I just finished reading The Mysterious Benedict Society thinking it would fit into my mysterious houses piece for the summer issue of Eclectica. I was buzzing along in the beginning with the weird house idea (which is completely true) and then the plot reveals that there's a whole mind control machine and plan for world domination and technology is already in place that is controlling some aspects of society and I thought....

Whoa - this reads like science fiction.

Bendict Society is about four intrepid kids who go undercover to expose the bad guys and stop the plan and save the world and so it's sort of junior Avengers (without the wicked cool British cars), but when advanced technology (that pretty much only evil genius guy knows exists) is being used to take over the world then isn't that in the realm of SF?

When does science move into the realm of science ficton?

Or how about this. In Eliot Fintushel's Breakfast With the Ones You Love you have a teenage telepath with the abilty to maim or kill with a thought. No magic - just ability. And then on top of that our gal Lea has a friend who is building a rocket ship in the abandoned section of a Sears store. This is so science fictiony that Bantam published it that way. It does also have more than one whacked old lady, the mafia, a group of Jews looking for the Promised Land and the Devil - which makes me wonder how you can be all that and still be SF. (It's probably the rocket ship - rocket ship = SF, regardless of all other plot elements) But what's really quirky here though (other than the entire story but I'll save that for my review - very cool, very very original and totally readworthy) is that the protagonist is a teenager but the book is marketed to adults. It ended up in my hands because of a response from a Bantam editor after reading my recent search for YA SF. Bantam does not have a YA imprint so even though Breakfast positively screams to be read by every single disaffected pissed off goth girl out there (so totally perfect for that audience I swear) it's an adult book.

Except to me of course because I'll be pushing it as YA all the way.

And then there is James Prosek's latest about a nine-year old boy whose mother leaves his family for another man and spends the next three years struggling to cope. It has very favorable blurbs from Harold Bloom and Tom Brokaw.

Yes - you read that correctly. A YA novel blurbed by Bloom and Brokaw.

The Day My Mother Left is a very well written novel about coping with enormous loss but really, it is way better suited for the twenty and thirty-year old set than the average 15 year old. It's not that they won't enjoy it, but it's too introspective - even though it's from the perspective of a child it seems to be written by that grown up child now looking back on a difficult period in his childhood. Even when Jeremy lashes out at his father or others it doesn't read as childish behavoir - but how an adult remembers childish behavior. It's a beautifully written novel but the only reason it is for teens is because the narrator is a kid.

But poor Lea is left out of the teen section due to genre confusion.

This is usually where my head starts to spin. Now I have to figure out just what kind of columns these books will end up in.

Anyone for the Dewey Decimal Defying? Of course that won't work because Dewey doesn't play with fiction but still...

This reading/writing thing just keeps getting tougher all the time, doesn't it?