Book #24::

The Rag and Bone Shop
by Robert Cormier
Random House, 2003

Book #23:

Veronika decide morir
(Veronika Decides to Die)
by Paulo Coelho
(translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
HarperCollins, 2006

Book #22:

Prom

by Laurie Halse Anderson

Penguin, 2006

Maybe Speak was a fluke? This is only the second of Anderson's work I've read, and from the outset I struggled to accept that I was reading the same author. Speak is so popular that it appears, the Penguin group has named a YA imprint after it: Speak Books. That book was among those that got me back inot reading YA fiction. It was original, well-constructed, real, affecting. Like the YA books I most favoured as a teen (those Robert Cormier, Robert O'Brien, SE Hinton, Paul Zindel), Speak had that lasting quality, I felt, that meant it would transcend generations. It was just one of those stories, with a lead character finding her voice, something we all realte to as teens straddling the line between wanting to fit in and stand out.

Prom, however, lacks that originality... more to come.