Time Magazine's Top 100 Young Adult Books

Greetings!
As is often the way of the world, whenever I turn my attention to particular topic, I suddenly see it everywhere, in the most random places, when least expected. It is delightful, and also not very surprising, since, well, I'm paying attention to it. To paraphrase Sherlock, I often see, but fail to observe. Once I start observing, I find lots of things around me that are suddenly full of meaning and importance.

Since I have recently been writing about books I read when I was younger, I was pleased that Time magazine did a story just for me about the Top 100 young adult and children's books of all time (in the first issue of 2015). In fact, Time even had a blurb from author Jesmyn Ward who said that Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown (prequel to The Blue Sword) was her favorite book as a child! To quote Ward, "The heroine [in The Hero and the Crown] is tough, stubborn, and smart, taking on a world bent on making her less than she is. I empathized." What excellent taste she has!

Enjoy browsing these lists. I was surprised at the number of books I hadn't read, pleased with the ones they chose that I had read, and disagreed about surprisingly few of them. I was also reminded of a few books I had forgotten I'd read (Johnny Tremain anyone? Loved that book!).

Here are the links:

Top 100 Young Adult Books of All Time

Top 100 Children's Books of All Time

I'd love to hear your thoughts when you are done looking at the lists. Any surprises? Remind you of any of your favorite books? Any that you think really shouldn't be on this list?

The Blue Sword

I discovered Robin McKinley when my dad read us her book The Outlaws of Sherwood, a pragmatic and slightly depressing retelling of the Robin Hood legend. I remember attempting to read a few of her other books and not falling in love with them really, until I read The Blue Sword. 

The Blue Sword is about a girl named Harry. That’s right - a girl. You love it already don’t you? I couldn’t tell you why her name is Harry, even though I’ve read the book several times. I think it is a nick name. Harry is forced to move to a new town when her father dies, a town that is essentially a military outpost and is on the edge of a vast desert, home to a strange and foreign people. Harry is inadvertently swept up in a war between these foreigners and their long-time enemies. 

Spoiler alert: She gets a blue sword.

If you’ve been reading my blog posts about the books I loved as a child, you will no doubt notice a theme when I say that I loved Harry because she wasn’t proper and well-behaved. She preferred horseback riding to sitting daintily in a parlor and not to give anything away, she kicks some pretty serious keister by the end of the book.

This book fits squarely in the fantasy genre and is technically young adult, but McKinley is a talented author, so it is young adult I think mainly because it doesn’t have cursing, sex, and violence or other mature content.

If you don’t love fantasy, you might not enjoy this book. It’s fairly traditional in it’s fantastical elements and plot. If you do love fantasy, you will enjoy McKinley’s world building and the development of Harry’s character.