"At a time when young adult literature is actively picking away at the stigma of mental illness, Whaley carves off a healthy chunk with style, sensitivity and humor," says Neal Shusterman, reviewing a book called "Highly Illogical Behavior," in The New York Times.
As regular readers know, young adult, or YA, literature is one of my favorite topics because it appears to be the one genre of fiction experiencing significant growth.
Technically, young adults are persons aged between 18 and 21, but the fiction in question attracts a much wider age range of readers, both below and above those numbers, and few if any topics are off limits.
"Highly Illogical Behavior," by John Corey Whaley, is about a girl who decides she can win a college scholarship by curing a boy of agoraphobia and then writing an essay about it. Needless to say, things don't go according to plan, but "it's the way the story gets there and how the characters handle the aftermath that make the book so electrifying," Shusterman says in his review.
For whatever reason or reasons, older adults buy a lot of YA titles and presumably read them. According to Shusterman, that's a good thing.
Humans don't always make the best choices and while mature adults tend to disguise, deny or dismiss their missteps, teenagers find them raw and consequential, he says. "It's one reason more adults should be reading good young adult literature like this novel. It insists on opportunities for growth that our cherished -- but often illusory -- notions of maturity have closed the door on."
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