Friday Short Post--Evelina Galang Goes to School.

We bring a lot of authors into schools, but it's not every day where an author gets to visit the school that her nieces attend. When Galang, author of Angel de la Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery, came back to speak at Pilgrim Park Middle School in Elm Grove, it couldn't be the school she went to, because it hadn't opened yet. No, she went to Burleigh Junior High, which is now Burleigh Elementary. Both schools fed into Brookfield East, and a number of the kids in the class went to Burleigh when they were younger.

Galang mentioned that her book was nominated for the Teen Choice Book of the Year award. Voting is going on right now at their website. It's a really long list of titles.

These lists can be very helpful. Here's another with School Library Journal's Best Adult Books for Teens. I read three of them, and another six were recommended by other Boswell booksellers.

Like many first-time YA authors, Galang wrote the book without categorization, and her publisher made the decision to label it YA. We had an interesting conversation about the protagonist in the book smoking. I wondered if the book had been picked up by a childen's book division, would they have allowed it in, even though Angel is a product of a different time and place? Galang noted that it was very important to the story, and she probably would not have changed it. Isn't if fascinating, though, that a teen smoking seems more risqué than the sex and violence that is pretty common in books for teens?