs to sexual experiences. Parents, read this before you let your kids do. Teachers, probably not one to be handing out left and right, but a reasonable choice for a classroom library.

Boy: Tales of Childhood, Roald Dahl

I have to admit that this book was sort of a selfish choice. Growing up I always loved Roald Dahl books, from Matilda to The BFG, he still remains today as one of my favorite authors for both adults and for children. I think that Boy serves as an excellent piece of nonfiction that concerns itself with the coming-of-age experience, one that I don't feel can be represented enough in the literature we give to our students. By providing students with accounts of adolescence, we give them the opportunity to find something to relate to and use it to help them however they need help, whether it be understanding their feelings and emotions to helping them understand what's going on around them or just giving them something, in the form of character or experience, that they can relate to and identify with and therefore maybe not feel so alone.

I like the way that Dahl shares his experience in this collection of essays about his adolescent and young adult experiences. Dahl has a unique voice that reflects his humor and is an effective communicator, and so I could easily see this text being used as a tool to discuss narrative structure and sequence and how to develop a “voice” in your writing. I don't know that I would use the whole text as a class novel, but I think that a few of the chapters could be used as examples of how an author's voice comes through in a text and how to do this in their own writing.

Lucky, Alice Sebold

This novel is a memoir written by Alice Sebold about her freshman year in college where she experiences a tragic rape but uses it as a vehicle for self improvement and to develop an altered perception of life and the world instead of as a reason to give up and fall out of everyday life. The title “lucky” gains its meaning from the sequence of events that immediately follow the sexual assault, when Alice is told that she should consider herself lucky since she was just raped, and earlier a woman had been murdered there. The twisted statement serves as the platform upon which Sebold develops her story, showing how something beautiful, herself as an adult woman, could grow out of such an ugly and tragic situation. The aftermath of the crime, right through Sebold's struggle to get justice by prosecuting her rapist, is communicated thoughtfully and poignantly, and the emotions of Sebold come through very clearly in her writing.

I think that this story is not only an interesting but an important one. I think that this book works as a means by which to more clearly communicate the effect of sex crimes on not only the individual but those around them, and I would suggest that any person that knows someone who is a victim of sexual assault read this novel. I would not suggest it to younger audiences, maybe fifteen year olds at the youngest and only with resources available for them if they need to talk or process their feeling and emotions that are sure to come up during their time reading the novel.