Books for Big Kids
Let me begin by stating that I’m in my 30s and I hold a degree in English. I read constantly. No genre is safe from my wandering reader’s eye. While I read primarily fiction, I also enjoy biography, essays, poetry, and nonfiction (particularly if it’s scientific). I’m the sort of guy whose friends know that a book is a great gift to give him for pretty much any occasion.
Recently, I read a couple of books that truly surprised me. My surprise was not because of the books’ content; it was because of their genre. Generally, I don’t read “young adult fiction,” mostly because I’m not the target audience. Based on the recommendation of a friend, though, I recently picked up a copy of John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines. I had previously read Green’s other young-adult novel, Looking for Alaska, after receiving it in a Christmas book exchange a couple years ago. I enjoyed Looking for Alaska, but I didn’t love it. Still, I figured that Green’s other novel was probably worth a shot, particularly since most young-adult novels can be read in a matter of a few hours.
As it turns out, An Abundance of Katherines is fantastic! John Green has used the relatively simple guise of young-adult fiction to convey the kinds of themes one might expect from a much more complex and difficult novel. His characters deal with loneliness, wanderlust, betrayal, joy, and even love (which feels surprisingly genuine despite the fact that both the characters and the intended audience are teenagers). I picked up this novel at 11:45 one night, and I finished it about three hours later. It’s that compelling.
The other young-adult novel that blew me away recently was Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I have read a number of Alexie’s “adult” novels, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each one, particularly Reservation Blues. When I bought Diary, I didn’t realize that it was written for a teen-aged audience, but reading the first few pages made it clear that I had unwittingly stumbled into young-adult fiction once again.
Sherman Alexie is among the nation’s finest Native American authors, and the characters in his books deal with the heartache, the happiness, the loss, and the beauty experienced by Native Americans as they live in both their traditional culture and American culture outside the reservations. Surprisingly, Alexie addresses these same very serious themes in Diary. The novel describes a young man who feels himself divided between his town on the reservation and the nearby white community where he chooses to go to school, partly accepted and partly rejected by each. The book elegantly addresses issues of identity, race, and belonging while remaining hopeful and easy to read.
The world is a heavy place, and we all need a break from it sometimes. Let me recommend finding your next escape in a young-adult novel. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.
