Eight YA must-reads with awesome origin stories

Sona Charaipotra is a New York City-based writer and editor with more than a decade’s worth of experience in print and online media. At the BN Teen blog she tagged eight YA must-reads with awesome inspirations and backstories, including:

Bone Gap, by Laura Ruby

Ruby’s Printz winner is eerie and atmospheric, and a little spooky too. When you hear the origin story of the tale, you’ll understand why. She credits the genesis of the mythology and magical realism-filled novel to life on her father’s farm, an old article about a missing boy that her father-in-law gave her, and the cornfields of Illinois. “Even in your car, you feel buried in the cornstalks, hidden in them, hidden by them,” she has said about driving though the region while doing school visits. “I could have sworn I saw the cornstalks walking. I’ve always felt that nature itself is magical and wanted to get that on the page. When I started writing I was just trying to capture the magic of this particular place, this certain landscape, that feeling of being neither here nor there that I had when I was driving through those fields.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue