2008 Best Books for Young Adults (4)

Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy

A twelve year old girl named Stephanie had her uncle as her closest friend, and now he has passed away and has left his expensive villa to her. Stephanie is a fan of her uncle’s fictional horror books that she believes are just stories until she meets an investigator that turns out to be a skeleton. The skeleton known as Skulduggery Pleasant has found Stephanie to help him stop an ancient evil that her uncle talks about in his books. Together they will need to pull their strengths in order to save humankind from this evil. This was a good book to read to older elementary students, since they always like reading about scary stories. I really enjoyed the duo in this book and it showed readers, young kids, that everyone is scared of something just like the skeleton.

2008 Best Books for Young Adults (3)

Before I Die by Jenny Downham

Imagine being sixteen years old and living with a terminal case of leukemia and you no longer want to have treatments after four years of it; what would you do? Tessa decides to make a list of ten things she would like to do before she dies and we learn about them throughout the book. She would like to experiment with sex, drugs and criminal mischief only because she will not have the time to suffer the consequences. This was a touching book that many young adult readers will like to read especially if they have had known someone close to them that has died. This is a sad story that had me in tears at times only feeling sorry for Tessa for not being able to live her life. She is however able to experience love and in the end realizes the best thing to have around before she dies is family that loves her. This brought back many memories of my loss that our family experienced four years ago and it does make you appreciate family.

2008 Best Books for Young Adults (2)

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

This is an amazing book-picture book. The detail of the illustrations make you feel that you are looking at a photograph and not a pencil sketch. The book is about a man that leaves his family to find a better life for them. He is an immigrant that is looking for better work to support his family. With language being different as well as customs he gets overwhelmed by it all. This is exactly what happens to many of the immigrants that we see now; they don’t know the language and are struggling to make a better life for themselves and their families. The book has no text and you need to decide how to interpret the drawings on the pages, but you actually feel like if you are the man trying to understand the world he has stepped into. This book actually reminds me of my brother that went to study abroad in Amsterdam. He did not know how to speak Dutch and had to learn day by day how to get around and had no family near him. He struggled at the beginning and felt utterly alone just like the book.

2008 Best Books for Young Adults (1)

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt

This was a good book that talked about the life of Holling Hoodhood. He was a seventh grade student in the year 1967 that had a teacher that hated him. What was different about his school was that on Wednesday’s afternoons half of the students went to temple and the other half went to catechism while Holling had to stay with his English teacher Mrs. Baker since he was Protestant. He believed that she hated him since she made him learn Shakespeare during the afternoons that they spent together. During his Wednesday sessions, he learned to like Shakespeare and actually understood it. This was great because it got him thinking about his own life and becoming a man. Holling’s parents were not that understanding or supportive of their children. Holling go to star in a play at school and became very fond of a girl named Meryl Lee with all of this going on in his life plus getting on the cross country team; he needed to start learning what life was all about. It is a great book to let middle school students read especially boys because it will give them a sense of purpose and help them find themselves.

2008 Batchelder Award or Honor Book

The Cat, Or How I Lost Eternity by Jutta Richter

Christine meets a unique cat in an alley on her way to school and she begins to ponder ideas that he is able to transmit or tell her. She is usually late to school because of this and her teacher makes her write lines stating that there are no talking cats and that she would not be late anymore. The cat begins to tell Christine that you have to go through life being cleaver and that you must always look out for yourself in life. Christine does not want to believe that and does not like his sense of spitefulness. Christine in the end begins to be scared of the cat and believes that he is not everything he says he is. Christine believes that being number one in your life is not the main priority of living life. This is a good book to show the young readers not to fall into someone else’s negative attitude and self-interest in life. Also, one should not always be cleaver since it usually takes you back instead of getting ahead in life.