by Cathy Hird

March Break is coming up, a great time to get the teens in our lives to read, if we can find the right books. Here are some thoughts on what might catch a teenager's interest.

A thin layer of dust sits on the books in my daughter's bedroom. You might think that makes these the neglected ones, but it means these are the stories she loved too much to let go of. The ones that started her reading at age 10--the Unicorns of Balinore for example--have been given to other children to enjoy. What remains are the Anne of Green Gables series as well as L. M. Montgomery's Emily. The books of Kit Pearson and Philipa Gregory take up much of the shelf beside The Royal Diaries and Tamora Pierce's work.

Thanks to the abundance of YA books written in the last few years, copies of the Divergent trilogy, City ofBones, and Catching Fire stand on the top shelf. These are books I would have relished when I was in High School.

My son's book shelf has a few comic collections with Calvin and Hobbs taking up several centimeters. Beside them are the three centimeter thick novels of the Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. Nearby is Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game along the books that follow the characters from that story in many different directions. My son discovered Jim Butcher much later, but he would have loved the stories of Tavi from The Codex of Alera when he was in high school.

If Orson Scott Card had written his work thirty years earlier, I would have loved to read it. What I did read what are now Sci-Fi classics by Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov. When I wasn't pondering space travel, I journeyed into Middle Earth, and read and re-read Tolkien's work. Hard cover copies became a necessity. A younger me loved horse stories, especially Walter Farley's Black Stallion, but if The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater, a story that draws on folk lore about horses that come from the ocean, it would have had a proud place on my shelf.

Curious about what else is available, I got in touch with Nadia, the children and youth librarian from the library in Owen Sound. She says that in high school, she read O. R. Melling, Charles de Lint and Francesca Lia Block. When asked what is out now that she would have loved at 16, she said "all of the really great urban fantasy that has come out, especially Holly Black, Melissa Marr, and Brenna Yovanoff." Nadia is also a big fan of the current publishing trend in "real life" teen drama, such as the work of Rainbow Rowell, John Green, Susan Juby, Kate Scelsa, and E. Lockhart's We Were Liars. She has many more recommendations, so a visit to her upstairs at the library is well worth it.

My own YA novels, so far, are set in ancient Greece with the gods and goddesses walking among the people. Consider beginning March break with me as I read from my second novel, Before the New Moon Rises, on at The Ginger Press in Owen Sound on Saturday March 12th at 2pm.
Cathy Hird is the author of two Young Adult novels.