Books for teen readers about SEX: sexual decision-making, sexual preferences, sexual identity, birth control decisions, abstinence, and personal responsibility.
Do these books belong in your library? Decide for yourself!
Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World by Ashley Herring Blake
Ivy is 12 years old (almost 13!), and feeling adrift following the birth of baby twins in the family. Her friends are just starting to think and talk about boys, but Ivy is starting to think about girls. Then, Ivy's world literally flies apart: a tornado flattens her house and leaves her family homeless.
Ivy is a smart, talented, and creative protagonist who finds more than a little help from friends--new friends and familiar friends.
This is a beautiful, sweet middle-grade book about Ivy and her family and friends, and their attempts to find their own places in the world. Highly recommended for readers ages 10 and up.
May is still mourning her best friend Libby, who died a couple of years ago when the car went off a bridge.
But maybe Libby didn't die.
The comic character created by the girls, a princess with blue hair, red Chuck Taylors and a katana suddenly shows up in graffiti all over Seattle. Then, May finds clues hidden in a webcomic: clues that lead her all over town, with a trail that might end with the discovery of a hiding, still-alive Libby.
This quick-moving story is interspersed with pages from the Princess X comic, and features action, adventure, friendship, mystery, and NO ROMANCE. Extra points for racial and gender diversity among characters that does not feel forced or tokenistic.
Things get a little name-droppy in the Seattle department, but at least the author used to live here and understands that just because there's a Starbucks on every corner doesn't mean that most natives actually buy coffees there.
Recommended for readers of print and graphic novels, ages 12 to adult.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
Senior Greg Gaines has planned out his last year at Benson High School: he's going to keep an insanely low profile, make lousy films, and survive until June.
It's good to have a plan. A plan makes excellent traction when you crumple it up and drive over it.
And that is, essentially, what happens Greg's plan. His mom greets him at the end of Senior Year Day 1 and tells him that Rachel has cancer, and that he, Greg, will go and befriend her.
If this was a regular book about cancer, Greg and his friends and family would learn a touching lesson about the sweetness of life and the bitterness of death. If this was a book by John Green you would need three boxes of tissues just to face the world after the final page.
But it isn't. Here are a few lines from the final chapter, just to give you a taste of the narrative voice:
...doesn't mean I'll be making a film out of this book. There is no way in hell that is going to happen. When you convert a good book to a film, stupid things happen. God only knows what would happen if you tried to convert this unstoppable barf-fest into a film. The FBI would probably have to get involved. There's a chance you could consider it an act of terrorism....
Greg's sarcastic, self-deprecating voice throughout the story rings true to anyone who has ever been a teen--or even spoken to a teen lately. However, Earl nearly steals the show several times. I won't quote any lines from Earl, partly because I don't want to spoil the fun of reading Earl in context, and partly because he cusses so much that every other word would be bleeped. And that is absolutely all I will say about Earl, except maybe this:
Great story, great characters, buckets of cussing and talking about sexual situations, but no bare skin except sometimes the bald head of Rachel, which looks (according to Greg and Earl) like Darth Vader when he takes his helmet off: "insanely white, like it had been boiled, and sort of veiny and lumpy." Not exactly an erotic image, but hey: cancer isn't very pretty.
Katherine Tegen Books, 2015. 978-0-06-22957-4. $17.99. 325 p.
Evie is a patient in a teen cancer ward.
She has had Ewing’s Sarcoma for most of her life, and feels more at home in the hospital with her fellow patients. Like any teen, she wants to act out. Stella is only too happy to help her. Stella becomes Evie’s outlandish roll model until they escape the hospital for a day and Stella dies. Evie falls into despair, as she knows her own death is also imminent. This is a 3 kleenex box portion of the book.
Suddenly, Evie’s cancer disappears! She goes home, finds that she is a stranger at home, at school, with the boyfriend who has stuck by her, and in her mind. She can’t shake the depression, and falls into prescription drug abuse. Her parents too have spent so much of their lives dealing with imminent death, that they become pretty ineffectual. Evie also meets Marcus, who is scarred in different ways, and while he tries to help Evie, the descent is horrifying to watch.
Reed creates real characters. This is not Fault in our Stars. It is a visceral reaction to finding that you are going to live after years of preparing for death. Tough themes are tackled with grace and realism, adding to the difficulty in placing this book in a school library. We can’t read only tearful, sweet stories of death and acceptance. This is the real world.
Set for a sequel, we will not read how Evie’s story ends until next summer.
