Hey YA fans!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Swoon Reads.
Swoon Reads publishes the latest and greatest in YA fiction with the help of readers and writers like you. We’re dedicated to the undiscovered, and we seek out the very best in bright, new bookish talent. From heroic epics, to alien adventures, to all-the-feels romance—if you’re loving it, we’ll publish it. We involve our community in every step of the publishing process, and work closely with selected writers to get their book ready for publication. Together, we bring new stories to life, because we believe that great books are better shared.
I’ve gotten and appreciated all of your amazing feedback the last couple of newsletters, so thank you all! Let’s take this week to regroup and catch up on some of the news going on in the YA world:
- August 18 is the day you can head to theaters to see the adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything.
- Hugh Jackman is attached to the adaptation of Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian.
- The UK hit by Beth Reekles, The Kissing Booth, was picked up by Netflix. I wonder if we’ll see it in the US…and more, I’m curious how the book feels, being that it’s set in the US but written by a British writer.
- Some news on the adaptation front for Patrick Ness’s “Chaos Walking” series.
- Here are the best children’s books of 2016 from the New York Times. The YA titles aren’t especially surprising, nor are they bad picks.
- This is an interesting idea: Hooked is an app for teens that sends short, conversationally-written texts to get them hooked on a book. I think the real takeaway is what the entrepreneurs found that anyone who has worked with teens knows — they can be brutal about their reading.
- I’m of mixed feelings on this piece about one author being told it was too dangerous for him to write about a teen genderqueer experience. My biggest feeling though comes from the end of the publisher: are they now actively seeking a genderqueer author doing this kind of writing? Because if the danger is that the author writing the book is not, then this is where they step up and actively seek out an author who is genderqueer. Talk the talk and walk the walk.
- A really great booklist of Native Americans in youth literature.
- The Bluford series was always wildly popular at the libraries where I worked, and it turns out, you can download the entire series on audio for free from the publisher.
Let’s take a look at the YA talk over on Book Riot from the last few weeks, too:
- The three kids books that made one reader a feminist.
- 10 ways that post-election America is like a YA dystopian novel.
- Build your 2017 YA reading list with these books which feature teens of color right on the cover.
- YA books which make good read alikes for Disney’s Moana.
- 5 fat-positive queer YA books.
- An excellent collection of YA titles are on this list of books about #CareFreeBlackFolks (aka, books not about The Struggle) by Jess Pryde.
Thanks for hanging out again! We’ll be back next week with a very much necessary, crowd-sourced book list and I’ll be asking you to weigh in on your favorite YA reads from this year (& those YA reads you think deserve a bigger readership).
This week’s Audiobooks! Newsletter is sponsored by 
So I congratulated myself for being a genius and queued up 
Look, we all like audiobooks here, we’re in on the secret that they can suspend time and transport you to a new world. Add an adventure story to the mix, and you’re in for an adrenaline-pumping, heart-pounding, shortest-car-ride-ever trip of your life. I thought you guys could use a 
Did any of you catch the new adaptation of Anne of Green Gables on PBS last week?! I am HERE for Anne and all her shenanigans on Prince Edward Island, butting heads with the uptight Cuthberts who thought they were adopting a boy to help on the farm. (Really, Cuthberts, that’s how you’re going to play this?) A new AoGG mini series is in the works at Netflix, too, written by Moira Walley-Beckett of Breaking Bad.
Recently out in paperback, Valente’s latest is an intergalactic opus and a love letter to cinema. Set in an alternate universe in which the Solar System was colonized via space cannon starting in the late 1800s (think A Journey to the Moon) and silent film retained a hold on the film industry well into the 20th century, it’s both incredibly elaborate and very simple.
Bailey Chen is whip-smart and has the college degree, the steel-trap mind, and the ambition to prove it. What she doesn’t have is a job. Or rather, a “real” job — currently, she’s the barback at her high school friend’s bar, living with her parents, and failing at networking her way into a better gig. This is her biggest concern until the day she discovers that not only are monsters real, but that an elite cadre of bartenders fights them with magical booze.
