Sunday, January 29, 2017

Five top YA novels for politically aware teens

At the BN Teen Blog Elodie tagged five YA must-reads for politically aware teens, including:
A Mad, Wicked Folly, by Sharon Biggs Waller

I will never be done being excited about suffragette novels. If the Women’s March had you feeling extra thankful for people like Susan B. Anthony and Margaret Sanger, check out this read featuring the fictional but no less formidable Vicky Darling, an aspiring artist in the early 20th century. She doesn’t want to become some wealthy man’s pretty wife. What she wants is to go to art school, and if she has to pose nude to do it, well, that’s a risk she’s willing to take. It’s a risk that gets her kicked out of boarding school and shipped back to London in disgrace, but it’s also one that puts her right in the middle of women’s suffrage. I spent 40% of this book being angry about things like how few rights women had (spoiler alert: it was zero), but it was the same kind of righteous fury that fueled the fires of a movement that’s no less crucial today than it was when it began.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue