Young Adult books: September 2007 Archives

I figure since stores are already selling Halloween candy, it's not too early to pick a book titled Good Ghouls Do (Berkley Books, 231 pages, $9.99) — a teenage vampire tale by Julie Kenner, the author of The Good Ghoul's Guide to Getting Even, where we first met our heroine, Beth Frasier.

Beth is your normal, everyday high school girl — except that she drinks blood and she's out to kill the freak who made her a freak. You see, if you kill your master — the vampire who "made" you — you can be restored to human ...

Ah, to be young and back in high school again... ahem ... I mean, man oh man, I'd rather walk barefoot over hot coals than have to relive the high school years. The awkward freshman year, trying to figure out where you fit in, the crush on the cool guy who likely doesn't know you exist, the dorky clothes you wear because you have no idea they're not in fashion ... oh, the agony of it all. If only there had been a handbook filled with the do's and don'ts of freshmen year.

Marissa Walsh has tapped into this teenage angst with A Field Guide to High School (Delacorte Press, 133 pages, $15.99), which actually is a novel but could certainly be read as a handbook for navigating the pressure-cooker world of high school...

"Life is short, so make time for your loved ones" is the big message in today's selection, Life on the Refrigerator Door: Notes Between a Mother and Daughter (Harper, 220 pages $15.95) by Alice Kuipers.

The book covers about a year in the lives of teenage Claire and her divorced obstetrician mother. The two never see each other, and apparently do not have cell phones, so they communicate via written notes. Here are a couple examples ...

In today's Sun-Times Books section, my colleague Dave Hoekstra writes about Jack Kerouac's On the Road, published 50 years ago this week.

So today I chose the young adult book Zane's Trace (Candlewick Press, 177 pages, $16.99), a swift read of a road book by Allan Wolf that details a teenager's day trip to visit his mother's grave, where he intends to join her in eternity ...