Kate Schatz’s recent release, Rad American Women A-Z, is an artistic-historic compilation of leftist women whose accomplishments have sometimes been forgotten but who paved the way for women of all kinds to have the rights we have today. What rad…
Category: Out of the Mainstream: Gender, Ethnicity, and Disability
The Morris Finalist Blog Tour: An Interview with Isabel Quintero
Welcome to the Morris Finalist Blog Tour, featuring the outstanding 2015 debut authors and their books! In December, YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association, of the American Library Association) announces the list of finalists, and we learn of the winner…
Civil Rights and Intersectionality: Lies We Tell Ourselves
The past ten years have seen 50-year milestones for significant events in the Civil Rights Movement, and with them have come a number of books, fiction and non-fiction, for young readers. Stories of school desegregation, in which a white student…
Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend by Erika T. Wurth
I knew from the very first sentence of Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend, by Erika T. Wurth, that I was reading a young adult novel like no other–that the voice was going to be entirely original, the setting one of those “invisible”…
Three Books on Questioning Religious Belief
With Hanukkah and Christmas at hand, this seems an inopportune time to review books about teens who question the religious beliefs of their elders. Still, adolescence is a time of questioning, and whatever decision a young person makes about faith…
Mental Illness, 50 Years Ago: A Review of Crazy
Laura Wahlberg has a secret that she hides from her friends and teachers—her mother’s mental illness. Once upon a time, her mother wanted to be an artist, but now her mother stares into space, often not recognizing her own family…
Coming of Age with “Gabi: A Girl in Pieces”
As I’ve made my way through the dozens of books nominated for the Cybils Award in YA Fiction—I’m now up to 55—a few books have come to stand out. I’ve already reviewed some and will be focusing on others in…
Boy in Love, Sideways
Last weekend I had dinner with a group of authors from Rochester who were in town for the Albany Children’s Book Festival, and the topic of YA romance came up. Someone asked if we knew of a romance from a…
Destigmatizing Mental Illness: A Review of Don’t Touch
Cadence Finn has undergone many changes in her life—notably, her father leaving and starting a new school. She also has a lot to prove, because, in her father’s absence, she is pursuing her interest in theater in defiance of his…
Claiming the Life You Deserve: Girls Like Us
Biddy and Quincy have just turned 18 and graduated from their high school’s Special Education program. Their counselor has arranged for them to live together, with Biddy helping Elizabeth, an older woman with a neurological disorder, and Quincy working as…