7 Great Books that Keep YA Weird
Andrew Smith is the author of vivid, unclassifiable YA, as likely to explore 19th-century Arctic expeditions, Polish history, and the ghosts of dam disasters as it is the more daily concerns of his teen protagonists (daily concerns = sexuality, bullies, athletics, epilepsy, refugee status, grasshopper plagues, freak accidents…). He’s also the perfect emcee for the recently announced “Keep YA Weird” tour, promoting both his forthcoming The Alex Crow (March 10) and experimental YA at large. In celebration of the tour, and of all that is bizarre and wonderful and utterly unexpected in YA lit, here are my own favorite weird YAs.
Grasshopper Jungle, by Andrew Smith
Some books go to the edge, then pull back onto safer territory. But this one guns it to the edge and right over, in a falling apart Ford Explorer driven by two brave boys in lemur masks and a barkless dog named Ingrid lying on the floor. It’s about best friends in podunk Iowa who inadvertently trigger a grasshopper plague, and is full of a bombast that’s part metaphor (pubescent boys have much in common with monstrous unstoppable bugs who only want to do two things), but mostly completely literal. It’s a foul, fantastic sci-fi/bildungsroman hybrid with an overdeveloped sense of history and heart, and serves as a reminder of how much the coming of age and dystopian genres still have to give.
The Dust of 100 Dogs, by A.S. King
Weirdness always lurks at the edges of even King’s most darkly reality-bound books. But from Dust‘s opening pages, you know you’re reading something completely different, a wild epic that’s brilliant and brave. Emer Morrissey was a dreaded teen pirate in the seventeenth century when she was cursed with the dust of 100 dogs, and slain alongside the body of her true love. After living through 100 canine incarnations, her soul is finally reunited with a human body, in 1970s America. Now named Saffron, she remembers not only her dog lives, but her pirating one—and bides her time for 18 years, till she can head back to Jamaica to claim the treasure she once died seeking. Interspersed with Saffron’s story is Emer’s, from an Irish childhood to poverty in Paris and beyond, as well as vignettes on lessons learned during her dog lives. There has never been a teen heroine like this one.
Midwinterblood, by Marcus Sedgwick
In the year 2073 a journalist, Eric, lands on the mysterious Blessed Island, where he plans to research a rare orchid breed. Instead he meets Merle, and finds himself beguiled both by her and by Blessed. On that story’s heels comes another, further back in time, but also centering on two connected characters named Eric and Merle. Sedgwick chases the pair back and back through history, writing mesmerizing snapshots in which they appear in different guises—mother and son, brother and sister—until their arc takes on the shape and feel of ancient myth. It’s inventive and fabulously weird, and barely fits the definition of YA: for one thing, few of its characters are teens. What a gift, then, that its classification puts such a unique genre-bender into teens’ hands.
Eyes Like Stars, by Lisa Mantchev
This effervescent, oddball delight is set in the Théâtre Illuminata, a company comprised of every character in a magical Book’s worth of plays, bound to perform their roles through the ages. Mantchev’s heroine, Bertie Shakespeare Smith, is a blue-haired foundling who travels with the theater—and is in danger of being kicked out by the all-powerful Theater Manager. Bertie has a quartet of fairy sidekicks, a weakness for slippery charmer Ariel (as in, The Tempest), and a grand idea for making herself a contributing member of the theater: by rewriting Hamlet. But when Ariel gets hold of the mystical Book, his efforts to free himself from it might spell the end of the Théâtre Illuminata. Sets rise and fall, the costume closet is a marvel, and pirates and magicians rub elbows in a fantasy that’s both gossamer-weight and totally engrossing.
Feed, by M.T. Anderson
“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” From the knockout first line, this book will make the top of your brain unlatch. It tells the future and makes you laugh and cry and drops you into a terrifying, effortlessly convincing future America where our brains are entwined with information “feeds” and even the president has lost the capacity for intelligent speech. While on the moon, Titus meets a beautiful girl named Violet—and when they become victims of a hacker who unhooks their ever-present feeds, their fates are linked. I can’t overstate how jealous I am of anyone who hasn’t yet read this book.
Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, by Michelle Tea
Teens in the blackhole town of Chelsea, Massachusetts, have to make their own fun, and for Sophie and her OCD best friend, Ella, that means playing the pass out game. It’s in the space between unconsciousness and waking that Sophie first sees a foulmouthed mermaid calling to her from polluted Chelsea Creek. It’s the first sign that Sophie just might be the one destined to save her town from the evil that’s lodged there—an evil that’s far more dangerous and closer to home than she imagines. The book is equal parts filth and fantasia, wrapping a bleak, beautifully observed story about adolescence, friendship, and family in a magical quest narrative that contains elements of Polish mythology and makes you look at pigeons through new eyes.
Noggin, by John Corey Whaley
Noggin’s first line (“Listen: I was alive once and then I wasn’t”) echoes the most famous line from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Whaley’s combination of a crazy original, sci-fi premise with an incredible emotional arc earns him the Vonnegut comparisons. Terminally ill teen Travis is only the second person to survive the removal and cryogenic freezing of his head—and its reattachment, five years later, to a healthy donor body. For him, no time has passed, but his parents, best friend, and girlfriend—the whole world—have moved on without him. It’s a high-concept book with a giant heart, and one of the best things I read in 2014.
What are your favorite weird YAs?