Thursday, January 26, 2012

Any Suggestions?

We have a lot of great speeches this year. Yay. My kids brought in some great books to cut from. A few we are using are:

A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl. (a novel in verse)
I Heart You, You Haunt Me (novel in verse)
Burned (novel in verse)

Okay, so I love novels in verse for Serious Poetry, one of the thirteen catagories kids can compete in. Last year we also used Shark Girl, and One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies. (Cool title, or what?)

We also have girls doing Humorous pieces from The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life, and Seinlanguage. Both are very funny.

Another of my favorites this year is a girl doing a cutting in Prose from The Lovely Bones. Very dark, very good.

Here's where I'm hoping I can get some help from you- I have a guy in Prose this year who is very talented, but we are having a hard time finding a great piece for him. I usually love using YA because these are teens, so, well, it's fitting. But I don't know of any great, dramatic YA books from a guys point of view. I don't know if this is just because I haven't read any, being a girl myself perhaps I've just been more drawn to books about girls. Or is it because teenage boys seem to be less dramatic, emotional, whatever, there just aren't books like that for them? I really don't know. I'm hoping you do. So, any suggestions?

11 comments:

  1. I'm sorry I can't help with the male YA speech request, I haven't read a huge amount of YA. I stopped by at the recommendation of Annalisa and am now following. It's lovely to meet you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I love Lisa Schroeder! She is my new favorite author :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's a good book. The girl brought it in herself. I may have to check out some other things by her now.

      Delete
  3. Thanks for stopping by you guys. To clarify, it wouldn't have to be YA, that's just often times my go-to. Any book with a great male lead and lots of high drama would be awesome! :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm not sure of a good suggestion either. My boys are all in their twenties now, reading adult fiction. Perhaps 'The Art of War' by Sun tsu(Not sure of the spelling). It's interesting reading and they quote it in lots of men's fiction and even in the TV show Firefly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh, I've never read that. I should check that out. Thanks!

      Delete
  5. I do not have suggestions for speeches but I have two suggestions for books about speech (and debate) that YOU might enjoy. The first is a novel, OyMG, about a Jewish girl who goes to a Christian speech camp. It's more about antiSemitism than speech but I thought you might get a kick out of it. The second is Bloggenheimer by Mark Oppenheimer, a memoir about his high school debate career. I'm not sure if that's really up your alley or not, but I figured it was worth a mention.

    ReplyDelete