Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 322
•
Trim: 5½ x 8½
978-1-4422-3081-1 • Hardback • September 2016 • $48.00 • (£37.00)
978-1-4422-3082-8 • eBook • September 2016 • $45.50 • (£35.00)
Joni Richards Bodart is associate professor in the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. She is the 2010 winner of the Scholastic Library Publishing Award and is the author of The World’s Best Thin Books: What to Read When Your Book Report Is Due Tomorrow (Scarecrow, 2000), Radical Reads: 101 YA Novels on the Edge (Scarecrow, 2002), Radical Reads 2 (Scarecrow, 2010), and They Suck, They Bite, They Eat, They Kill: The Psychological Meaning of Supernatural Monsters in Young Adult Fiction (Scarecrow, 2011).
A companion to Bodart’s They Suck, They Bite, They Eat, They Kill (2012), this volume’s horrors come from the human rather than the supernatural realm. Here, Bodart has compiled a directory to the most diabolical characters in young adult literature, backed by an analysis of why the genre is so attractive to many young people. The book covers 30 novels in depth, with an exhaustive bibliography of additional picks in the back matter. For each of the featured titles, there is an extensive summary accompanied by a dissection of its attractiveness. Each section is dedicated to a particular kind of evil— mass murderers (including school shooters), bullies in real life and online, mean people at school, monsters at home. The most difficult chapter focuses on predators, like kidnappers and rapists. An important distinction in this volume is that the 'toxic' characters are not dealing with mental illness—the author intentionally excluded these titles. Each book’s description is accompanied by information on how and why its author chose to write it. This book serves as an efficient guide to a high-demand genre for readers’ advisors.
— Booklist