Walk a Mile in My Shoes: August

This year, our theme is “Walk A Mile In My Shoes.” The idea that you can’t understand someone (and shouldn’t judge them) until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes is a pretty common sentiment. And research has shown that reading fiction is one way to really get such a walk going. So, that’s what we are going to do this year: use fiction (and some nonfiction when we just can’t resist) to take walks in someone’s shoes. We hope you join our journey. For August, our theme is teenagers.

Ben Philippe’s The Field Guide to the North American Teenager is a fun but thought-provoking take on the teen years. When Norris and his family move from Canada to the United States, he relies on pop culture to help him get through his new high school. It tells him everything he wants to know about American teenage stereotypes, and he sure finds enough students that seem to fit, whether it’s stuck-up cheerleaders or standoffish loners. Norris feels like he’s breezing through high school with his helpful guide to stereotypes. That is, until he discovers some of the stuck-up cheerleaders are actually nice and some of the standoffish loners aren’t so standoffish after all. . . .

For a unique look at two staples of the teenage experience (awkward romances and the unpredictable power of rumor mills), Kevin Wilson’s Now Is Not the Time to Panic follows Frankie, who wants nothing more than to be a writer, and the 90s summer she spends in Coalfield, Tennessee. There, she meets and falls for a budding young artist named Zeke. When they leave a cryptic unsigned poster up in town, what started as an innocent lark soon turns into a full-fledged town-wide panic as everyone tries to parse the message. Complications ensue.

Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now is a bit of a throwback setting-wise (late 60s) but still taps into universal experiences. It’s about Doug, who has a pretty miserable life with his abusive family, but who has a vibrant new world opened to him through his local public library.

David Yoon’s Frankly in Love is about a Korean-American teenager named Frank in L.A. His very traditional parents want him to date nice Korean girls, and he knows they won’t approve of his girlfriend Brit, so he and his family friend Joy start using each other as fake dates to keep their parents at bay. But then he finds himself developing feelings for Joy. . . . What could possibly go wrong?!

For a lot of people, JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye remains the pinnacle of books on teenagers because conflicted Holden is so, well, conflicted Holden.

That being said, John Green’s novels are considered modern classics when it comes to presenting sympathetic but complicated teenage protagonists. Looking for Alaska is widely considered the best starting point for his books. Just don’t do what I did as a teenager and read it expecting it to be about the state of Alaska. Spoiler alert: it is not, in fact, about the state of Alaska.

For me personally, Laurie Halse Anderson’s books were what resonated with me the most as a teenager. She writes some very compelling books about some very dark topics (ranging from eating disorders to depression to sexual assault) but her work also includes the significantly more lighthearted Prom about, you guessed it, prom.

What’s your favorite book that features a teenage protagonist? What have you read lately that helped you walk in someone else’s shoes? Tell us in the comments! As always, please follow this link to our online library catalog for more information on any of these items or to place them on hold.