Young Adult titles

Do teenagers still read books? Or are they all on Snapchat and Instagram, while it's their mothers who read The Hunger Games?


Here are a few titles teens today may like to try:

• The Gallagher Girls series ("I'd tell you I love you but then I'd have to kill you")
• Elle Enchanted
• Anna and the French Kiss
• The Program (and The Treatment and The Adjustment and The Remedy) by Suzanne Young
• The girl who drank the moon
• Stargirl
• Hush, hush
• My life, undecided
• Vampire Academy

The Year We Turned Forty

"The Year We Turned Forty" by Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke is a what-if novel about three friends who get the chance to go back to their fortieth birthday and re-live the next decade the way they think they were meant to live it (in hindsight).


It's a good premise, well executed. An interesting variation on the usual "make things un-happen" theme, this book does not allow to go back far enough to erase mistakes - it only allows to handle the blowout from the mistakes differently.


The novel asks important questions about fate, karma, the definition of happiness, and - ultimately - about the meaning of life.