What’s next?  That’s what I seem to be hearing many eighth graders across Indiana saying.  These slightly irritated adolescents are challenging their teachers to produce the goods.  The demanding teens are often those who have been hooked on young adult literature since fourth grade.  They’ll tell you they’ve read it all.  The goods that they are seeking are new titles to whet their appetites.  The titles they are ready to sink their teeth into are often adult literature.

      The good news is that this seemingly early movement among these middle schoolers from young adult to adult literature is a clear indication that more and more teens are exposed to young adult reading earlier and are getting hooked sooner.  The bad news is that middle school teachers are faced with the dilemma of providing a palatable menu of adult selections that are suitable for the adolescent reader.

      In the summer of 2001, I decided to face this challenge.  My goal was to prepare a banquet of adult titles to feed the hungry middle schoolers when they returned to school in the fall.  My quest led me to Hawley-Cooke Booksellers in Louisville, Kentucky, where I enlisted the help of the knowledgeable and unsuspecting staff.  My mission began by reviewing all of the summer reading lists submitted to Hawley-Cooke by Jefferson County public and private schools.  From those lists, I compiled a list of my own that reflected the most frequently recommended titles that might be deemed recreational reading.  Then, flanked by the bookstore support staff, I began the selection process.  I yielded to their expertise in adding generously to the list already compiled so that the final selections would represent current favorites, as well as titles or authors too good to miss.

      The resulting list seems to me to be a collection of “transitional literature.”  While the titles are for the most part adult literature, they provide a step in that direction with a selective safety net cast over the craggy depths.  They are not sterile.  They are stirring.  Several titles are annotated to tantalize your taste buds.  The rest are for you to sample on your own.

Catherine Ryan Hyde, Pay It Forward, Pocket Books, 1999, ISBN: 0-7434-1202-8.

One kid can make a difference.  Trevor did.  This is the story of one teacher who has had to face his own challenges and begins the new school year, in his new job, with his new class by giving them a challenge of their own: “Think of an idea for world change, and put it into action.”  Trevor decides to do something good for three people, and instead of letting them pay him back, they are to “pay it forward” to three more.  Trevor’s story empowers adolescents to believe that they can make a difference.  This book dwarfs the movie version.

Joanne Harris, Chocolat, Penguin Books, 1999, ISBN: 0 14 100018 X.

For those who already suspect that chocolate holds a mystical power of its own, Vianne Rocher confirms its intoxicating effects.  Vianne and six-year-old Anouk appear in Lansquenet, a blip of a French town, on the “wind of the carnival,” only to entice the villagers at the beginning of the Lenten season by opening a chocolaterie.  This indiscretion sets the local priest in opposition to the temptress.  Vianne’s persuasive powers, the lingering aura of the carnival, and the arrival of the gypsies allure the town toward impending change.  This book teases the reader into questioning illusion and reality, good and evil, and tradition versus change. 

Robert Cormier, The Rag and Bone Shop, Delacorte Press, 2001, ISBN: 0-385-72962-6.

Cormier’s last book is tough in typical Cormier style.  He captures the Holden Caulfield innocence of middle schooler Jason Dorrant, who like Holden, perceives himself as an outcast but admires and respects younger children because they act so seriously, “like miniature grown-ups.”  Then seven-year-old Alicia Bartlett is found dead.  Jason, reeling from the news, finds himself face-to-face with Trent, an expert interrogator known for always getting a confession.  Cormier takes Jason and the reader to the raw edge of the cliff, but unlike Holden, he pushes us over.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees, Harper and Row Publishers, 1988, ISBN: 0-06-017579-6.

Don’t let the copyright date stand in the way of adding this book to your classroom collection.  In fact, The Bean Trees was selected in 2001 for Kentucky’s program “What If All Kentucky Reads the Same Book?”  Taylor Greer is a young woman determined to graduate from high school and escape Pittman County, Kentucky, where most of her kind ended up barefoot and pregnant.  Her dream trek out West takes an ironic twist when she stops at an Oklahoma diner on the edge of the Cherokee reservation and a young Indian woman thrusts a bundle of a child into her car and says, “Take this baby.”  Taylor’s unexpected venture into motherhood moves from one of abandonment to fulfillment.  The reader gains insight into her dilemma, as well as a rich sense of cross-cultural challenges faced when a girl from Kentucky ends up with an Indian child but risks everything to assist a Guatemalan couple seeking asylum in the United States.  If the book ends before the reader is ready, know that Kingsolver has already written the sequel, Pigs in Heaven.

Another book by the same author that also deals with Native American legends is Animal Dreams.

Alice Hoffman, Second Nature, Berkley, 1994, ISBN: 0-425-14681-2.

Second Nature is a story with appeal on different levels to different audiences.  It portrays Robin Moore, a divorcée struggling to find her niche while raising her adolescent son, Conner, and still battling his father.  Yet another level emerges when sixteen-year-old Conner embraces Lydia, his childhood friend and neighbor, as his first serious love interest. The overriding story is that of Stephen, or Wolf Man as he was first introduced.  Infant survivor of a plane crash and raised by wolves, Stephen finds himself trapped by hunters only to be institutionalized and essentially trapped again by the hospital system that sets out to help him.  It is when Robin impulsively frees Stephen that all levels of the story come together.  The reader is challenged to question man’s ability to overcome his primordial instincts whether raised by humans or in the wild.

Tracy Chevalier, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Plume, 1999, ISBN: 0-452-28215-2.

From his first meeting with her in her father’s kitchen, Vermeer knew that she would be more than a maid.  Daughter of a tile painter, Griet accepted servitude in the Vermeer home when her father was blinded by a kiln explosion.  But she was soon entranced by the art and the artist, and he, likewise, beguiled by “the girl with the pearl earring,” was not content until she was the subject of his art.  Chevalier manages to pull the 21st-century reader into the mystique of the 17th-century Dutch artist in the ageless coming-of-age story.

Other Transitional Titles

Alvarez, Julia.  In the Time of the Butterflies

________.  How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Belfer, Lauren.  City of Light

Berg, Elizabeth.  Joy School

________.  Range of Motion

________.  Until the Real Thing Comes Along

Bryson, Bill.  Notes From a Small Island

________.  A Walk in the Woods

Card, Orson Scott.  Ender’s Game

Case, John.  The Genesis Code

Cisneros, Sandra.  The House on Mango Street

Clark, Mary Higgins.  Moonlight Becomes You

________.  Remember Me

Dorris, Michael.  A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

Gaines, Ernest J.  A Lesson Before Dying

George, Elizabeth.  A Great Deliverance

Gibbons, Kaye.  Charms for the Easy Life

________.  Ellen Foster

Krakauer, Jon.  Into Thin Air

Letts, Billie.  Where the Heart Is

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow.  Gift From the Sea

McDermott, Alice.  Charming Billy

Moore, Lorrie.  Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Naylor, Gloria.  Bailey’s Cafe

O’Brien, Tim.  The Things They Carried

Reynolds, Marjorie.  The Starlite Drive-In

Rowland, Laura Joh.  The Samurai’s Wife