Cora Cancel is a twelve-year-old voracious reader at Saint Patrick’s School in Carlisle, PA. Here’s how she sees the world of reading. How many books do you read per week, on average? 1-2 weekdays, 2-3 on the weekends. Why do you read? It transports me to other worlds. I become an all-powerful observer. I’m in
. . . Revising, revising, revising . . . I’ve written before about how, for me, writing a novel is rewriting a novel. And that the revision process is like applying several coats of paint, pausing in between each coat to get a look at what’s happening to the object. More precisely, it’s like coating
Karen Jensen, MJS, published an article in School Library Journal in January 2023, “By the Numbers, a look at YA being published in 2023 (so far)” https://teenlibrariantoolbox.com/2023/01/24/by-the-numbers-a-look-t-ya-being-published-so-far-in-2023/ In that article she links a similar study that she conducted on YA literature in 2022. What can we tell about YA Contemporary by reading Karen’s work? We
My goodness! It’s the 10th of May already! A third of the second-best month of the year is shot. Time to look towards summer Young Adult Contemporaries. Here’s my list of books I’ll be looking to buy. June Beach Reads: Crashing Into You, Rocky Callen. Street racing! Cool! All Roads Lead to Rome, Sabrina Fedel.
Things are a-hopping with my second and third novels. Let’s talk about my third novel first. That’s the one I’m working on right now. If you know me, you’ve heard me talk about my Muley novel. The novel used to be called Muley the Magnificent and the Star of India. I think that’s a great
What award do I want to win with my YA Contemporary fiction? I know about the Printz prize. You probably do too. Are there other prizes for YA novels/literature/fiction, however you term it? That’s the question I asked myself this past weekend. What am I shooting for, exactly? I found out that there are over
Now that I’ve talked about what YA Contemporary is, and about its various manifestations, I will say what YA Contemporary is not. If you’ve read about a dozen YA Contemporaries, or at least books labeled as such, you know that most Contemporaries have romance in them. It’s just part of the genre. Relationships are so
by Hank Roberts I have just returned from an unusual eight-day writing conference. It was held aboard a cruise ship. While the Harmony of the Seas traversed the Gulf of Mexico, we writers gathered daily to listen to bestselling author William Bernhardt discuss the craft of composing fiction. I took dozens of pages of notes.
Hank blogs about YA Contemporary every Monday and Friday. (Part 3 of a 3-Part Series) What are the sub-genres in Young Adult Contemporary? Here’s what I did. I read the summaries of the Goodreads Best Of YA novels for the past 5 years. I categorized them. Lots of overlap. I chose each one’s category by
My great friend and teacher of YA fiction at both high school and college levels, Dr. Dean Smith, https://www.author-dean-smith.com/, suggests this definition: YA lit didn’t really come into its own until Catcher in the Rye and later on with The Outsiders and Ordinary People. Prior to that, most of the novels directed toward a teen
