Not a YA fan but...

 Weekly YA Explorations: SCARY BOOKS! 👻🧟 I was looking forward to this week. I enjoy some horror fiction here and there, as long as it keeps things light and there's a fun supernatural element in the mix. I'm grateful that I read Dread Nation , as it seems some of my other classmate's books were about kids in scary situations which is not for me . I'll take some zombies to separate me from the heavy stuff, thank you very much.  Deathless Divide, by Justina Ireland, is the sequel to Dread Nation , and it sees Jane and Katherine departing the crumbling Summerland for California. It seems she can't leave it all behind though, as the the trauma of Summerland haunts her on the road to the golden west. Judging from the snippet I read, it seems as though the people of Jane's past still haunt her, too. (Miss Anderson is back!) While I enjoyed reading Dread Nation this week, it did feel at times like the book did a lot of work to set up the sequel, at the expense of t...

 Weekly YA Explorations This week I checked out a few different books at my local public library. One of them I'd heard mentioned by so many different people, I thought it must be a sign... which maybe I'll get around to acting upon some day! The others I found through researching other aspects of YA. The first book I'd like to highlight is The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics , by Daniel James Brown. Told in part through the team members' own diaries and photographs, The Boys in the Boat seems like a perfect summer read for someone looking for both some inspiration (who couldn't use a bit of that these days?) and also way to get into the Olympic spirit during this summer's odd Olympics. The 1936 Olympics were also unusual, though more for the fascist scourge taking over the host country that the plague still ravaging the globe. I overheard strangers talking about this book over the last week; once when I...

Hello! I will be up front: I'm someone who loves to read and has always shunned YA. I've tried a couple books here at there but I've never given YA much of a shot. I've always had the, perhaps very unfair, assumption that YA books are overwrought, melodramatic, unnecessarily florid and just and too self-serious for me. However, I'm really looking forward to trying out some YA books with a more context and a critical eye. Also, if I still don't like the books I read, it doesn't really matter does it? I really look forward to learning about how to get people excited for a book they might like, that doesn't necessarily appeal to me . So, here we go!