Fiction teaches us lots of things we might never need to use: how to win the Hunger Games, how to react upon learning you’re a wizard, what to do if a werewolf falls in love with you. But it also gives us life lessons we actually need, wrapped in narratives we can’t stop reading: how to empathize […]
One of our favorite things to zero in on here at the B&N Teen Blog is YA’s that “Get it Right,” i.e. that seem to perfectly portray some element of the human experience. As new YAs emerge, we get to add more and more of them to the small but illustrious list, though of course, there […]
The best thing about being a reader is the way it lets you live countless lives, countless stories. Books let you leave yourself behind, becoming such a part of your worldview that sometimes you can’t remember what came first: the book or the feeling. Truly great books say things we didn’t even know we felt, or at least express them better […]
The idea that readers can’t identify with unlikable characters is hilariously, fatally flawed. In pursuit of a good story, we’ve rooted for the success (or at least avidly followed the story) of psychopaths, rabbits, the color red, unapologetic pedophiles, and bees. If you stick googly eyes on a rock and give it a purpose (to kill all the other […]
You cried when you read the book, you cried double when you saw the movie, and now you’re all cried out and in need of a seriously good follow-up read (and a glass of water). Gayle Forman’s elegiac heartbreaker If I Stay finds teenaged Mia on the precipice between death and life, after the rest […]