Kids and Teen Blog
Tough Issues, Great Reads: When Teen Life Isn’t All Rainbows and Sock-Hops
by Megan
January 25, 2013
Sometimes, being a teenager sucks.
Sometimes it goes beyond plain-old suckage and into downright nasty, over-the-top suck-tastic territory.
Adult fiction loves the coming-of-age tale, but what if that coming of age is horrendous, cataclysmic, short… or doesn’t happen at all?
There’s been an ongoing spate of attention to the so-called genre of “sick lit” for teens (a term that doesn’t leave much wiggle room for argument). What is "sick lit"? (I cringe whenever I type that term... Every time I read about so-called “sick lit” I hear a shrill shriek in my head of “Won’t somebody please think of the children!"). Essentially it describes books for teens that explore topics such as death, disease, and anything not particularly PC.
This subject got a lot of attention from the success of last year’s The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, a story about two teens with cancer. Whether you think the whole sick lit argument is a somewhat bogus idea that doesn’t give teens enough credit [full disclosure here: I DO! ], or an argument with some merit, it can hardly be disputed that bad things happen to kids, bad things act as good discussion points, and bad things can make a pretty compelling story.
Here are a couple of good books on the horizon that I’ve been reading that do it right, and some good discussion points raised therein.
Absent
(Spring 2013)
Much like the Marleys were dead to begin with, Paige is dead from the get-go after a freak fall from the school roof during her physics class. Seemingly doomed to be confined in ghostly form to the high school that was the scene of her death (as nightmarish an idea as any I’ve ever heard), Paige feels hopeless as rumors circulate that her death wasn't an accident, but a suicide... until she discovers that she can possess living people when they think about her. Can she use this new ability to stop the rumors swirling about her death?
Why you’ll talk about it: There is a mystery involved in this story, and the borders between the living and the dead are not so rigid as they would seem.
Discussion points: Questions of free will are raised, the labels we assign to people, and the idea of reputation, that bastion of obsessed high-school attention, extended to life after death.
My Life After Now
(April 2013)
Theatre-loving Lucy is sixteen and happy, with a boyfriend, her best friends, and an upcoming role in the school play. But after her boyfriend makes a less-than-graceful exit with another girl and Lucy's choice role in the school play goes to said girl, Lucy loses it and does something completely out of character. After an unplanned night, Lucy becomes HIV positive. Yikes. Now there’s a yearbook summary from hell for you.
Why you’ll talk about it: This is no “don’t have sex or bad things will happen” kind of book, but a book of what happens "after". As the protagonist notes, what happens when you need to know information beyond the “practice safe sex, kids” lessons of sex ed class?
Discussion points: How do you go to high school being HIV positive? How do you deal with the misinformation and fear around the disease? How do you forgive yourself for a costly mistake?
BIG Discussion Point: As the authors notes in the "Facts and Figures" section at the end of the book, though teenagers make up only 25% of the sexually active population, young peole (13-29) accounted for 39% of all new HIV cases in the USA in 2009. That is a scary number.
(BONUS: the book includes book Reader's Guide discussion questions and an HIV Resource Guide For Teens at the back).
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teen fiction teens
Comments
On January 26, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Darlene said:
On May 29, 2013 at 03:43 PM, Hanna said:
I’ll see if I can find this book in the nearest bookstore.
These both sounds like very good books! I read my first “sick-lit” book last year, Never Enough by Denise Jaden, and I loved it. It tackled a lot of tough issues, and it was hard to read. I laughed, I cried, it was a heart-breaking book.
I am adding both of these books to my Wishlist!