Skip to main content

"The Story of Owen" by E.K. Johnston and My YA Problem



I tweeted last night that I wanted to hug The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim by E.K. Johnston. Today, none of the glow has worn off. But … there had to be a but … I’m still learning how to recommend YA novels.
 
Part of the problem is I don’t love many YA novels. In fact, I can’t stand YA novels with too much angst. Or mean girls. Or unrealistic situations. You may find that last one funny when I tell you the YA novels I recommend over and over again:


  •  Feed by M.T. Anderson: In the not too distant future a customized World Wide Web is piped directly into our brains. Having the system know everything about you is both helpful and harmful, though.
  • Seraphina by Rachel Hartman: A half-dragon girl is able to pass for human and become an important member of the royal household. But where will her loyalties lie if humans and dragons go to war?
  • The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater: A group of private school boys are on a quest to find an ancient ley line and awaken a long dead king. They’re helped by Blue, who comes from a family of psychics, but whose real ability is to magnify others’ powers.
  • The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater: Once a year, carnivorous horses come out of the sea and a few brave men ride them. This year, a young girl wants to take part in the race.


This isn’t to say I don’t appreciate the clamor behind such titles/series as Divergent, Eleanor and Park, The Fault in Our Stars, The Fifth Wave, The Hunger Games, Matched, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The School for Good and Evil, Thirteen Reasons Why, and so on. I even liked many of them, at least at first. But I don’t want to hug them.

So I’m left with a disconnect. The books the teens want to read aren’t necessarily the books I want them to love. I have a feeling The Story of Owen is going to be a hard sell. No sex, no drugs, no alcohol. No mean girls, no texting, no dead parents. It’s not even dystopian. Instead, it’s subtle. It’s filled with dry humor. It’s about family. It’s about music. And for a dragon lover like me, it’s not even about good dragons. The dragons in this alternate reality are bad. They maim and kill and due to our reliance on fossil fuels have become carbon-eating monsters that attack oil tankers, factories and anything emitting smoke. (When Siobhan, our protagonist and narrator, gets her first car, she’s so wonderful she doesn’t even ask her parents if they don’t love her enough to get her a hybrid. That’s funny.) Siobhan has been enlisted by Owen’s family to become his bard and she does that and so much more. 

The heart of the novel, though, is how Owen, dragons, and his family change everything about Siobhan’s life. Kids may look at the cover and the title and think it’s a fantasy. It’s not. But it is fantastic.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What I Haven't Read in 2017

I made an odd sort of promise to myself this year: Read fewer books. The past few years, I been reading at a pace of about 100 books per year – a mix of children’s (but not counting picture books), young adult, and adult – and I felt as if I was reading too quickly and perhaps forgetting what I was reading. (Thank goodness for Goodreads.)
However, I consider it a very important part of my job as a librarian to keep up with what’s published, even if it’s a daunting task. Hundreds of thousands books are published each year in this country, so obviously it’s beyond even a superhero librarian (and I’m not one of those) to keep all those titles straight. But I try to at least know something about some books. We have two public-facing desks in my library – one is called the information desk; the other, reference. If you are working at the information desk, you will be asked for book recommendations. You will be asked, have you read this book? You will be asked to help select a book for a r…
Post a Comment
Read more

"Hillbilly Elegy" by J.D. Vance

I rarely get angry at a book or an author, but I found myself getting increasingly angry at J.D. Vance and his book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Angry enough to blog (so you know it must be bad.) This book is filled with contradictions and in several places is downright crazy because of people making really poor decisions. I am disappointed that so many people I know love it and so many book reviews rated it as one of the best books of 2016. I thought it would be a story that would teach me something about Republican/conservative voters, so I wanted to read it. It did not do that.
A graduate of Ohio State and Yale Law School, and a veteran (marine), J.D. Vance is from Kentucky and Ohio (his family is originally from Kentucky but they moved to Ohio and the author spends much time traveling back and forth), so he grew up in a family of hillbillies. Most of them were very poor and didn't work and often moved to larger cities in Ohio to …
Post a Comment
Read more