SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
SLJ Blog Network +
  • 100 Scope Notes
  • A Fuse #8 Production
  • Good Comics for Kids
  • Heavy Medal: A Mock Newbery Blog
  • Teen Librarian Toolbox
  • The Classroom Bookshelf
  • The Yarn
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • About TLT
  • Reviews
    • Book Reviews
    • A to Z Book Lists
    • Book Review Policy
  • Teen Issues
  • Middle Grade Mondays
  • Programs
    • TPiB
    • Tech Talk
  • Professional
    • Teen Services 101
    • Things We Didn’t Learn in Library School
  • MakerSpace
  • Projects
    • #SVYALit
    • #FSYALit
    • #MHYALit
    • #Poverty in YA Lit

August 13, 2012 by Karen Jensen, MLS

Best or Favorite? A look at the NPR “Best” Young Adult Novels list

August 13, 2012 by Karen Jensen, MLS   8 comments

I watch So You Think You Can Dance every week without fail.  Here is a show where you can call in and vote for your “favorite” dancer.  This favorite part is important, every year they make a point of making this distinction: it is not the best dancer, but your favorite.  Because that’s how voting works usually, it’s subjective.

Best implies perhaps the highest quality while favorite implies the most popular.  And, truthfully, if you are asking the people to vote you are going to end up with the most popular.  So when NPR puts out it’s list of the Best 100 Young Adult Novels that have been voted on by the public, what you are really getting is some combination of both the best and everyone’s favorites.

SCROLL TO KEEP READING THIS POST

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

NPRs Best Young Adult Novels
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/07/157795366/your-favorites-100-best-ever-teen-novels
Did your favorites make the list?


One look at the list and you see the truth of this statement.  The Twilight series by Stephanie Meyers appears at number 27.  Had the vote been taken just a few years earlier, before it became fashionable to hate Twilight, I am sure it would have appeared in the top 10.  But still, in terms of quality of writing and storytelling, even 27 seems incredibly high when you compare it to some of the other books that made the list farther down – and some of those that didn’t make the list at all.  My favorite comment on Reddit: “List totally invalidated by the presence of Twilight.”

If you are on the Yalsa-bk listserv, then last week you saw a really informative post by author David Lubar.  He took a quick moment to do a Google search and found that many authors and fans actively campaigned for others to vote for their favorite books.  As someone who spends a lot of time on the Internet, this is not surprising to me at all.  But it does remind us all that the Internet voting is not a perfect mechanism for developing lists, unless of course your goal is popularity.  So perhaps if they had just changed what they called the list, not the “best” but “favorite”, it would have been an accurate statement.

I’ll be honest, I did not vote.  Not because I don’t care, I obviously care very much about teen literature, but because as soon as I realized the mechanism they were employing to create the list I realized that it would be a deeply flawed list.  Compare the idea of the NPR Best Young Adult Books list to the Teens Top 10s put together each year by Yalsa – and voted on by the public.  The Teens Top 10 list explicitly states that it is a “teens choice” list where teens nominate and then vote on their favorite books from the previous year.  You see the distinction there?  They aren’t saying they are the best, but that the teens declare these their favorites.  Semantics are important.

If you have looked at the NPR list you probably will have noticed what Debbie Reese, Laurie Halse Anderson and others have noticed: the list is incredibly white.  I mean super white.  There are only a couple of titles that have a main character that it a person of color. I won’t talk a lot about that because the previously mentioned people have covered it so well, but it is disappointing.  And not at all reflective of the literature that I see on my shelves.  Don’t get me wrong, I think there needs to be a lot more diversity on our library shelves, but this list totally neglects longstanding popular authors like Walter Dean Myers and Sharon Draper and Jacqueline Woodson.  In fact Monster by Walter Dean Myers is a groundbreaking – and award winning – book and definitely deserves to be on this list.

SCROLL TO KEEP READING THIS POST

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere, but the list also doesn’t seem to include many LGBTQ titles at all.  Where is Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan? How about Annie on My Mind?  A brief look at the list shows that it includes The Perks of Being a Wallflower (without a doubt an amazing read), Will Grayson Will Gryason and the Dangerous Angels series.  Is the lack of LGBTQ and POC titles representative of who votes, what we read, or what gets published?  Whatever the issue, it is clear that we need to work harder on reaching diversity goals.  (Side note: I actually think that the problem novel, one of the classic mainstays of young adult literature, is under represented on this list as well.  I know right now that fantasy and dystopian is super popular, but where are the problem novels?  Thankfully Speak made the list.)

My other question regarding this list would be around the voting mechanism, which I can’t actually speak about because as I mentioned, I didn’t vote.  But I would have loved for them to have kept track of the age of voters and created separate lists.  What does the list look like if only teens vote?  What does the list like if only librarians and educators vote?  What does the list look like if all adults – including educators and librarians – but no teen votes are counted?  It would be interesting to compare the various lists, and I suspect there would be some major differences.

And finally, I am interested in some of the titles that they classify as young adult.  To Kill a Mockingbird is without a doubt one of my favorite books and I would say one of the best books written, but is it young adult?  I would ask the same of The Lord of the Rings series?  Something can be popular with young adults but not be actually a young adult book.  We can all look back at what we read as a teen, and look at what our teens often read now, and recognize that a lot of teens like to read adult authors, which is cool.  Just because something is popular with young adults doesn’t mean that it is in fact a young adult novel.  Of course what, exactly, constitutes a young adult novel is probably the guts of an entirely different post and is further complicated by the introduction of the New Adult genre.

Overall, I think the list is a great starting place for new readers of young adult books to begin reading; it definitely is a good look at what is popular with my teens over the last few years.  As much as I love John Green, I would knock a couple of his books off the list – leaving The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska – and add some multicultural authors.  I was ecstatic to see the Delirium series and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children on the list.  I kind of felt that Miss Peregrine didn’t get the love that it deserved when it came out.  There is some good stuff on the list.  There is some fun stuff on the list (I LOVE the Gallagher girls series).  But is this list representative of THE BEST? I guess it depends on how we are defining the best.

So here’s my question to you: If we made the list again in 10 years, what titles from 2012 do you think will stand the test of time and make an appearance?  And what diversity titles do you think should have made the cut this year?
Also, what is the most surprising title on the list for you?  For me it is The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud.

Filed under: Booklists, Contemporary Fiction, Fiction, GLBTQ Fiction, NPR, Racial Stereotypes, Racism, Teen Fiction, YA Lit

SHARE:

Read or Leave Comments

About Karen Jensen, MLS

Karen Jensen has been a Teen Services Librarian for almost 30 years. She created TLT in 2011 and is the co-editor of The Whole Library Handbook: Teen Services with Heather Booth (ALA Editions, 2014).

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Posts

August 2012

Top 10s: Books I would have like to have seen on the NPR list

by Karen Jensen, MLS

January 2023

Have Some New 2023 Mysteries

by Karen Jensen, MLS

December 2022

A THRILLING Countdown: From TEN to One, these mystery/thrillers will keep you on the edge of your seat as you countdown until the new year

by Karen Jensen, MLS

November 2022

Let's Talk About April Henry: A book review of TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

by Karen Jensen, MLS

October 2022

An A to Z Look at YA Horror: So you want a spooky book for spooky season? A YA horror master list

by Karen Jensen, MLS

ADVERTISEMENT

SLJ Blog Network

100 Scope Notes

One Star Review, Guess Who? (#181)

by Travis Jonker

A Fuse #8 Production

Review of the Day: The Tree and the River by Aaron Becker

by Betsy Bird

Good Comics for Kids

Monkey Prince Vol. 1: Enter the Monkey | Review

by J. Caleb Mozzocco

Heavy Medal

Heavy Medal Mock Newbery Readers’ Poll Results

by Steven Engelfried

Teen Librarian Toolbox

The Value of Innocence for BIPOC Students, a guest post by David Mura

by Amanda MacGregor

The Classroom Bookshelf

The Classroom Bookshelf is Moving

by Erika Thulin Dawes

The Yarn

A Book 25 Years in the Making: Marla Frazee Visits The Yarn

by Travis Jonker

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Articles on SLJ

Three Dystopian Novels for Teens Watching Chaos Walking

Underdog Titles That Could Take the Prize | Pondering Printz

Four Breezy YA Summer Reads for Fans of 'Along for the Ride' on Netflix | Read-Alikes

10 Titles Featuring Twins for Middle Grade and YA Readers

2 Contemporary Retellings of 'Pride and Prejudice'

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Teen Librarian's Toolbox, Karen says

    August 13, 2012 at 3:04 pm

    We're talking about the NPR list on Twitter https://twitter.com/TLT16/status/235017096289992704

  2. Teen Librarian's Toolbox, Karen says

    August 13, 2012 at 3:05 pm

    Excellent question on Twitter: How many on this list are Printz award or honor book winners? Is that a good measuring stick?

  3. Teen Librarian's Toolbox, Karen says

    August 13, 2012 at 3:06 pm

    Another Twitter question: Didn't they vote on already nominated books on a list? Yes, they did. But I think the nominations were open to the public as well. So they took open nominations, compiled a list, and then asked the public to vote again.

  4. Teen Librarian's Toolbox, Karen says

    August 13, 2012 at 3:07 pm

    http://www.npr.org/2012/07/24/157072526/best-ever-teen-novels-vote-for-your-favorites

    “Last month we asked you, our audience, to nominate titles for a top-100 list of the best young adult — YA — fiction ever written. Thousands of you sent in nominations. We've tabulated those suggestions and, with the help of an expert panel, narrowed the list to the 235 finalists you see below.”

  5. Stephsco says

    August 13, 2012 at 7:00 pm

    That list also frustrated me. I voted and I participated in the post that solicited recommendations. It sounded like a rather big undertaking: first they asked for suggested titles, then they had a panel of their-choice selected authors and YA readers to vett the list, then they opened up the voting.

    Some of the comments I saw were from people who apparently had no idea of the guidelines between YA and MG, and probably not much about kid's books in general (probably drifted over from reading other articles on the NPR site). I agree some titles that made the list weren't really YA — Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper has teen characters but it is written for the adult lit market. I love her books, but that book wasn't written for the YA audience. Even her own marketing team knows this since her latest, Between the Lines, was pitched as her first YA market book.

    When I voted it was hard not to pick just my favorites, i wanted to pick books I knew had a lasting impact and literary merit. I chose just one John Green title and tried to spread the love beyond 🙂

  6. Tahleen says

    August 13, 2012 at 7:22 pm

    I think the nominations were gathered from the public, though I'm not sure when—I missed that part. I'm not sure how or why they narrowed it down to 235 books, and I think that might be worth investigating. Thanks for the post.

  7. Teen Librarian's Toolbox, Karen says

    August 16, 2012 at 11:51 pm

    Out of curiosity, which John Green title got your vote?

  8. Teen Librarian's Toolbox, Karen says

    August 16, 2012 at 11:52 pm

    It looks like they did indeed take public nominations.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

Follow This Blog

Enter your email address below to receive notifications of new blog posts by email.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

Primary Sidebar

  • News & Features
  • Reviews+
  • Technology
  • School Libraries
  • Public Libraries
  • Age Level
  • Ideas
  • Blogs
  • Classroom
  • Diversity
  • People
  • Job Zone

Reviews+

  • Book Lists
  • Best Books
  • Media
  • Reference
  • Series Made Simple
  • Tech
  • Review for SLJ
  • Review Submissions

SLJ Blog Network

  • 100 Scope Notes
  • A Fuse #8 Production
  • Good Comics for Kids
  • Heavy Medal
  • Neverending Search
  • Teen Librarian Toolbox
  • The Classroom Bookshelf
  • The Yarn

Resources

  • 2022 Youth Media Awards
  • The Newbery at 100: SLJ Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of the Award
  • Special Report | School Libraries 2021
  • Summer Reading 2021
  • Series Made Simple Spring 2021
  • SLJ Diverse Books Survey
  • Summer Programming Survey
  • Research
  • White Papers / Case Studies
  • School Librarian of the Year
  • Mathical Book Prize Collection Development Awards
  • Librarian/Teacher Collaboration Award

Events & PD

  • In-Person Events
  • Online Courses
  • Virtual Events
  • Webcasts
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Media Inquiries
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Content Submissions
  • Data Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Terms of Sale
  • FAQs
  • Diversity Policy
  • Careers at MSI


COPYRIGHT © 2023


COPYRIGHT © 2023