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Th e well-known YA literature teachers and critics off er their list of the best works of 2008.
Every year after we have looked at the prize winners and the annual "Best Book" lists coming from the American Library Association committees and from editors of such publications as School Library Journal, Booklist, the New York Times, and Amazon.com's teen books, we settle down for a month or so of wonderful reading. What struck us about this year's crop of most highly acclaimed books is how different the books are both from each other and from what many people assume to be "the genre" of young adult literature, i.e., fi rst-person stories of kids in high school struggling with emotional problems.
As more and more people pay attention to young adult books-which for the moment are being described as a bright spot in an otherwise fl at era of publishing-we see less agreement on what is "the best." We were surprised, for example, that we did not see the book given the Printz Award by the American Library Association, Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (Harper), on other lists. Books that did appear on other lists, but not often enough to make it into our top seven or eight, include Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels (Knopf), John Green's Paper Towns (Penguin), and Nancy Werlin's Impossible (Penguin). We assure you that these books-as well as many others published in 2008- are worth reading.
Here are the eight books in alphabetical order that we have chosen to be on our 2008 Honor List.
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves
M. T. Anderson. Cambridge: Candlestick, 2008. 561 pp. $22.95. Grades eleven and up. ISBN: 978-0-7636-2950-2.
Schools teaching the Revolutionary War in integrated units are fortunate to have not only Laurie Halse Anderson's Chains but also the more advanced Octavian Nothing books by M. T. Anderson. By the end of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume I: The Pox Party, we have watched Octavian survive the madness of the Novanglian College of Lucidity with all its experiments in rationality; endure the horrors of the Pox Party in which invited guests played cards, danced, and drank copious amounts of spirits while...