YA Kick

Like most readers, I have a stack of books on my To-Read list. There’s a literal stack of them on the floor of my office that I’ve been making my way through over the course of the year. Almost all of them are used books, picked up at estate sales, Half Price Books, and from Little Free Libraries.

Over the summer, I inadvertently discovered that I was on a YA kick. While “Ya Kick” sounds like it could be a band name, I’m referring to my run of reading Young Adult fiction. I had picked up several YA books without realizing that’s what they were.

I started with The Clockwork Scarab: A Stoker and Holmes Novel by Colleen Gleason. In the book, Evaline Stoker, the sister of Bram Stoker, teams up with Mina Holmes, the niece of Sherlock Holmes, to solve the murder of a high society girl and the disappearance of another. In the novel’s world, electricity is outlawed and steam is used to generate power, with touches of steampunk making an appearance. Time travel is also a feature of the story. The book clocks in at 350 pages.

The second YA book I read was Last Chance Books by Kelsey Rodkey. This book stars Madeline Moore, a young woman on the cusp of leaving for college, who is trying to save her aunt’s bookstore from the chain bookstore that opened across the street. She keeps up a running rivalry with Jasper Hamada, whose family owns the store across the street. This book is 352 pages.

The third book I read was Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley. The protagonist in this novel is 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, whose family generally ignores her as she solves a murder and mixes up potions in her large bedroom. This was my favorite of the three books and runs 375 pages.

I mention the number of pages because over 300 pages seems long for YA novels, which are typically aimed at people between 12 and 18 years of age. I read somewhere recently that publishing shorter books is not as cost effective, so publishers encourage these longer books … apparently even for younger people.

I was so taken with Speaking from Among the Bones that I had to seek out more of Alan Bradley’s books. He wrote an entire series of 12 Flavia de Luce novels, with “Speaking” being the fifth in the series. I wanted to start from the beginning, so I searched for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and found it at Half Price Books.

I zoomed through this book and made a list of the books in the series, so I can find the rest of them. I was surprised I had never heard of this series before, so I had to look up Alan Bradley. He started writing the Flavia de Luce novels when he retired at age 70. (There’s hope for us late bloomers!) Bradley died this past May, at the age of 87, and his final book is due out this November. (https://www.cbc.ca/books/flavia-de-luce-mystery-writer-alan-bradley-dead-at-age-87-9.7205807)

Despite his protagonist being an 11-year-old, these aren’t actually marketed as YA novels. Surprise!

Which just goes to show the arbitrariness of classifying books by age. I think the Flavia de Luce novels are appropriate for the 12-to-18 demographic, just as I found The Clockwork Scarab and Last Chance Books appropriate for a person of middle age (me!).

After reading this bunch of books, I turned to a set of stories I read as a kid – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

These were most assuredly not considered YA fiction when they were released, as the term “young adult” was first used in 1942, well after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his Sherlock Holmes stories between 1887 and 1927. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_adult_literature,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes)

That I picked up Sherlock Holmes after reading The Clockwork Scarab and the Flavia de Luce novels was no accident. Both were inspired by the Holmes canon. Alan Bradley actually cowrote a non-fiction book with William A.S. Sarjeant called Ms. Holmes of Baker Street in which they surmise Sherlock was a woman. (https://www.cbc.ca/books/flavia-de-luce-mystery-writer-alan-bradley-dead-at-age-87-9.7205807)

It felt appropriate to revisit Sherlock Holmes to remind myself what these stories were like after not having read them for decades. I recognized a certain repetition in how the stories are told that I don’t remember before. My brother once pointed out that Arthur Conan Doyle never gives readers enough to solve the mysteries on their own. Some key piece of evidence is always withheld, only to be revealed by Holmes. That is certainly the case, but now I wonder if that’s standard practice in the mystery genre because I couldn’t figure out the Flavia de Luce mysteries, either.

Anyway, I enjoyed my foray into YA novels this summer.

How about you? Have you read any YA novels, or reread any novels you read as a kid? What did you like about them? If you reread a novel from childhood, what did you notice this time that you didn’t when you first read it?