Finalist for the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, Deborah Wile’s Revolution, Book 2 in The Sixties Trilogy, is a new, powerful, and complex young adult novel. While Revolution focuses on two fictional characters, their story is embedded in the true historical events of Greenwood, Mississippi during the summer of 1964, known as Freedom Summer, when volunteers, met with violence and threats, launched a campaign to register as many newly enfranchised African-American voters as possible. Drawing on excerpts from songs, news articles, images, and other ephemera from the events in Greenwood and the wider civil rights movement, Wiles’s layered narrative honestly depicts the violence and bigotry of the era while also appealing to relatable and age-appropriate themes of growing up and facing family changes.
A is for apple, B is for baby, C is for… yawn! Unexpected, funny, and irreverent, Oliver Jeffers’s Once upon An Alphabet is a new take on the old formula; this picture book has “stories, made of words, made for all the letters.” The once familiar alphabet comes uncannily alive in the form of characters such as “Danger Delilah” (L) “who laughs in the face of Death and dances at the door of Disaster,” and the “Owl that rides on the back of the Octopus” (O) who together search for problems like the “puzzled parsnip” (P). Jeffers’s beautiful illustrated and endlessly clever book may be a challenge to describe but is also a joy to read, no matter your age (or grasp on your ABCs).
Crazy, Linda Vigen Phillips’s YA novel in verse, is a finely crafted fiction that deals with mental illness in a 1960s family. Laura, a 15 year old living with a bipolar mother, tells her story in free verse that takes inspiration from the narrative, lyrical, and imagist style. Phillips draws from her own personal experience dealing with the stigma historically attached to mental illness and, through her compelling book, hopes to be an advocate for teens facing similar situations today.
Karen Stanton’s Monday, Wednesday, and Every Other Weekend is a sympathetic and eclectically styled picture book that deals with a family break up and the adjustment of living in two homes. Henry and Pomegranate (Henry’s dog) move between Henry’s parents’ new homes on a daily basis; Henry notes the great things about each house but Pomegranate’s actions reveal a longing for their old home all together. Stanton’s book also captures the diversity of city living and different types of families, and would be a great addition to units on family and city life.
For youth with a flair for words and language is the delightful and heartfelt YA novel, Natalie Lloyd’s A Snicker of Magic. Felicity Pickle, our narrator, is fresh character who sees words everywhere but finds it hard to say them. Her experiences will be welcome to students who have a creative bent but find public speaking a challenge, or to anyone who has ever felt like the odd one out in a new classroom. The novel is peppered with fun visual touches that express handwritten notes or event posters and fans have noted that Lloyd’s wordplay and invention make this text a particularly fun one to read out loud.
Feel free to browse these titles and more in OISE library’s Juvenile Fiction section which is located on the third floor of the OISE library.
