Contemporary Young Adult Fiction is a blast. The voices are real and the humor is strong. I don’t remember having this much fun reading novels written for my age when I was in high school. I had to read Flowers in the Attic to get my thrills, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t written for teens. Certainly, there was nothing for teenagers that was this frank, nothing that spoke in the voice of the teen, expressing those thoughts that we only expressed to our friends. Certainly, these wonderful books I’ve been reading these last few weeks would have never made it to press.

Are you thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy? If so, crack open Dumplin’ (hilarious and timeless) or Into the Wild Nerd Yonder (hilarious and relatable) and enjoy what you missed reading when you were sixteen, when it wasn’t aloud, when you had to tell your secrets to your friends and maybe didn’t know that thousands of other kids were feeling just like you.

C’mon. Have some fun.