Staff Picks
Weird YA
10.24.17
As an avid reader of books, most often books for teens, I find myself getting tired of reading the same tired plot over and over again.
A dystopian with a female protagonist who has to choose between two boys. No thank you.
A mind-bending tale of the apocalypse that begins with a clumsy mistake and results in six foot grasshoppers stomping about town and eating their way through the neighborhood. Yes, please!
Weird books have the distinct ability to charm us and perplex us at once.
kind of like eating a donut with gummy worms on it. It feels creepy and a little bit wrong, but still delicious so you just keep going until you have devoured the whole thing.
If slightly odd or full-on bizarre is what makes you keep turning pages, here are some teen titles from some of my favorite "experimental" authors.
I am told I will lern how to rite the tale by riting it.
The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean as Telt by Hisself
by David Almond
Trapped in his bedroom by a father who fills his mind with mysterious tales and warnings, Billy Dean goes outside for the first time when his father disappears, and he discovers his abilities to heal the living and contact the dead.
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck
Feed
by M.T. Anderson
In a future where most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment, a boy meets an unusual girl who is in serious trouble.
It all really began, all the terrible business that followed, on the day my Aunt Rosamud’s door handle went missing.
Heap House
by Edward Carey
Young Clod is an Iremonger. He lives at Heap House, his family's mansion at the center of the Heaps, a vast sea of lost and discarded items whose ever-shifting masses have been known to swallow people alive.
The moon man said nothing. He opened his mouth to show us he had no tongue to speak with.
Maggot Moon
by Sally Gardner
Following a stray football to the other side of a wall where there is a secret, Standish Treadwell discovers astonishing truths about a moon landing that the overseeing Motherland, a ruthless regime, is determined to hide.
The place where we explain the helicopter and how not to eat the green sauce at Las Hermanas and we don’t mention anything about love.
I Crawl Through It
by A.S. King
Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender. So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away...but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.
It was almost beautiful to see a brain at work in its natural habitat, instead of floating in a liquid-filled jar, totally out of context.
Slice of Cherry
by Dia Reeves
In Portero, Texas, teens Kit and Fancy Cordelle share their infamous father's fascination with killing, and despite their tendency to shun others they bring two boys with similar tendencies to a world of endless possibilities they have discovered behind a mysterious door.
Robby and I were the gods of concrete rivers and history does prove to us that wherever boys ride bicycles, paved roadways ribbon along afterward like intestinal tapeworms.
Grasshopper Jungle
by Andrew Smith
Austin Szerba narrates the end of humanity as he and his best friend Robby accidentally unleash an army of giant, unstoppable bugs and uncover the secrets of a decades-old experiment gone terribly wrong
The day before I went back to school, I found out that there is an urn containing my ashes hidden in the closet of the guest bedroom.
Noggin
by John Corey Whaley
After dying at age sixteen, Travis Coates' head was removed and frozen for five years before being attached to another body, and now the old Travis and the new must find a way to coexist while figuring out changes in his relationships.