I love autumn—the sweet smell of wood-smoke, pumpkins everywhere, trees laden with ripe apples and pears, the radiant bursts of red and orange that make me go wow on a regular basis. As Keats said, autumn truly is the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
But there’s also the icy whisper of winter around the corner. It gets dark way too soon, and things wither and die. To celebrate the light and dark sides of this season here are some of the YA riches hitting the shelves this fall, and some biting (well actually not that biting) criticism of all those best of YA lists, and overused YA tropes.
- Make your heart happy and cozy up with some of this fall’s new YA novels.
- Teenreads has some October YA releases you don’t want to miss.
- But sometimes it seems like every week there is a new best of YA list. Do you think it’s time for a best of YA canon that doesn’t change every other minute?
- I was surprised to learn about the rise of Buffy studies in Academia. I would definitely make Buffy an honorary member of the YA canon.
- No YA canon is complete without literary criticism. A common criticism of YA is its overuse of certain literary tropes—the parent who died, the teen with amnesia for a traumatic event, the artsy understanding girl who teaches the nerdy boy about sex, the hot guy who teaches the nerdy girl about sex. And there’s more. Learn about a new YA literary trope every week over at the HUB. This week it’s the manic pixie dream girl and boy. Most of the authors mentioned here are guys—no duh. Can you share some examples of YA novels by women with manic pixie dream boys?