Yesterday, Lindsay Peifer and I presented our poster session at Macalester College’s Library Technology Conference. Here is the link to our slides (which we modified slightly for the poster version). The slides are a modified version of our Ning.com project from Michael Stephens’ Library 2.0 course. Feel free to contact either of us if you have further questions!
Scrambled Eggs at Midnight by Brad Barkley and Heather Hepler is a humorous romantic story, with some wonderful descriptions of how it really feels to fall in love for the first time. Since the point of view alternates between Eliot (Brad Barkley) and Calliope (Heather Hepler) we get a nice mix of tones. I like this book, but I don’t think it did as well with the switching perspectives thing as it could have. My favorite book that does the same thing amazingly well is Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. Though, Scrambed Eggs has lovable characters who don’t use curse words, so I’d recommend this one to younger readers in the 12 to 14 range who aren’t sure what they want to read. I like the idea of being able to say to girls or boys, “This will help you know what they are thinking” (meaning the opposite sex).
Having read a handful of GLBTQ books for my LIS722 course last semester, reading Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden was a good look into the past. For my paper, I read books mainly from the 1990s-2000s, and my, how times have changed. The story of Liza falling in love with Annie is a classic romance—but it’s how their special connection is outed that is particularly painful to read. Liza faces expulsion from her prim-and-proper Foster Academy, and both girls are very fearful to let their secret love be known the world. Today, girls like Liza and Annie might be involved in a Gay-Straight Alliance, and they certainly would not be on trial for being gay.
This book is still very relevant for YAs today, but I would want to include the caveat that this book is from 1982 even though the cover image has been updated. I would probably put this on a booklist or display with the word “historical” so that readers could compare it with, for example, Kissing Kate by Lauren Myracle or Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan.
Anne of Green Gables is one of those books I always felt I should have read when I was 11 or 12, but never managed to get around to it. I distinctly remember being in the 6th grade and reading Sue Grafton’s B is for Burglar, so perhaps I missed a step in my reading career, going from The Baby-Sitters’ Club to murder mysteries.
Anne’s story has that episodic feel of many novels of this time period. Her experiences at Green Gables teach her—and, coincidentally, the reader—about right and wrong and good and evil. She appears, at first, to be a sort of ragamuffin orphan child, but turns out to be highly imaginative and intelligent, so much so that she charms her adoptive family into keeping her, when they really wanted a boy to be an extra hand. Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert feel at turns pity for Anne and a kind of love for her.
My favorite part of the story is when Anne is told she may not go to a much-anticipated picnic because she has not confessed about where Marilla’s amethyst has been mislaid. So, Anne says that she was playing with it and dropped it in the stream—a wild fabrication. Marilla is so angry, she denies Anne from attending the picnic, with Anne accusing her with the fact that she said that if she confessed, she could attend the picnic. Marilla finally finds the missing item on a shawl of hers, and, realizing her mistake, allows Anne to enjoy the raptures of attending a picnic with her friends.
I liked Nat Henthoff’s The Day They Came to Arrest the Book, but I don’t think YAs today would really enjoy it all that much. We get all the different perspectives on a censorship case in a high school in a nameless town in America. All sides are openly debated while Mark Twain’s the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is “on trial” for racist language and sexism. While the book is certainly thorough in covering all sides of the debate, it reads more like a case study than a young adult novel. I know why this makes a lot of library reading lists: the librarians are portrayed as tough, intelligent people. The other characters are pretty flat, but fill in the dialogue where needed by the author to make his points about censorship. One plus: the book is fairly short.
Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones by Ann Head was published in 1969, but I think that many young readers today could appreciate this story of two high school students who find out that they are going to be parents. July thinks at first that she might have an abortion, but decides, for personal reasons, that she cannot do that to her and Bo Jo’s child. They decide to “do the right thing” and get married–amidst family disappointment, changing friendships, and their own relationship troubles. They sneak across state lines, lie about their real ages–16- and 17-years-old–and wind up living in Hatty Barnes’ garage apartment, with Bo Jo taking a job at July’s father’s bank while July whiles away the days as a housewife.
July is the protagonist, so we really get to see how she has mixed feelings about keeping the baby and marrying her boyfriend Bo Jo, and we get to know her as an intelligent, if stubborn, young woman. There are a lot of reflections on what it means to be a woman and to be married young; July is quickly bored. I liked that marriage wasn’t portrayed as some final, happy “we’re playing house and it’s wonderful!” scenario. Marriage is difficult for July and Bo Jo, and as their love for their baby matures, their love for each other also grows. While the book suffers a bit from dated language, for those who’ve read books like The Catcher in the Rye, this will be no great stretch.
