Reading Rants! Out of the Ordinary Teen Booklists!

Seventeen-year-old Mia has everything: a promising career as a cellist, awesome former-punk parents that really get her and her music, and best of all, an understanding alterna-rock boyfriend who is the yang to her yin. Then one day on a routine drive near their home, her family is involved in a terrible car accident. Mia’s life is nearly lost. Now treading a fuzzy comatose line between life and death, Mia has to decide whether she wants to give up and let go or stay and fight. As the minutes tick by during the the longest day of Mia’s life, she mentally contemplates the consequences of either choice. Friends and relatives move in and out of her hospital room and her memory, each one weighing in on Mia’s decision, whether they know it or not. As the dawn breaks the day after her accident, Mia finally decides what she wants to do. Then one last person speaks, and everything changes once again…you may think you’ve read this story before, but you haven’t. Not the way Gayle Forman tells it, in an unsentimental and sincere way that may remind you of certain other well-crafted weep-tastic reads on this list, but which has a unique style all its own. Best of all are Forman’s characterizations, especially of Mia’s punk rock parents, who remain realistically cool for adults, despite their suburban trappings. You won’t want to miss this evocative tearjerker, which will soon be a movie directed by former Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke. (2 weepies)

“Would you rather have your father sing at the supermarket or your mother fart in the principal’s office?”

“Would you rather lose all your hair or all your teeth?”

“Would you rather know what’s going to happen or not know?”

Natalie and her friends play the “Would you…” game all the time, with the highest marks going to the grossest or grimmest options. In fact, it’s just after they’ve been sitting around shooting the “would you” bull on a perfect summer night when Natalie gets the call that changes everything. Natalie’s older sister Claire has been hit by a car. She’s in a coma and it doesn’t look good. Now all Natalie can do is wait. Her life has slowed down to moments that pass like eons while she waits for Claire to either wake up, or…the alternative is impossible to imagine. “Would you rather die or have everyone else die?” Who is Natalie without Claire? Not only doesn’t Natalie know the answer to that terrible question, she’s sure she doesn’t want to find out. Marthe Jocelyn paints an incredibly intimate portrait of a family responding to a crisis. Grieving turns out to be heartbreaking and sometimes even heartbreakingly funny. The dialogue between Natalie and her posse is so crisp and real it feels like Jocelyn has somehow been party to the conversations that flew around your own rec. room on a slow Saturday night. If you only read one book before you go back to school this fall, I would rather it be this one. (2 weepies)

“If she dies, I’ll die. But here we were.” Mia’s mom dies suddenly of a fast moving cancer after just twelve short days in the hospital. And even though Mia can’t imagine life without her, the rest of the world just keeps movin’ on, forcing Mia to cope whether she wants to or not. And it’s not easy. First, there’s the funeral to get through, officiated by Rabbi Elvis, who arrives in Ray-Bans and sporting a very hairy chest. Then there’s dealing with her crabby, sarcastic sister, her moping, depressed dad, and the nightmare that is school, where no one seems to understand that World History is meaningless when her own history has been altered forever. Not to mention the condoms she finds in her dad’s shaving kit less than a year after her mother’s death. He couldn’t possibly be…? Oh, gross! Mia keeps looking for the self-help book, What to Do When Your Mother Dies from Melanoma, Which They Thought Was a Stomachache at First, but it doesn’t seem to exist. To make it through this bleak time, Mia is going to have to learn how to help herself, and how to accept help from others. Margo Rabb, whose own mother died when she was a teen, manages to effectively capture the moments of both absurdity and pain that accompany the loss of someone close. This book moved me to both laughter and tears, and I especially enjoyed Mia’s description of her Queens neighborhood–between the 46th and 52nd Street stops on the 7 train–which was also my neighborhood when I first moved to NYC! And if you want another sad story of parental passing, try Grief Girl: My True Story by Erin Vincent. 1 weepie.

Sixteen-year-old Tessa Scott has incurable leukemia. She is going to die, probably before next spring. “It’s really going to happen…I really won’t ever go back to school…I’ll never go to college or have a job…I won’t travel, never earn money, never drive, never fall in love or leave home or get my own house. It’s really, really true.” But Tessa isn’t about to take the matter of death lying down. Instead, she composes a list of all the things she wants to do before the cancer takes her. Have sex. Spend a day saying nothing but “yes” to every question she’s asked. Shoplift. Try drugs (besides the kind she takes for her cancer treatment). Drive a car. And maybe, if she’s lucky, fall in love. Meanwhile, her surrounding family and friends each struggle with their own feelings about Tessa’s impending death: her desperate father, who spends his days searching the Internet for alternative therapies; her distant mother, who copes by pretending everything is alright; her little brother Cal who fusses over her one moment and taunts her the next; her best friend Zoey, who manages to be both selfish and supportive; and finally, her next-door-neighbor Adam, who, in the last months of Tessa’s life, unexpectedly becomes the love of her life. But no matter how much they all care about her, Tessa will have to finish the list–and her life– on her own. My adolescent friends, I never thought I would find the book that could knock my much beloved and oft-read copy of Norma Klein’s sob-inducing Sunshine (also on this list) out of the top tearjerker spot in my heart. But Before I Die has done it. Like Sunshine, it’s not sappy, corny, or saccharine. It’s just a very clear-eyed, realistic portrayal of what it means to die young, and how it feels to die from this particular disease. Downham pulls no punches, she takes you with Tessa right to the very end, an ending that you won’t forget, now or ever. To heck with the box of tissue, you’re gonna need stock in Kleenex to finish this one. But believe me, I’m not crying when I say this is one of the best books of 2007! (4 weepies)