Top 250 LGBTQ Books for Teens: Coming Out, Being Out, and the Search for Community - Softcover

A columnist and reviewer for Booklist magazine, Michael Cart is the author or editor of twenty-two books, including The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969-2004, which he co-authored with Christine A. Jenkins. A past president of both YALSA and ALAN, Cart.is the recipient of the 2000 Grolier Award and first recipient of the YALSA/Greenwood Publishing Group Service to Young Adults Achievement Award. Until his relocation to the Midwest, he taught young adult literature at UCLA. Christine A. Jenkins is associate professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a PhD and MS in library and information studies and an MA in children’s literature. Jenkins is recipient of several teaching awards and has a decade of experience as a school librarian/media specialist. She is co-author (with Michael Cart) of The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969-2004, and has published articles on historical and contemporary children’s and young adult literature and librarianship; intellectual freedom for youth; and online education. She and her wife live in a 100-year-old bungalow in Champaign, Illinois.

On the heels of the conversations happening as a result of the We Need Diverse Books movement, acquiring quality LGBTQ titles for young adult collections is more important than ever. Enter Top 250 LGBTQ Books for Teens, in which even dedicated fans of LGBTQ teen titles will find new favorites to enjoy and classic selections to explore. Here, one can peruse an exhaustive collection of the best fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels this niche has to offer. Each title is painstakingly annotated and given equal space within. Books are arranged by author, though the coding system is slightly awkward; readers may have been better served by separate sections for each genre. In addition, a section of professional resources for teachers, librarians, and counselors is included. This title is current through 2013 and includes Sara Farizan's Lambda Award-winning If You Could be Mine (Algonquin, 2013). Only a few 2014 titles appear and the two most recent and significant Printz Award and Honor titles, Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun (2014) and Andrew Smith's Grasshopper Jungle (2014, both Penguin), both of which prominently feature queer protagonists, are missing. Despite its excellent attention to detail and clear celebration of LGBTQ literature, it's sadly a book that will be dated rapidly as new titles hit the market. VERDICT An additional purchase, best used for backlist collection development.—Ingrid Abrams, Brooklyn Public Library, NY