Teen Genre Connections: from Booktalking to Booklearning

Citation

Ray, S. (2006), "Teen Genre Connections: from Booktalking to Booklearning", Library Review, Vol. 55 No. 6, pp. 381-382. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530610674848

Lucy Schall is a retired English teacher, who has published two earlier guides to talking about books. Her aim here is to provide information about titles that librarians, teachers or families who want to keep teenagers reading should know about. All the main recommendations, which include both adult fiction and novels published for young adults, have been published in 2000 or later, a fact which seems to be very much in keeping with the compiler's aims.

The featured titles are arranged by genre in a user‐friendly way. There are seven chapters: Labelled Issues, Contemporary Life, Adventure/Survival, Mystery/Suspense, Fantasy/Science Fiction/Paranormal, History/Period and Multiple Cultures, each of them appropriately subdivided. Under each featured title, the same arrangement is followed. After details of the book and its themes, with an indication of the appropriate reading level, there are a succinct description of the content, an outline for a book talk, “learning opportunities” (i.e. things to do), and a list of related works.

The recommended books are intended as starting points for discussions around various themes and should take young people beyond their text books, inspire book club programmes and keep teenagers in touch with books as they move from books written specially for them to adult novels. Ideally, the young readers will also be prepared for reading and appreciating classics and more difficult texts.

Schall presents the books with great enthusiasm – I felt I would really enjoy reading some of them by myself. However, many of the books are unlikely to be easily available outside the US. I recognised some of the authors and titles, including Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light, published in the UK as A Gathering Light and winner of the 2003 Carnegie Medal. Two British writers, who are also Carnegie Medal winners, Aidan Chambers and Gillian Cross, are represented, along with J. K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a featured book. I knew Postcards from No Man's Land by Chambers, Jane Eyre and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, all currently in print in the UK and all of which are linked to Garret Freymann‐Weyr's My Heartbeat, which I didn't know.

There is an index to authors, titles and subject and it is the last which shows very clearly that Teen Genre Connections has been produced for the American market. For example, “British history” is represented only by Marc Aronson's John Winthrop, Oliver Cromwell, and the Land of Promise. Before you ask, Oliver Twist, the only one of Dickens's works to be included, appears twice as a linked book on the theme of orphans.

The really determined reader outside the US might be able to adapt and make use of Schall's ideas but $40 is a lot to pay for creating a fair amount of additional work!