When she relies on music references to add weight to scenes, she reminds us that the here and now is fleeting. This strategy is enabled by legal language at the start of the novel: “All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination.” (Lil Wayne, you made it!) It is as if Donnelly wants the freedom to invent a world as she does in “A Northern Light,” but feels compelled to stay culturally factual to preserve relevance with her young readers. (In the morning? Really?) Donnelly also has a Wikipedia-like command of pop music, in one four-page stretch mentioning Nirvana, Elliott Smith, Nada Surf, Green Day, Jack White, Jeff Buckley, Simon and Garfunkel, and Lil Wayne.
Students throw weekly booze- and pot-filled parties in the morning before classes at their tony Brooklyn Heights private school. Paris’s rich and romantic past is promised, but the novel’s present has up-to-the-nanosecond touches of invention that distract. Andi Alpers, a teenage guitar prodigy with mental-health issues, hangs out with her privileged peers (Brooklyn’s “bored-oisie”) before going on a supernatural adventure in France, where she falls for a fellow outsider. Heavily promoted as the new novel from the author of “A Northern Light” (an award-winning historical fiction-dictionary mash-up set in 1906), “Revolution” starts in the present day. Two candidates this fall are Jennifer Donnelly’s “Revolution” and “Halo,” by Alexandra Adornetto. It can be more or less literary, but it must be attention-getting. Sherman Alexie, Nick Hornby, Jane Smiley and Oscar Hijuelos write for young people now, and if they see fit to mention it at a party, they are likely to hear, “How can I get into that?”Īll the attention means that the “big book” has arrived in Y.A.: the high-profile title that publishers clamor over every season, on whose fortunes their balance sheets may turn.
books as they do in adult fiction, as well as an audience that is loyal, smart and self-renewing. But ever since the success of books as different as Laurie Halse Anderson’s “Speak” (1999), a grittily realistic portrait of sexual violence in high school, and “Twilight,” it’s become clear that writers have at least as much freedom in Y.A. “Are you ever going to write a real novel?” was the common response. Years ago, anyone who admitted to writing young adult books - more likely, “books for teens” -at a cocktail party would be faced with a blank look. For an industry supposedly in decline, book publishing still offers welcome surprises.
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