I don’t think of myself as a reader of Young Adult novels, yet, here I am, starting off the year with a Young Adult week. Why? Well, this year, my reading is governed by the four rules I set for getting on top of my TBR pile:

1. Any book I add to my library in 2024 will be read in 2024.
2. During 2024, I will read or discard the 135 books I bought in 2023 but have not yet read. 
3. I will read 30 books from my TBR pile, choosing 3 a year from 2012 to 2021.
4. I will reduce my TBR pile by identifying books to move from my ‘To Read’ shelf to an ‘Unlikely To Read’ shelf.

To my surprise, according to the tags I assigned to them on LibraryThing, six of my unread 2023 purchases are Youg Adult novels and so is one of the thirty books selected across 2012-2021. So, I decided to pick three of them to read this week.

One is the latest book from an author whose wide-ranging novels always light up my imagination. One is the second book of a famous series that I only started last year, One won the American Library Association Newbury Medal in 2011, an award that, Brit that I am, I’ve only recently become aware of. One is a fantasy novel, one is an historical mystery set in Sherlock Holmes’s England and one is an historical novel set in Kansas in 1936.

I’m looking forward to week of varied reading with strong characters and some bright ideas.

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‘Amelia Sand And The Silver Queens ‘ by Jim C Hines (2023)

I came to Jim C Hines via his novel ‘Terminal Alliance‘ about humans who work as janiotrs on an alien spaceship who end up saving the univers, which seemed, at first glance, to fit under the ‘original, zany and funny’ branch of Science Fiction but turned out to be something much less fluffy than that and much more emotionally engaging without losing any of its originality, zaniness or humour. ’Terminal Uprising‘ and ‘Terminal Peace‘ became gradually darker and more complex but were all the better for it.

Then I read his Princess series, starting with ‘The Stepsister Scheme‘ and was delighted by his ability to add a feminist slant to stories of the various fairy tale princesses and add humour, fight scenes and twisty plots.

I know ‘Amelia Sands And The Silver Queens‘ looks like (and probably is) a Middle Grade children’s book but I’m sure that it will be more than that and that I’ll leave it with a lot to think about as well as a lot to smile about.

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‘Moon Over Manifest‘ by Clare Vanderpool (2010)

‘Moon Over Manifest‘ is a bit of a punt for me. Yes, it won the Newbury Medal and it gets great reviews but it’s a long way outside my Brit cultural background as it’s set in Kansas in the 1930s. Yeah, I know – how much further can that be from my culture than goblin children going to a school set up be humans from another dimension? The thing is, none of us know about goblins so we take what the author tells us and run with it. An historical setting like this one, in a novel aimed at an American audience, is likely to be weighted with knowledge and expectation that I don’t have.

Even so, I took a look at the text and it carried my imagination along so I’m going to give it a try and hope that all I really need to do is focus on how Abilenne sees the world.

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‘The Case Of The Left-Handed Lady’ by Nancy Springer (2007)

I’ve been looking forward to reading ‘The Case Of The Left-handed Lady‘ since I finished the first Enola Holmes book, ‘The Case of the Missing Marquess‘ last year.

I love the concept and the writing and most of all, I love Enola Holmes. I’m expecting to wolf this book down in now time at all and to be smiling while I do it.