Making the Match

What do adolescents care about? Chatting online with friends, movies, their favorite bands … but many are also avid readers. What motivates some of these "typical teens" to become lifelong readers and others to slide by with the minimum amount of assigned reading? Teri Lesesne says the key is finding the books that get them hooked in the first place.

In Making the Match she focuses on three distinct areas that will assist teachers and librarians in steering students to the literature they love:

• Knowing the readers: discussion of important theories in the development of adolescents (mentally, physically, morally, socially) and how that information helps educators to reach these kids with books. This background information is brought home through the book's “snapshots,” which profile many of the adolescents the author has worked with.
• Knowing the books: examination of the various forms, formats, and genres that YA literature has to offer, as well as what special challenges educators face when selecting quality nonfiction or realistic fiction, and the role picture books can play in this process.
• Knowing the strategies: an overview of concrete ideas for motivating students to read, as well as follow-up activities for post-reading assessment. Strategies discussed include reading aloud, booktalking, alternatives to traditional book reports, and literature circles.

A delightful feature of the book that will help inspire teachers and students alike—as well as underscore the concepts contained in the text—is a series of vignettes by popular, award-winning YA authors that offer glimpses into their own feelings and memories of books and reading. Authors include Sharon Creech, Jack Gantos, Chris Crutcher, Mel Glenn, Paul Janeczko, and others.

The book concludes with an invaluable set of appendixes providing an FAQ on YA literature, bibliographies of professional materials, books by the vignette authors, and over twenty booklists with hundreds of books organized by genre or topic, all with suggested grade levels.