How fully can an author inhabit an addict's world and still spin a story coherent enough to engage the teen reader? Margaret K. McElderry Books(Simon & Schuster Books), 2004 In the 1970's, kids might have turned to the anonymously penned Go Ask Alice (1971), which was billed as
At the beginning of the novel, where an epigraph might appear, is a note from the author, explaining that Uglies was shaped by a series of email exchanges between Scott Westerfeld and author Ted Chiang about his story “Liking What You See: A Documentary”. At the end of Ted Chiang's
Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, Claudette Colvin, fifteen years old, stayed in her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. It was March 2, 1955, but in the intervening years, this story has been all-but-forgotten. Phillip Hoose's work is essential reading.
Admittedly, I chose There's an Owl in the Shower because I had read Jean Craighead George's classic My Side of the Mountain. I knew of her reputation for including ecological and environmental themes in the stories she has written for children. But when I realized that it had been published in
When Penelope Lively was interviewed by Emma Donoghue in 2003, the author was tickled to have her books for children acknowledged; her writing for children was routinely dismissed and she explained that she now felt quite distanced from it. The news of this dismissal shocked me because I came of
