Five YA Favourites

Young Adult writer and avid reader Margot McGovern names the top five books she wishes she’d read as a teenager and still loves as an adult.

I feel old admitting this, but the books on this list weren’t published back when I was at school. Even if they had been, I wouldn’t have read them. In early high school I was far too preoccupied with trying to curry favour with the popular girls to be caught dead doing anything so deeply uncool as reading. When my efforts to turn Plastic proved a spectacular failure I went all out in the opposite direction and ponced about with copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the collected works of Bertolt Brecht tucked conspicuously beneath my arm. I declared myself first an expressionist and later a modernist, and spent long evenings memorising T. S. Eliot’s poetry (you’re as shocked as I am that the cool kid thing didn’t work out, right?). I had no interest in anything written after 1965 and even if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have bothered with anything so juvenile as teen fiction. My poor teachers, I’m so sorry.

Fortunately after arriving at university and finding that no one could care less that I knew ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by heart, I relaxed a little and allowed myself to enjoy a much broader range of fiction and belatedly fell in love with Young Adult literature.

It’s not nostalgia that draws me to these stories, or a symptom of Peter Pan syndrome. I love YA because it reminds me that life is wonderful, confusing and awful all at once and that mistakes are inevitable and change is always possible. It’s a genre filled with big emotions and ideas, and peopled with characters who are full of energy—awed and overwhelmed by the new freedoms and responsibilities held out to them. The best YA writers speak with bold, original voices in language that is precise, distilled and engaging. Coming-of-age is not a one time experience, but a cycle we repeat in endless variations throughout our lives. As such, for me, it seems impossible that we can ever outgrow or fail to connect with these stories.

So here are five of my favourite YA novels that I fell in love with as an adult and will time machine back to my teenage self as soon as the technology becomes available. I am always, ALWAYS on the hunt for new YA reads. If you have suggestions, post ’em in the comments below.

Looking for Alaska by John Green (2005)

A lonely misfit with a love of famous last words, Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter transfers to Culver Creek boarding school in search of new friends and ‘the Great Perhaps’. There he becomes one of the infamous Barn Night Crew, a band of outcasts like himself with a taste for pranks and mischief. Leader among this rag-tag group is the enigmatic Alaska Young. To Pudge’s mind Alaska is ‘the hottest girl in all of human history’, a girl with a mysterious past and a Life’s Library, a girl who teaches him about ‘crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry’. But while Pudge believes he loves Alaska, he doesn’t really know her and it never occurs to him that she is not the person she seems.

Looking for Alaska is a bittersweet coming-of-age story about friendship, grief, forgiveness and (to steal a phrase from Green’s later novel, Paper Towns (2008)) learning to ‘imagine others more complexly’. Of all the YA I’ve read, the final two pages of this book are my absolute favourite.