Oh, Grow Up!
Joyce Adams Burner, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 5/5/2009
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Listen to John Green introduce and read from Paper Towns
Today’s teens face adult challenges ever more quickly, increasing the appeal of the coming-of-age story. Spice up your list of reliable classics with some edgy new titles that explore the passage to adulthood. The characters of these recent releases cross from innocence to experience against a backdrop of gritty realism, life-altering choices, occasional violence, and frequent disillusionment, gaining a mature understanding of self and circumstances that will provoke readers’ thinking and engage their imaginations.
Road Trip
"But thinking about the grass and all the different ways you can see it made me think about all of the ways I’d seen and mis-seen Margo. …I realized that the most important question was who I was looking for….[T]here was room enough in what she had left me for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos." In John Green’s Paper Towns (Dutton, 2008), Quentin Jacobsen, 17, spends a wild night pulling elaborately vindictive pranks with his unrequited love interest, nonconformist Margo Roth Spiegelman. When she disappears, Quentin discovers she has left clues sensible only to him, and fearful she intends suicide, he determines to find the mysterious Margo. Quentin’s search takes him, via Leaves of Grass and a deserted strip mall, from Orlando, Florida to a crossroads in upstate New York on a raucous road trip with friends in tow. Full of sophisticated musings, clever dialogue, hilarious moments, and raw emotion, Paper Towns portrays complex characters struggling to understand themselves and those they love. Who really comes of age in this story? Explore the metaphor of "paper towns," fictitious place names inserted on maps as copyright traps.
In Jennifer Bradbury‘s Shift (S & S, 2008), best friends Chris and Win take a post-graduation cross-country bicycle trip, but Win takes off alone when the boys have a falling out near the end of their trek. Chris arrives home alone to find he is a suspect in Win’s disappearance, and is being tailed by a detective working for his friend’s powerful father. Deducing from cryptic postcards that Win is staying with a Montana rancher they befriended, Chris sets off via bus to uncover the truth and bring resolution to their relationship. Explore themes of anger, honesty, emancipation, and friendship in this sharply crafted story that combines mystery, loss of idealism, and emergence into clear perception of self. Watch for moments of epiphany for Chris, such as his dominance in a friendly wrestling match that suddenly turns serious. "Friendly rivalry had been left behind on the road, or maybe this desire was something I’d had all along and just ignored. This time I was fighting to learn who was actually stronger—the better man. And I was willing to risk losing to find out who that was…. That’s when we started to break apart, I think."
Knowing Oneself
"I used to think that a person would not know who I was, not really know me, until they heard about my mother. Until they knew that I was a girl whose mother had chosen to leave her, had not wanted her. Whose mother walked out the door one night and never came back." Natalie, 16, rides a bus from Connecticut to Florida to find the mother who abandoned her, in Nora Raleigh Baskin’s All We Know of Love (Candlewick, 2008). Having given her virginity to a manipulative boyfriend, Natalie seeks insight about the nature of real love. After breaking up with him—three times—she is now afraid that she might be pregnant. Baskin skillfully weaves vignettes about what Natalie’s fellow passengers know of love into a beautifully written story full of longing, bewilderment, passion, pain, and hard-won wisdom. "Being wanted—when did that become the only thing that matters to me?" puzzles Natalie, in a title that lends itself to discussions of sexuality, ethics, psychology, and women’s studies, as well as literature.
"There are moments when people change. These moments are not isolated, not separate, not removed from the rest of life. They are not independent atoms of existence that suddenly break into your life—the ever-shifting phonemes of existence, which sometimes gather into concentrated patterns of such intensity, such unmistakable clarity and significance, that suddenly you know something about yourself, your own self, for the first time." In Aidan Chambers’s The Toll Bridge (Abrams, 2009), the playful friendship shared by teens Tess and Piers, who mans the toll bridge on the British estate where Tess’s father is caretaker, is disrupted when enigmatic Adam suddenly shows up at Piers’s door and refuses to leave. Tess and Piers are soon caught up in an emotionally explosive relationship with Adam, drawn to his lack of inhibition and finding themselves pushing the boundaries of experience and self-discovery. When Piers’s clingy girlfriend Gill believes she is being attacked by Adam and seriously injures him in retaliation, Tess and Piers finally unravel the shocking tangle of Adam’s true identity. Multi-layered characters populate this riveting coming-of-age story for older teens.
The Impact of Family
"At the funeral for Oliver’s father I daydreamed about killing my own," seethes Marcus in the opening lines of Suckerpunch by David Hernandez (HarperTeen, 2008). "With stealth I’d come at him, his back always turned, the way he finally turned his back on us early one morning and drove off to who-knows-where." For years Marcus watched his father physically and verbally abuse his younger brother Enrique, never stepping in to stop the violence. With their father now absent for a year, Marcus and Enrique resort to drugs, casual sex, and vandalism with their suburban California friends. Depressed Enrique is on medication and Marcus is struggling with guilt. When Mom reveals that Dad has reformed and is moving back home, the brothers decide to pay him a visit and frighten him with a starter pistol. Off his meds, Enrique’s anger rages out of control in an anguished climax that offers no easy answers. Hispanic culture, family dysfunction, child abuse, and the role of anger in emotional health are themes worth exploring in this gritty urban story.
African-American teens Marianne and Opal grew up as close as two girls could be in their Pennsylvania town, in Tonya Cherie Hegamin’s M+O 4EVR (Houghton, 2008). In high school, Marianne abandoned studious Opal in a wild quest for popularity. Opal’s love for fickle Marianne consumes her: "I still felt the same way, like she was the only thing in the world for me, but…there was something different—in me. I didn’t want to chase her to wherever she was going right now; it seemed too fast and too far this time—I felt like my heart might explode trying to catch up." When Marianne is found dead in a ravine, by accident or suicide, Opal is devastated, and withdraws from life. Gradually, through the steady support and lavish love of her grandmother and parents, Opal begins to emerge from her shell and find healing, in this lyrically written story that weaves the legend of a runaway slave into its narrative tapestry. Consider incorporating M+O 4EVR into the study of race relations, African-American history, sexual identity, and family dynamics.
Classic Coming-of-Age
"I believe all things happen for a reason, then ripple like the surface of a pond once a rock has been skipped. And I believe in the medicine, the signals.…That summer, we all had the ghost medicine that made us vanish and fade in ways we never thought, never saw. Anyway, it was what we wanted. And I guess that’s how all boys die." Troy Stotts, 17, works on a neighboring ranch with his best friend Tom Buller, and discovers love with Luz Benavidez, the rancher’s daughter, in Andrew Smith’s Ghost Medicine (Feiwel & Friends, 2008), an eloquent and timeless coming-of-age story full of vibrant characters in a Western setting. Encountering danger that escalates from a rattlesnake bite to a mountain lion attack, Troy and Tom are accompanied by Luz’s younger brother, the reticent Gabey, and threatened by Chase Rutledge, the town bully. When the boys stop Chase from raping Luz, the tension builds to a shattering conclusion. Consider Ghost Medicine’s exploration of courage, friendship, and the meaning of manhood.
Listen to John Green introduce and read from Paper Towns
Related TeachingBooks.net resources »»»
