Ideas to Inspire

In the last of this series, I’d like to offer up some young adult books that students will find difficult to put down. In fact, they may actually, ACCIDENTALLY, finish the book before even realizing it.

Some trivia from Everything You Need to Know About the World by Simon Eliot :

• The first wedding in a public toilet took place in 1996 in Taiwan
• Poop in Swahili is kinyesi
• Amazons were a race of heroic women warriors in Greek myth.  They each cut off their right breast so they could better draw their bow and arrow.  Mazos means breast. “ A”  means without.  Hence their name.
• Human mouths produce about a quart of saliva a day.
• Mind your Ps and Qs refers to pints and quarts.  A customer would indicate whether he wanted a pint or quart of beer in a pub by the angle at which he held his elbow.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart.

Frankie Landau-Banks at age 14:
Debate Club. Her father’s “bunny rabbit.” A mildly geeky girl attending a highly competitive boarding school.
Frankie Landau-Banks at age 15:
A knockout figure. A sharp tongue. A chip on her shoulder.
And a gorgeous new senior boyfriend:  the supremely goofy, word-obsessed Matthew Livingston.
Frankie Landau-Banks.
No longer the kind of girl to take “no” for an answer.
Especially when “no” means she’s excluded from her boyfriend’s all-male secret society. Not when her ex-boyfriend shows up in the strangest of places. Not when she knows she’s smarter than any of them. When she knows Matthew’s lying to her. And when there are so many, many pranks to be done.
Frankie Landau-Banks, at age 16:
Possibly a criminal mastermind.

This is the story of how she got that way.

One Good Punch by Rich Wallace

Michael Kerrigan is about to start his senior season on the track team and he’s in the best shape ever, but when a friend of Michael’s gets him in trouble, Michael confronts the common teen dilemna of deciding whether to lie, tell the truth, or tell the other truth, the one with shades of gray, that no one wants to hear—all with his future hanging in the balance. The choices he makes may seem questionable to some readers; but while Wallace refrains from overtly moralizing, he does illustrate the very serious repercussions that one major mistake can have on one’s hopes, especially those with the drive to be the very best.