26 March 2008

Awesomely Depressing Adolescent Fantasies

About a month ago, I was delighted to follow a path from Desert Dispatches to the Neon Season's "Awesomely Depressing Books" tag.

In that series of postings, Rachel M. Brown presented her YA Agony Award to "Susan Beth Pfeffer's depressingly realistic apocalypse novel Life As We Knew It." But her commentary on the whole tradition of awesomely depressing literature for adolescents offers nothing but joy. (For folks not used to LiveJournal, when you see highlighted text between parentheses at the end of an entry, you can click on that link and read even more.)

I don't care for deliberately depressing books and never have, but I might have to check out Ann Halam's Taylor Five, which Neon Season summarizes as "your brother is dead and your family failed to save the orangutans." Because adding great apes to any plotline automatically makes it more awesome.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Taylor Five is an amazing book. Right up there with Feed in terms of bleak books that I really loved.