This illustrator, YA wunderkind, and all-around czar of imagination has more irons in the fire than a kleptomaniacal leprechaun could steal. Read on.

Wit, passion, fatal cancer, and true love. Green’s big risks pay off.

With her latest novel, Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein pushes the limits of the YA genre.

Our conditioned hunger for young adult literature

This summer some dear family friends gave us a few antique German children’s books for our son. They included a huge and heavy tome of Wilhelm Busch’s work for children – author of the savagely funny and come-uppance-heavy Max and Mortiz (look it up, it’s worth it) – and a curious little volume of (what [...]

My desk totem is a hundred-year-old children’s book. As a child, I knew its magic was true—the characters were too sharp not to be real.
“What on earth is it?” Jane said. “Shall we take it home?”
The thing turned its long eyes to look at her, and said: “Does she always talk such nonsense, or is [...]

What if you could flip a coin and change your life?

Summers, my dad took his two weeks’ vacation from the bank and drove our family southeast through corn and tobacco fields to Emerald Isle, North Carolina. We stayed on the sound-side of the island, in a small cottage on stilts, and each morning we hauled our chairs, coolers, and my mom’s heavy beach bag through [...]

Saldin nails the caustic appeal of troubled teens at a wilderness reform school.

I could easily make the case that Absolutely Normal Chaos by Sharon Creech changed my life forever. I read it some time in early middle school. It was the first book that made me want to be a writer. For the next decade, yes even through college, I reread Chaos — diary novel about one [...]