YA Guy Reviews... NO SURRENDER SOLDIER by Christine Kohler

In 1972 Guam, fifteen-year-old Kiko would prefer to spend his time playing baseball, hanging out with his friend Tomas, and working up the nerve to ask out beautiful Daphne. But Kiko is dealing with serious family problems: his grandfather’s descent into dementia, his older brother’s tour of duty in Vietnam, and the rumors he starts to hear about his mother being raped during the Japanese occupation of Guam. When Kiko discovers a “straggler”--a Japanese soldier who never surrendered at war’s end--hiding in the jungle near his home, his anger comes to a head and he contemplates taking revenge on the man who symbolizes his family’s suffering.

Based on the strange but true tale of a Japanese soldier who hid out in the jungles of Guam for nearly three decades, Christine Kohler’s debut as a YA novelist is a real treat, a coming-of-age story told with skill and sensitivity. I really identified with the young male protagonist, and loved how Kohler wove his story together with the incredible story of the Japanese straggler’s life. I also appreciated how vividly Kohler described the customs in Kiko’s world: slaughtering a pig with his grandfather and participating in a saint-day festival become elaborate rituals that bind Kiko to his family and community. Like the best historical fiction, No Surrender Soldier isn’t only set in history but about history: how the past shapes us, clutches us, sometimes maims us. All three principal male characters in this novel--Kiko, his grandfather, and the Japanese straggler--are haunted by history in some way, fighting to escape traumatic pasts. The following passage powerfully illustrates Kiko’s struggle to come to grips with the reality and aftermath of war:

When the reporters wrote of war, it was those happy-ending stories that named people’s names in them. The kind of stories kids clipped and took to school for show-and-tell when they were little because they were proud their tatan and nana bihu [grandfathers and grandmothers] were heroes.

But not bad stuff. Not stories about murders, and people getting their heads chopped off, and people with body parts blown up by grenades the Japanese threw at unarmed [citizens]. Those people were all dead. No one reported their names. Not the textbooks, not the newspapers. Not unless they came out alive or a hero.

The blending of family history with world history--and the choice of a boy on the verge of adulthood to bring these historical strands together--make this novel emotionally resonant and morally satisfying. I'm thrilled to discover this new voice in YA fiction, and I look forward to more stories of conflict and courage from her!

YA Guy Reports: Why Girls Aren't Reading

My daughter used to love to read.

Voraciously. As a pre-teen she read just about anything you put in front of her, though she favored fantasy series: Harry Potter, Narnia, The Shadow Children, Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner. When she entered her teen years, she started reading realistic fiction: Sarah Dessen, Gayle Forman, S. E. Hinton. She loved the classics--Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye--and some modern classics, including Life of Pi and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. When she met YA writers Erin Bowman and Kat Zhang at a workshop for young writers, she was so jazzed she ran right out and gobbled down their books as well. As the daughter of a writer, it’s perhaps unsurprising that she read so much. But it was still impressive.

And then she started high school.

She doesn’t read anymore. Oh, she reads what’s assigned (currently The Odyssey for English, a book about leukodystrophy for Biology, and newspaper articles for Social Studies). But pleasure reading has shriveled to near nothing.

As I see it, there are two main reasons for this.

--First and most obviously, the amount of homework she has every night and weekend leaves virtually no room for leisure reading. She averages four hours of homework per weeknight, five per day over the weekend. Some weekend days, she does nothing but homework. And much of the homework is repetitive, boring drills: once you’ve proven twenty times that you can summarize a chapter, you really don’t need to summarize any more chapters. But the teachers don’t see it that way, and neither does the school district. And so reading for pleasure takes a back seat to working out three hundred identical algebraic formulas to prove yet again that you can work out algebraic formulas.

--Second and somewhat less obviously, high school--or at least my daughter’s high school--strips the fun out of reading, making it yet another onerous, meaningless chore. It’s bad enough that ninth graders are reading The Odyssey (a book I first read in college, and that my current college students struggle with)--but was it really necessary to use a stodgy, antiquated prose translation of Homer’s epic poem? With so much great literature for young people out there, both classic and modern, what on earth is the point of making young teens slog through a three thousand-year-old behemoth for which they can’t possibly have any associations or context?

We obsess endlessly about why boys aren’t reading. We don’t talk so much about why girls aren’t reading. (Indeed, when I Googled "why girls aren't reading," I got the same articles about why boys aren't reading.)

Based on my experience, I’d have to say girls aren't reading because high school beats the love of it clean out of them.

YA Guy Reviews... DEAR LIFE, YOU SUCK by Scott Blagden

It's DEAR LIFE, YOU SUCK week on YA Guy! Today, I've got a review of Scott Blagden's great debut novel. On Friday, I'll have an interview with Scott and a great giveaway! So read the review now, keep an eye out for the interview in a couple days, and make sure to enter the giveaway when it comes!

Scott Blagden’s Dear Life, You Suck hit YA Guy like a punch to the gut.

In a good way.

Blagden’s debut novel is not for the faint of heart (or stomach). The title delivers a fair warning. But it’s not until you enter the warped mind of narrator Cricket Cherpin, a sarcastic, pugilistic, foul-mouthed, drug-doing, suicidal seventeen-year-old living in a nun-run orphanage in small-town Maine, that you get the full picture.

Here’s a tiny sample of Cricket’s utterly unique voice, chosen more or less at random:

Cheesecake LaChance is a physiological dichotomy. He’s Beauty and the Beast incarnate. From the neck up, he’s as pretty as a transvestite prom queen. Ice-blue eyes, impeccably groomed butt-bandit beard, and perfect teeth like LEGO pieces. From the neck down, he’s as pretty as an Amazon jungle queen. Tree-trunk thighs, an ass the size of Brazil, and a belly that looks like he swallowed a Galapagos sea turtle. It’s hard to look at him without imagining his Grand Canyon ass-crack bent over a log-clogged toilet, a monkey wrench in his one hand and a plunger in the other.

That’s Cricket: irreverent, tongue-twisting, given to outrageous similes and egregious wordplay.

I won’t lie to you: it takes a few chapters to get accustomed to that voice. And it takes just as long to muster sympathy for the guy, who initially seems like the kind of teenager grownups like me are praying they’ll never have to spend any time with.

But once you’ve made the transition, Blagden’s book is little short of genius. Indeed, the mere fact that he manages to recruit readers to the side of his misanthropic anti-hero is a triumph in itself. But once you understand what makes Cricket tick, once you plumb the depths of his anger at the hand life has dealt him, you find yourself unable to stop reading and rooting for him.

I mean, how could you not root for a character who describes his confusion as follows: “Damn, life sure is carving crop circles in my ass tonight.”

And how could you not be moved by a passage like this, wherein Cricket apostrophizes the eternal:

Me and Art have a problem. The same way me and God have a problem. I mean, this scene is so out of this world, so inhuman and infinite, so boundless, so worthy and eternal. And human life is just so not. Yet I can’t deny a connection. An intermingling. A gravity. A pull. I mean, it sucks at my soul. Probably so it can digest me and shit me out when it’s done. That’s how the infinite makes me feel. Like a hunk of beef it’s gonna process and return to the dirt as fertilizer.

If you think that’s good, wait until you watch Cricket deconstruct the Immaculate Conception.

There’s not enough good I can say about Dear Life, You Suck. It’s hilarious, poignant, wrenching, profound, sad. It’s at once a twisted simulacrum of life and a transcendent celebration of it. It’s like Cricket himself: so surreal it’s all too real.

It’s a book I wish I wrote. About a guy I wish I knew.

YA Guy Hosts... Ryan McBriar!

Proving that young guys love to read, teach, and write YA, here’s a guest post from Ryan McBriar about the experience of incorporating NaNoWriMo into his high school English classroom. Full confession: Ryan was one of YA Guy’s students way back when. Great to have you on the blog, Ryan!

Picture this: a crowd of eighteen high school freshmen filling a classroom. They descend on a mobile laptop cart without being prompted (releasing their assigned computer, finding their most comfortable spot in the room) and write. For sixty minutes, the only sound (aside from the occasional brag about word-count goals) is the tapping of keys.

I can’t take sole credit for this phenomenon. I decided at the beginning of the school year to challenge my first-ever Honors English class with the task of writing a novel in thirty days. This challenge came courtesy of the wonderful National NovelWriting Month Young Writers Program.

An Old-West assassin. A wrongly-accused convict. A seafaring pirate. A novice witch. A fallen football hero. These character types (and more) populated the novels written by my Honors class, a testament to the amount of creativity and passion young people will bring to writing if given (mostly) free reign and a little push.

Taking advantage of an online word-processing program, students were required to share excerpts of their novels-in-progress with me throughout the month, and I noticed something for which I hadn’t necessarily planned. Aside from just sharing their writing with me, they were sharing their novels with each other, and sometimes with students in different classes. Suddenly, sprouting up around my class was a small community of writers who were not only excited about but proud of their writing, so much so that they wanted peer reviews.

A lot of prep work went into getting students ready for this project, but I think the most valuable lesson came in mid-October. I introduced the coming month of frenzied creative output by first discussing with my class the qualities that make a novel good or bad. I required students to bring in an example of a good novel they had read and present it to the class to support their opinions on plot, character development, word use, structure, and a variety of other novel elements they found most important in the books they loved. Student volunteers generated posters of these good novel attributes and this became one of our guiding lights throughout the outlining and eventual writing process.

This book-sharing activity, done so early in the school year, exposed students to what their friends were reading and me to a slew of new YA fiction that allowed a sneak peek at their individual interests. I found that what high school students desire from both the fiction they read and the fiction they write is what all accomplished readers and writers want: compelling, complex characters; well-structured plots; clear but challenging prose.

An optional task over the summer for my first experimental NaNoWriMo subjects was, after editing (and in some cases completing) their first drafts, to take advantage of the program’s opportunity to receive five free copies of their published novels. I’m eager to see how many students have novels to show me on the first day of school this August.

At the end of the school year, one of my wrap-up activities is a course evaluation. I make it anonymous so students can tell me aspects of the class they found both positive and negative. The most recurring positive on my Honors English evaluations was NaNoWriMo. When the evaluations came in, any doubts about running the project again next year vanished. Like any seasoned writer knows, my job now is revision: how do I make this experience even better for my next group? I can’t wait to find out!

Ryan McBriar is a teacher and writer originally from Pittsburgh, PA. His first published short story “Writer’s Block” can be found in The Big Book of Bizarro, at www.burningbulbpublishing.com. Ryan currently lives in Warren, PA and teaches high school English in nearby Corry. When he isn’t teaching, Ryan enjoys spending quality time with his wife and young son. Ryan loves Halloween, anything scary, and obsessing over books, movies, music, and television. His ramblings on some of the previously mentioned topics can be found here: http://thoughtsfromtheblackrock.blogspot.com/

YA Guy Reviews... MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN by Ransom Riggs

YA Guy’s wife picked up Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children from a display rack in Barnes & Noble.

Which was a bit peculiar in itself, since she tends to shy away from fantasy.

When she set the book aside to move on to her more favored historical fiction, I grabbed Miss Peregrine and plunged in. I was intrigued by the concept, the way in which debut novelist Ransom Riggs weaves oddball period photos into the story of marooned sideshow children, and I’d heard good things about the book. Plus, as you all know, YA fantasy is right up my alley!

But the thing is, it took me a really long time to get into the story. For the first hundred pages or so, I found the pace uneven (at times too rushed, at others too protracted), the narrative (which involves time travel, never one of my favorite subjects) too convoluted, the dialogue too labored. A writer-friend of mine confessed she’d had the same problems with the book, and wondered whether it had originally been a stand-alone chopped up into a series. Whatever the case, I seriously considered setting the book aside.

But I’m glad I didn’t.

For in the end, Riggs’s strange story won me over. Once fifteen-year-old narrator Jacob Portman stopped shuttling between his own world and the world of the peculiar children and became firmly committed to their struggle against the monstrous antagonists Riggs names the hollowgast--scary-as-hell fiends with tentacles for tongues and a voracious appetite for children’s flesh--I let my reservations slide. A good monster can often do that for me.

More importantly, though, I too became more committed to Miss Peregrine’s world as it unfolded. During the novel’s first third, I got so distracted by its unconventional presentation that every little flaw loomed unusually large. By two-thirds of the way through the book, I’d become comfortable enough with the concept to ignore it and simply enjoy the story. When I did, I found some real pleasures in the reading, as in this lovely passage where Jacob considers revealing his hidden life to his clueless father:

I wanted to tell him. I wanted to explain everything, and for him to tell me he understood and offer some tidbit of parental advice. I wanted, in that moment, for everything to go back to the way it had been before we came here; before I ever found that letter from Miss Peregrine, back when I was just a sort-of-normal messed-up rich kid in the suburbs. Instead, I sat next to my dad for awhile and talked about nothing, and I tried to remember what my life had been like in that unfathomably distant era that was four weeks ago, or imagine what it might be like four weeks from now--but I couldn’t. Eventually we ran out of nothing to talk about, and I excused myself and went upstairs to be alone.

As this passage shows, folded into Riggs’s tale of peculiar children is the feeling all young people have of being peculiar: misunderstood, unloved, unlovable. In that respect, the concept that I’d found so nettlesome in the early going started to make perfect sense: just like the orphan photos rescued by Riggs from oblivion, his tale is about a teen’s discovery of how brutal the world can be to those deemed different.

We grown-ups have typically become so complacent about our own normality that we forget the time when it mattered profoundly, for better and for worse, to be odd. Riggs’s odd story reminds us of that time, and celebrates, in today’s sadly conventional world, the saving power of strangeness.

YA Guy Hosts... Kai Strand

Today on the blog, YA Guy has Kai Strand, author of KING OF BAD, discussing the obvious (and not-so-obvious) benefits to teenage boys of reading. And at the end of her list, you'll find another goodie: a giveaway of KING OF BAD itself! So settle in, enjoy, and enter to win. Free advice and free books--it doesn't get any better than this!

Hi, my name is Kai Strand. I write fiction for kids and teens. I think we are all aware of the fact that girls will read almost anything. They don't care what gender the main character is. They don't care if a book is chock full of romance, adventure, brainiacs or divas. Girls just read.

Well, I'm here to encourage boys to do the same thing. There are so many reasons why, but here is a sampling of them.

• Teenage boys who read are more approachable.
• They are better able to carry on conversations because they’ve read so much dialogue.
• Being able to discuss plot points and character motivation on a first date often leads to a second date.
• They experience things they may not get to do in their own school like saving the world, kissing, Yetis and foreign countries.
• Their vocabulary is advanced so they are naturally more articulate and able to schmooze speak coherently to teachers and other adults.
• They know the thrill of jumping out of a plane, or speeding down a highway, or piloting a spaceship, without the consequences of broken bones or life in prison.
• They learn what to take on an extreme mountaineering adventure in order to avoid death.
• If they are paying real close attention they learn what girls like and don’t like--and they take notes.
• There is a certain sort of internal quiet to a teenage boy who incorporates reading into his leisure activities opposed to one who only blows up aliens on his Xbox.
• Teen boys look sexy lounging in a chair clutching a book or ereader in their hand and ignoring the world around them.

I’m not saying that teenage boys who don’t read aren’t smart or sexy. I’m just saying that teen boys who read get there faster.

Anything you’d like to add to the list? Let’s hear from you.

About the book:

Jeff Mean would rather set fires than follow rules or observe curfew. He wears his bad boy image like a favorite old hoodie; that is until he learns he has superpowers and is recruited by Super Villain Academy--where you learn to be good at being bad. In a school where one kid can evaporate all the water from your body and the girl you hang around with can perform psychic sex in your head, bad takes on a whole new meaning. Jeff wonders if he’s bad enough for SVA.

He may never find out. Classmates vilify him when he develops good manners. Then he’s kidnapped by those closest to him and left to wonder who is good and who is bad. His rescue is the climactic episode that balances good and evil in the super world. The catalyst--the girl he’s crushing on. A girlfriend and balancing the Supers is good, right? Or is it…bad?

Buy it: Publisher, Amazon, Barnes and Noble Add it to Goodreads

About the author:

Kai Strand writes fiction for kids and teens. Her debut novel, The Weaver, was a finalist in the 2012 EPIC eBook Awards in the children’s fiction category. As a mother of four young adults her characters are well researched and new stories are inspired daily. Kai is a compulsive walker, addicted to pizza and a Mozart fangirl. Visit her website for more information about her work and to find all her virtual haunts; www.kaistrand.com.

To celebrate her newly released book, Kai is offering one ecopy (Kindle or pdf) of King of Bad to a lucky winner. Open internationally as long as you have an email address to receive the book. Enter as often as you can and spread the word.

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YA Guy Reviews... ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s YA novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is, simply, a beautiful book. It’s also a beautifully simple book. YA Guy admires the heck out of writers who can express so much in such straightforward, clean prose; I tend toward the baroque and the extravagant, and I sometimes feel I say less with more.  But not Sáenz.

The story he tells is classic coming-of-age material: two Mexican-American teenagers, Aristotle (the brooding narrator) and Dante (his chatty best friend), learn about life and love during several momentous summers, both together and apart. Aristotle is dealing with lots of demons: a father who won’t talk about his traumatic experience in Vietnam, an older brother who’s imprisoned and whom the family never mentions, a near-deadly accident that turns him into a reluctant hero. Dante seems to have things much easier: openly loving parents, artistic talent, an easy manner of being around others. But Dante has his own painful secret, and it’s one only Aristotle knows.

He’s gay.

I won’t tell you all the twists and turns in the book; you’ll love discovering them for yourself. And you’ll also love Sáenz’s prose, which offers pearls like this on practically every page:

The problem with my life was it was someone else’s idea.

Words were different when they lived inside of you.

I sometimes think that I don’t let myself know what I’m really thinking about.

Do you know what dead skin looks like when they take off a cast? That was my life, all that dead skin.

For a few minutes I wished that Dante and I lived in the universe of boys instead of the universe of almost-men.

I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much.  Leaving each other alone was killing us.

I think my mother and father had decided that there were too many secrets in the world.

If I have any reservation about Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, it has to do with the book’s conclusion, which I felt moved too fast and provided too pat a resolution to Aristotle’s crisis. But overall, if you’re looking for a book that explores the painful process of growing to manhood, Aristotle and Dante is one of the finest I’ve read in a long time.

YA Guy Reviews... OPENLY STRAIGHT by Bill Konigsberg

High school junior Seamus Rafael Goldberg (call him Rafe) is openly gay and lives in relatively tolerant Boulder, Colorado.  Until, that is, he decides to move across the country and enroll in an all-male boarding school in Natick, Massachusetts, where everyone assumes he’s straight.

And that’s exactly the way Rafe wants it.

That’s the premise of Bill Konigsberg’s poignant, funny, and smart YA novel Openly Straight.  Feeling constricted by the label “openly gay,” Rafe sees his move to Massachusetts as a way to reinvent himself: “As of tomorrow, I was going to have new skin, and that skin could look like anything, would feel different than anything I knew yet.  And that made me feel a little bit like I was about to be born.  Again.”  His plan seems to be working when he makes new friends with the Natick jocks, fabricates a girlfriend out of his (platonic) best friend back home, and convinces his parents to go along with his deception.

But then he meets Ben, a classmate who knows nothing of Rafe’s past.  And when Rafe finds himself falling in love with Ben, his plan to “be this new, uncomplicated Rafe” starts to seem a lot more complicated.

YA Guy has a confession to make: I’ve not read much YA with gay protagonists.  That’s not a reflection of the genre but of me: I’ve not sought such books out.  A lot of the YA I read is fantasy and sci-fi, where--as in Rafe’s Natick--heterosexuality tends to be assumed; I’d love for someone to point me toward some  good speculative YA with queer characters.  But in any event, what this means is that Openly Straight was something of a revelation for me, and a good one at that.

I liked Konigsberg’s novel for a number of reasons: its marvelous portrait of Rafe, who learns to his surprise that “being able to pass for something you’re not is a kind of curse”; its representation of young male camaraderie, where allegiances can sour in an instant and physical play can turn to desire; its refusal to sentimentalize or resort to easy stereotypes (misunderstood youth versus repressive parents, etc.).  In that respect, the only slightly false note for me was Rafe’s kindly writing instructor at Natick, whose suggestion that Rafe keep a journal expressing privately what he can’t admit publicly seemed not only a bit of a stretch--would Rafe really jump at this chance to reveal himself to someone he barely knew?--but a too-convenient means of communicating Rafe’s internal struggles to the reader.  (Not only that, but the teacher’s unfailingly supportive comments made me, a not-always-kindly English teacher, feel like a real jerk.)

This blog, as you know, focuses on guy books--though as I’ve pointed out, that ends up being a much broader category than it might appear.  So is it fair to call Openly Straight a “gay book”?  Well, on the one hand, Rafe’s journey to understand and embrace his sexuality is what the book’s about.  But on the other, Openly Straight belongs to a long tradition of coming-of-age novels, be the protagonist’s sexuality what it may.  As Konigsberg reminds us, labels are perilous, and I’d be reluctant to place undue restrictions on his wonderful book.

YA Guy's Top 10 (Movies!)

Following yesterday's post, I began to think about YA-guy movies.

Turns out there are quite a few of them.

So here, for what it's worth, is my provisional Top 10.  I say "provisional" because this list is based entirely on the DVDs and Blu-Ray discs I personally own, so obviously it's not definitive (for example, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, which I love but don't own, isn't on the list.)  But it's not wholly random, either; all of these films, which I've listed in rank order (best to least best), are darn good.

YA Guy swears on it.

1. Breaking Away.  You want a YA-guy movie that deals thoughtfully and subtly with growing up, with father-son relationships, with male friendship, with choice-making, with the meaning of work and sports, and with a whole lot of other things besides?  Look no further.  Quite simply, one of the finest films ever made.

2. American History X.  This is R-rated, and the graphic violence and sexuality are tough for some to watch.  But it's an absolutely amazing film about the choices young men make--in this case, the negative choices.  Riveting and emotionally devastating.

3. Star Wars: A New Hope.  In other words, the very first Star Wars film in order of theatrical release.  I saw it when I was twelve, and my YA years were indelibly marked by it.  That the series morphed into a father-son story, and then (in the prequels) into the story of a young man's fall, only made it more powerful.

4. Edward Scissorhands.  For every high school boy who's ever felt like a freak....

5. Spider-Man. ... and wished he was a hero.  In other words, every high school boy.

6. The Outsiders.  This movie was critically panned for some reason, maybe because of its faithfulness to the book or because it wasn't the kind of film people were expecting Francis Ford Coppola to direct.  But it's a terrific adaptation of Hinton's novel, and it launched the careers of many fine young actors, male and female.

7. West Side Story.  Yes, it's dated.  Yes, it's ridiculous to have people dancing and singing while they're killing each other.  But if you can get past that and let yourself be immersed in the music and visuals (not to mention the Shakespearean love story), it remains an astonishing achievement.

8. Friday Night Lights.  A bit repetitive--how many scenes do we really need that show how football-crazy the town is?--but still a great high school sports film.

9. The Lightning Thief.  This film suffers from some very questionable adaptation choices--in particular, the decision to make Percy and co. much older than they are in the book, presumably so they can drive lots of really fast sports cars--but the source material is so great, the film couldn't go entirely wrong.

10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  Confession: I haven't seen this one yet.  But my daughter swears it's amazing.  I'll take her word for it.

I considered a few others for this list--Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Hunger Games, etc.  But the first seemed a bit young for YA, and in the case of the second, does Collins really need any more free publicity?  So I'm sticking with what I've got.

Now it's your turn.  What would you add (or delete)?

Inquiring YA Guys want to know.

YA Guy Reviews... AFTER EARTH

YA Guy doesn't typically review movies.

But YA Guy loves fantasy and sci-fi, both movies and books.  (Just take a look at my Top 10 list if you don't believe me.)

And AFTER EARTH, the new Will and Jaden Smith vehicle from oft-reviled, sometimes-celebrated director M. Night Shyamalan, is so perfect for this blog, I couldn't resist.  It's a totally YA-guy film, with an early-teen male protagonist, a father-son relationship, a host of cool monsters, and a bunch of lessons in courage and responsibility.  So I trust you'll indulge me if I depart somewhat from form.

AFTER EARTH takes place a thousand or so years after human beings have destroyed the earth's environment and effectively driven themselves from the planet.  Setting up shop on another planet, they find to their dismay that it's already inhabited--and that the natives aren't keen on company.  They unleash monstrous beasts called Ursa, which are blind but can smell the human fear response and hunt their prey without eyes.  Only people who can "ghost"--suppress their fear--can escape and fight back against these fearsome predators.

And guess what?  Will Smith is one such guy.

A general and a celebrated hero of the battles against the Ursa, Smith (whose character's name I won't even try to write out) is also an absentee dad, too preoccupied with his military leadership to pay any attention to his son.  That all changes, however, when the two are the sole survivors of a crash landing back on earth--and the son needs to venture into this hostile environment to find the homing beacon that's the last hope for him and his gravely injured father.

The story of AFTER EARTH is pretty simple: a boy has to become a man, and a man has to become a father.  The film hints at other thematic elements--environmental degradation, colonialism, militarism--but these take a definite back seat to the twin quest narratives.  It's not exactly thrilling stuff--you know from the moment the movie starts how both quests are going to end--but it's well-acted (especially by the younger Smith), reasonably well-paced, and mercifully free of the glaring directorial gaffes for which Shyamalan is infamous.  All in all, I'd call it a modest success, neither edge-of-your-seat-gripping nor an epic yawnfest.  It was fun, and maybe that's all it was meant to be.

As a YA-guy film, it was pretty much paint-by-numbers; the arc of the son's development--from tearful mama's boy to Ursa-busting action hero--couldn't have been more predictable.  For me, that was the film's biggest weakness: the boy's growth to manhood held no surprises, and hence no emotional resonance.  When all that's at stake is "will boy become brave?"--and when you know from the get-go how the film's going to answer that question--what's to care about or root for?

I'd love to see more YA-guy films that delve into the complexities of young male adulthood, films like What's Eating Gilbert Grape? or The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  And being the fantasy/sci-fi fiend that I am, I'd love it if some of those films (other than the Harry Potter series) were in the speculative genres.

So you tell me: what are your favorite YA guy films?  Are any of them fantasy or sci-fi?  Which YA-guy books would you love to see made into films?

Eagerly awaiting your answers.

Until then, I'll save you the aisle seat.

YA Guy Wants to Know: What Makes it a Guy Book?

What makes a YA book a guy book?

Is it that the author is male?

That the protagonist is male?

That there are lots of references to Kevin Durant and LeBron James?

Or is there something more mysterious that appeals to guys?

YA Guy is going to go with the latter.

Authorship doesn't mean a thing.  One of the best books I read as a preteen was Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't.  I didn't care that it had a female author.

Ditto with the narrator or main character.  Then Again had a male MC.  But I loved lots of Blume's books, including Deenie and Blubber, whose narrators were girls.  I love The Fault in Our Stars, whose narrator is a teenage girl with terminal cancer.  I love The Hunger Games, whose narrator is the poorly named but incredibly well realized teenage girl, Katniss Everdeen.

And okay, Katniss does hunt with bow and arrow and kick lots of butt, so you might think that's what makes the book appeal to my testosterone-driven existence.

But actually, what I like most about her is the choice she makes, the choice to save her sister.  I think that's what most readers, male and female, find most appealing about her.  It's not only the book's defining moment--the "inciting incident," the incident from which everything else follows--but one of the great moments in all literature.  Who couldn't like a character who sacrifices herself to an uncertain fate in order to protect her little sibling?

So there you have it.  Guy books are books that enable guys to see the best in themselves, to envision themselves as they could be even in the worst of worlds: as protectors, decision-makers, brave souls who stand up for others and for what's right.

That those are not exclusively "guy" characteristics is, of course, why such books appeal to male and female readers alike.

Let's write more books like that, and guys will read them.

***

Here's a list from J. King of YA books for boys.  Note what's at #1.

YA Guy's Top 10

What should teen boys be reading?

Well, here's what YA Guy was (and is) reading (and though biologically I've grown up, I still read the same things I read in my YA years!).

Note: this list is in no particular order.  Everything on it is guaranteed, bona fide great!

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.  Not technically YA, as the category didn't exist in Tolkien's time, but close enough!

2. James Dashner, The Maze Runner.  And its sequel, The Scorch Trials.

3. Roland Smith, Peak.  Wonderful storyteller, great economy of voice.

4. Chris Howard, Rootless.  Amazing dystopian novel about a world without trees.  Sequels forthcoming.

5. J. Barton Mitchell, Midnight City.  Totally creepy alien-invasion novel.  Beware the Tone!

6. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games.  Just plain a great book, for boys and girls.  The sequels rock too.

7. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Still one of the greatest boy books--scratch that, books--of all time.

8. John Green, The Fault in Our Stars.  Female narrator, but so what?  This is Green's best book--and that's saying something.

9. M. T. Anderson, Feed.  A world hooked on the internet.  Wait, is that the future?

10. S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders.  Hinton initialed her name so no one would know she was a woman.  But her book remains one of the all-time great boy books.

So there you have it.  If I'd allowed myself fifteen or twenty or a hundred, I could have gone on and on.  What would you add to the list?