Libby's Lit

Obvious spoilers for TMI but warnings are before any spoilers for other Cassie series I first picked up City of Bones by Cassandra Clare at the beach the summer before 7 th grade. I’d only recently made friends I actually liked at school and I hadn’t even had my first period. But my middle school self found comfort in the shadow world, a name that aptly described her level of self-proclaimed angst. She lost herself in Clary and Jace and Simon and Izzy and Alec and Magnus in a way she hadn’t since the days of reading Harry Potter and Percy Jackson for the first time. I just graduated high school, so that was over six years ago . Cassandra Clare’s books have meant a lot to me in all the years since, but I rarely found myself turning to The Mortal Instruments, the series that started it all. Reading The Dark Artifices as they came out filled my school breaks with laughter and tears, while rereading The Infernal Devices helped me get through periods of tears in my own ...

Are you a mom trying to understand why your daughter refuses to date real boys? Do you see teenagers in movie theaters screaming in outrage at the latest book-to-movie adaptation and want to experience that rage for yourself? Do you seek to use underage protagonists to make yourself feel young again? Well, you’ve come to the right place! Libby’s tell-all guide to getting your start in YA will cover all the basics, from overly-cheesy titles to poorly thought out dystopian conclusions. Consider this Young Adult Fiction 101 (but way cheaper and with a way less qualified teacher). In this course, I will be covering six YA classics, which I like to call “YA Rites of Passage” because anyone who’s anyone in YA has read them. These books are the building blocks for your YA education. If you want anyone to take you seriously in this field, you’ll need to have an opinion on them. Now, I’ve only included novels that are both ubiquitous in their popularity but also worth your time (...