A YALSA Best Book for Young Adults

"Joyce Maynard has created unforgettable characters in this moving story of love and loss. It will make you laugh and cry. Be prepared—once you pick up this book you won't be able to put it down."—Judy Blume

"A meditation on the massacre of the innocents . . . Child of My Heart concerns itself with . . . the almost timeless, action-free lagoon of the spirit, the territory of dalliance and delight—and also with its paradoxes, and also with how to make a story out of it."—Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books

"[Themes] collide through [this] novel with the potency and flash of subatomic particles in an accelerator. Music is one. Perhaps not since Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus has a novelist conveyed so tangibly and exaltedly the mechanism and the aesthetic effect in musical performance, and the relation between them. Another is the restless dimensions of time, both in post-relativity physics and in human consciousness: speeding, slowing, circling back, and standing still . . . [Powers] is unmatched among our first-rank novelists in connecting the new ambiguities of scientific theory to the old relativities of the heart . . . [The novel is] prodigious, illuminating, and exhilarating."—Richard Eder, The New York Times

“Suki Kim’s debut novel, The Interpreter, is a melancholy study of a young Korean-American woman’s alienation from both her Asian roots and her American environment. It’s also a murder mystery. That Kim makes these two aspects of the novel work together suggests that she’s a writer to keep an eye on . . . The Interpreter is clearly the work of a gifted writer.”—Charles Matthews, The Mercury News (San Jose)

"I highly recommend Banks' Vampire Huntress Series for use in courses ranging from high school to college. I have used this series as recommended reading for my graduate students in Women's Studies and they cannot stop talking about these works. Banks' writing is smart, poignant, and engaging. Students aren't able to put the books down. Each novel in the series brims with social critique and commentary. Banks is a perceptive writer who provides a wonderful critique of societal issues, from the impact of drugs to self-responsibility and self-reliance to the choices we all make in life. Students who engage in the work of L. A. Banks will leave the classroom with sharper critical thinking skills and a newfound joy of reading."—Gwendolyn D. Pough, Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Writing, Syracuse University, and author of Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere