A Different Look at YA Novels
Sonia Patel, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who has written three YA novels, argues that “YA fiction needs to expand its boundaries beyond safe, popular stories that only affirm and praise different cultures. It needs to push past the expectation that all diverse teens can conquer adversity in a tolerable way.”
5 YA BOOKS THAT TACKLE MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES
In honor of his brother, who died a year ago, Lucas Maxwell decided to read five YA novels dealing with mental health and substance abuse in five weeks. Here he reports on the five books he read and what those books can teach us.
Where the Amateur Reader Ends, and the Professional Critic Begins
Tom Lutz reminds us that we all were amateur readers before we became critics of what we read.
‘Quichotte’ Is Salman Rushdie’s Latest. But the Act Is Getting Old.
Having never read anything by Salman Rushdie, I was drawn to this article in which Parul Sehgal argues Rushdie “is the author of nearly 20 books — six published in the last 11 years alone, but of diminishing quality. The novels are imaginative as ever, but they are also increasingly wobbly, bloated and mannered. He is a writer in free fall. What happened?”
TECHNOLOGY IS A CRIME WRITER’S BEST FRIEND
Here are two novels that I’ve read recently:
- The Escape Room by Megan Goldin, in which four coworkers become trapped in an elevator and must think about the consequences of their past actions
- The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware, in which a governess faces haunting occurrences in a smarthouse completely controlled by technology
This reading is the reason this article by thriller writer Catherine Ryan Howard caught my eye: “When I sit down at my desk to work on my novels, it’s in this particular corner—the mundane, everyday world of our online lives—that I like to play in.”
© 2019 by Mary Daniels Brown
