The Teen Reader's Advisor

Citation

Carlin, A. (2008), "The Teen Reader's Advisor", Collection Building, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 42-42. https://doi.org/10.1108/01604950810846242

This is the author's fourth book and her third in the Teens @ the Library Series. This volume is a welcome addition to such readers' advisory tools as Huse and Huse's 2005 guide, Who Else Writes Like … ? A Reader's Guide to Fiction Authors.

The main part provides annotated booklists that have been categorized into subjects and genres. Working through hierarchies to identify desired topics achieves greater specificity of recommendations (e.g. Families/Adoption). This dissection of genres into separate aspects (e.g. Fantasy/Dragons; Fantasy/Talking Animals) reflects how genres are multifaceted, enabling the young adult librarian to provide a range of options for readers. Each section lists further resources for the librarian, which are useful for contextualizing, consolidating and marketing genre‐based collections. Honnold takes a title (rather than author) approach to recommendations. Since some writers inhabit multiple genres (e.g. Ian Banks, Stephen King); this is advantageous for school librarians, who have to work on a case‐by‐case basis.

Upon careful reading, the booklists manifest difficulties with classifying a book within a subject or genre: A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess) overlaps the author's categories, e.g. Crimes and Detention, Dystopia, Gangs, Peer Pressure/Conformity, not just Science Fiction Classics to which it has been assigned. This makes the excellent separate author and title indices vital.

Furthermore, the lists illustrate the difficulties involved in categorizing books as “YA” literature. Titles regarded as “adult” and “classic” fiction, not necessarily “YA” fiction, are included, which strengthens the book and acknowledges that these titles are suitable for YA readers also. The author provides a good chapter on characteristics of YA literature.

The author, wisely, makes no claim to comprehensiveness: the Holocaust and War sections do not include Emil and Karl (Yankev Glatshteyn), Fatelessness (Imre Kertész), nor The Dark Room (Rachel Seiffert), with YA protagonists. The Science Fiction and Fantasy sections are surprisingly short: only one book each by John Wyndham, Philip K. Dick, and Raymond E. Feist. The series editor refers to Robert Heinlein's Glory Road, yet the author misses this!

The book uses the US age‐grading system and has an Anglo‐US literature bias. Nevertheless, this is a useful resource for collection building and reader advisory services. For the first section alone (pp. 3‐52), this book is recommended for postgraduate school librarianship programmes. For the readers' advisory section, it is recommended to all RA services and school librarians.