Summer of YA

After spending two years teaching middle school and having it look like that will be continuing for the foreseeable future, I decided that I needed to get better acquainted with the books that my students are reading.  I fully admit that my YA knowledge is quite limited, and that needs to be corrected so that I can be better informed of what my students like to read.

I will be honest, YA has never been a genre I've been overly fond of, even when I was the target demographic.  Once I left children's books behind, I jumped to non-fiction and left fiction behind.  I read a few of the required classics here and there, but for the most part, if I was reading for pleasure, it was either non-fiction or adult fiction (Tom Clancy, Tony Hillerman, etc.) that my mother approved for me.  Even then, and to this very day, I read fairly little prose fiction.  (But I do read a comic book or two.)

So I vowed that this will be the summer of YA--my goal is to read at least one a week before the year starts and then read at least two a month going forward, to get myself better acquainted with the genre.  I'm starting with the books I will be teaching this year as well as the Hunger Games and I hope to do at least short reviews here as I go along.

I'd love suggestions, but please make sure they are on the low-end of the YA scale.  Things for high-school won't help me or anything that really has strong adult and/or controversial themes.

Sometime soon, my reviews will kick off with thoughts on the first book of The Hunger Games.  See you then!