Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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After having spent the past year reading more than two hundred of the new Young Adult books published in 2003, I headed off to ALA in San Diego, just after New Year's, to participate in discussions on each of the titles nominated over the course of the year by the members of the Best Books for Young Adults committee. For one of us to so nominate a title--and we nominated a combined total of 207 books last year--meant that we committed the other fourteen members of the BBYA committee to read that book in its entirety.

As we neared the final voting for the BBYA list--the point at which we necessarily turn our backs on nearly two-thirds of those nominated titles--I made a final plea for including my favorite "Growing Up Male" books for 2003.

Richie's Picks: Growing Up Male, The Best of 2003:
BOY MEETS BOY
PREP
CLAWS
HOW ANGEL PETERSON GOT HIS NAME
INSIDE OUT
OUT OF ORDER
JAKE, REINVENTED
BLANKETS
DRIFT
ACCELERATION

Nobody needed to make a similar plea for including a sufficient number of "growing up female" books on the BBYA list--their nominations come easily and often since the committee was (and continues to be) composed of fourteen female librarians and me. Not anybody's fault, but merely a product of our society and the resulting predominance of females throughout the Young Adult librarian field. And while these exceptional, cutting-edge female YA librarians do their utmost to serve all of their patrons, their inexperience in growing up male means that a vigilance must be maintained so that the BBYA list harbors an equitable number of contemporary novels wherein adolescent boys can identify with authentic male protagonists, male issues, male sensibilities, and male humor.

Having limited myself to fighting for these ten primo "Growing Up Male" books of the year, the reality was that I was necessarily campaigning for only a few of them. The majority of these ten books I listed had been readily embraced by most of the committee, in the same manner that I had enthusiastically nominated and/or supported many great books with which girls could identify such as TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A HEARTLESS GIRL, A NORTHERN LIGHT, FRICTION, KISSING KATE, ZIGZAG, and STARING DOWN THE DRAGON.

Yet there were, indeed, a good number of "girl" books that easily made the BBYA list for which I still cannot begin to understand the charm or appeal. And I'm sure that each of the committee members would voice that sentiment about one or two of the books on my "Male" list. In fact, they put the kibosh on CLAWS which absolutely, positively should have made the BBYA list. And they disapproved--in a nearly unanimous female chorus--the inclusion of other solid "Male" books I nominated over the course of the year for which I had enthusiastic male reader responses such as SHOOTING MONARCHS, SKUD, and THE GLASS CAFÉ. Teens readers I know like Cody and Taylor and Tyler and Ricky and Eric and Vlad could passionately relate to these books and their male characters. Female BBYA committee members could not.

Last spring many of us got to read the highly publicized and highly charged essay in The Guardian by British author Anne Fine about the new Melvin Burgess novel DOING IT. (If you haven't read the essay, Google "Guardian Anne Fine Doing It" and you'll find a link.) To put it mildly, Anne Fine was unable to find the appeal in DOING IT.

Reading Fine's attack, along with statements by other writers about Burgess's proported attempts to "push the envelope" by having the male, high school characters so candidly discussing issues of male sexuality, left me somewhat squeemish about the prospect of reading the book. I'd heard lots of "Wows," but not any "Really great story!"

DOING IT is, in fact, a really great story about three male high school friends and their obsessions about and relationships with females. It is well-written and compelling, fun and honest and occasionally heartwarming. Those three high school boys are a self conscious, vulnerable, and sensitive lot. And while I cannot necessarily see myself as any one of those three characters, I had friends in high school who were dead ringers.

To argue that normal high school boys don't spend a lot of time thinking about girls and girls' bodies would make my high school experience abnormal. (It could be argued that Richie's Picks began in the late 1960s when I kept a secret, hidden list, updated weekly, of the ten girls at school I'd most like to be with.) To argue that boys aren't fearful about their adequacy, that they don't worry about whether their bodies are normal, or that they don't say truly gross stuff on a regular basis is, of course, ridiculous. And to argue that boys won't go crazy over this book is something that even Ms. Fine didn't even have the...um...nerve to claim.

My point is this: DOING IT is a primo Growing Up Male book. High school and public YA librarians absolutely need to forget about Anne Fine's fears of DOING IT. Instead they need to read DOING IT and need to buy it for their collections whether or not it is their cup of T (as in testosterone).

I'm recommending this book for high school and public library YA collections. (But I told the eighth graders in our BBYA group that if they bring in a copy of the Anne Fine attack piece signed by their parents then I'll add them to the long waiting list that our high school readers have already created.)

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com