Yesterday I received a review copy of Cecil Castellucci's new young adult novel and after reading a chapter from The White and the Gold (The French just "discovered" the Mississippi River - and now I know how Joliet, Illinois got its name!), I decided to give myself up to The Queen of Cool and have a fun evening. Here's the thing about young adult books - when they are bad they are so pathetically stupid that you can barely stand to turn the pages (the literary version of Saved by the Bell), but when they are good, they are smart and funny and witty and so awkwardly true to life - so honest they almost hurt - that you just can't resist them. (Compare to the Rory moments on Gilmore Girls, all of the high school years on Buffy and certainly the late lamented My So-Called Life.)

I've been reviewing young adult books for awhile now and I have certainly seen my share of the good, the bad and the ugly (can you tell I grew up glued to the tv screen?!). I reviewed Cecil's first book, Boy Proof earlier this year and was pleasantly surprised by her unique heroine (whose father is a Hollywood makeup artist). In The Queen of Cool she writes about someone who is a bit more traditional - the popular girl who seems to know and care about nothing but is the center of attention for the whole school. Cecil asks a very intriguing question with this book though, what if everything you thought was great and cool in your life (and your world) all of sudden one day seemed incredibly boring. Would you still play the game so you could remain cool (whatever that means) or would you be brave enough to change? It probably seems like a silly thing to worry about with the CIA opening secret torture prisons all over Eastern Europe, but a lot of high school seems silly when you are 35. And young adult books are not written for adults in their 30s - they are for teenagers and that is the audience that has to believe what the author is telling them.

But.

I don't think teenagers are stupid, in fact I think most of them get very little credit in the world for how smart they are. So I have no patience with books that talk down to me; I don't read a YA book and think, well a teenager would like this but I don't. Every book I read to the end needs to be well written, period. So I have no difficulty saying that even though I think Samatha Powers's book A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide is what every adult American should be reading, I think The Queen of Cool is absolute perfection for every American teenager - many of whom will recognize themselves in this book, and it is a mirror that most of them are long overdue for. It's funny, very funny in fact, but it also has a seriousness to it, a weightiness that suggests that even when you are 16 you need to figure out what kind of person you want to be. And in what I'm discovering is a Cecil trademark, the adults in Queen are deep and intense and very much realized characters as well (shades again of My So Called Life). No one gets off easy in this book, either the jerks or the heroes, and everyone is great fun to read.

So, yesterday I wrote about why war fiction and memoirs and histories are so important and today I am fascinated by a novel about a group of high school kids. But here's the thing, one of the reasons why no one knows the difference between Iran and Iraq (apologies to Alan Jackson), is because they didn't find anything to read when they were young so it doesn't occur to half of them to even look for anything to read as adults. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a good book; A Peace to End All Peace is a good book and We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killied with our Families is a good book. And so is The Queen of Cool. This is where it starts if you are young and restless - this is a book that will speak to your world, to a place that you understand and recognize. Start here, keep reading, and hopefully you will never stop.

Just start.