Best YA of 2008

[owlectomy]

The Adbooks mailing list nominated 12 books for their annual JHunt award:

o The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves by M.T. Anderson
o Graceling by Kristin Cashore
o The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
o Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
o The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
o Paper Towns by John Green
o Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
o The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
o The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
o The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
o Nation by Terry Pratchett
o Impossible by Nancy Werlin

I've read 11 of these (all except Nation! Which is on my desk right now and I'll get to it Very Very Soon!) and I was going to make a big huge post on them but I think I'd just as soon tackle them a couple at a time. For the record, as of this moment my top picks are:

Octavian Nothing
Tender Morsels
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
The Knife of Never Letting Go

...And if I had to pick just one it would be Morsels or Knife. I think. Maybe. It was an extraordinarily good year for YA, and especially for YA fantasy, although you can find fantastic books any year if you're paying attention.

Little Brother already got voted off, so perhaps I'll start with that and with the other science fiction book that didn't seem particularly special, The Adoration of Jenna Fox:


Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
Here's what I wrote about it the day after I finished it:

17-year-old hacker, tinkerer, and gamer Marcus finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when he skips school and gets caught in the worst incident of terrorism in the U.S. He gets separated from his friends, detained by Homeland Security.

As the government starts encroaching more and more on civil liberties, Marcus is determined to get back at DHS, stop the questioning and detainment of innocent civilians, and generally take back the government from the law-and-order-at-all-costs brigade. Tall order for a junior in high school.

This is not a far-future dystopia. It is about the world now. (Based on Marcus having a Sega Dreamcast when he was seven, and discussions of the upcoming midterm elections, I'd put the date at 2010. I'm not sure if the technology is there yet, but certainly Doctorow would know more about that than I would!) It is, specifically, about the situation in the U.S. in the present day, not some handwavy analogy of a dystopia. It is also a manual to do exactly what Marcus does. Mind you, it's not filled with lines of code and technical detail. (You can look up all that stuff on Wikipedia). It's just enough to make you go, "Oh, cool!" - or else, "Oh, no!"... and to inspire you to take a few pages from Marcus's playbook.

Which makes it a really important book.

But it's something else again that makes it a whole lot of fun. Doctorow - well, he named his daughter Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus. That just about says it all. It's a fast-paced technothriller packed with offhand nifty ideas and references and in-jokes. If you're at all familiar with Scrotumgate from last year, you'll know why this was my favorite:

"Did she use the scrotum line on you? I hate it when she does that. She just loves the word 'scrotum,' you know. It's nothing personal."

I'm thrilled when I read a boy book that's filled with information and technology and the things that guys will voluntarily read about if they won't voluntarily read about things like feelings, and is also plenty good on its own literary merits. It's icing on the cake when that book is also politically conscious, socially relevant, and smart as all get-out. (Of course, that's not to say that girls shouldn't read it too!)

In short: it's made of awesome.

And they were absolutely write to vote it off the island. Not because it was a BAD book, mind you. But for all that I loved it the day after I read it, a few months later I can hardly even remember it. It hits at a lot of superficial truths and no deep ones. That would be enough in a year when there weren't this many fantastic YA books, but not this year. I wasn't particularly bothered by the quality of the writing, as other mailing list members were; I wasn't bothered by the infodumps, because I have talked to enough teenage boys who only know how to talk in infodumps, and it's SO in character. I am not regretting that I loved it intensely for about a week and a half. But it wasn't one of the best books of the year.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary E. Pearson

Jenna wakes up from a year-long coma, without memories of her parents or her friends or her life before the coma; she gradually comes to realize things she wasn't told about her accident, about her family, about her present existence.

Some people loved this book, but I really thought it was just okay. The problem is that the author is dealing with two big themes here: first, what it means to be alive, to be human, in a society where the lines between alive and not-alive are increasingly blurred; second, coming into existence as an independent person rather than a projection of the hopes and fears and expectations of one's parents. I didn't feel like either theme was developed as well as it could be; I didn't feel like the second theme was grounded enough in the action to come alive for me (we're told a lot about how Jenna feels pressured by her parents' expectations, but I don't FEEL it), while the implications of the first theme felt a bit skimpy and skipped over, too neatly resolved at the end.

Comments

[erinbow.livejournal.com]

What's the scoop on this award? It's a new one for me.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

It's a really informal award voted on by members of the Adbooks mailing list; it was started a few years ago by one Jonathan Hunt after he was unhappy with the Prinz picks. Members vote off one book per week, Survivor-style, until a five-book shortlist remains and the winner is voted on from among those.