There comes a time when your children — no longer children, in fact, but "young adults"—begin reading books that are designed more to reveal than to protect. As a reader and a parent of a 14-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son, Tom Perrotta is fascinated by this particular moment in literature, when the stories no longer involve Winnie-the-Pooh looking for his next honey jar but rather, say, a kid with attention-deficit disorder wishing his parents would get back together. And who better than Perrotta, the creator of such vivid characters as Tracy Flick in Election (Berkley) and the disgruntled parents of Little Children (St. Martin's), to guide us through the best depictions of "real kids" he has found in literature? "All these books matter to me because they describe real, often flawed kids and the struggles of growing up with empathy and a sense of humor," he says. "Those are two qualities that can help make us better people—and better parents."
The Joey Pigza series
By Jack Gantos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
"Joey Pigza was recommended to me word-of-mouth by other parents. My family listened to an audiobook of Joey Pigza Loses Control on a long car trip. I was startled by the dark comedy. Joey's family is different from most I've encountered in young-adult books—his parents are divorced, and his mom is really struggling, both financially and emotionally; his dad is unreliable—moody, irresponsible, and self-involved. Perhaps most important, Joey has been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder and takes medication for it. You'd think the series might be a bit depressing, but it's actually a lot of fun. It does what all good literature does: It takes an important cultural phenomenon—Joey's ADD—and depicts it not in some kind of well-meaning textbook way, but as an element in the story and in the consciousness of the main character. You can't be a parent and not run into ADD as an issue now. Chances are your kid will be in school with a kid like Joey and play on teams with a kid like Joey—your kid may even be a kid like Joey. Conversations emerged from this story naturally. That helped us step back and understand Joey's behavior with a little more compassion."
Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
A Novel in Cartoons
By Jeff Kinney (Amulet)
"It's easy to look at your kids' lives and think, Oh, they have it easy—what problems do they have? But this book reminds you how small their worlds are and how large certain things loom. Kinney has a great eye for detail and an uncanny ability to describe the absurdity of middle school: For example, in the book, there is a moldy piece of cheese that has been sitting on the blacktop at the school for nearly a year, and the kids start a game in which anyone who touches it has the 'cheese touch,' which can be passed off to others unless their fingers are crossed. Greg, the book's lead character, is so scared to get this horrible affliction that he tapes his fingers together, which causes him to get a D in handwriting one day. This is just one of the many playground humiliations that not only spoil Greg's day but haunt him at night. He is just a little stick figure in the illustrations, but somehow you get a vivid sense of his emotions. "This book is really about embarrassment. 'Let me just say for the record that I think middle school is the dumbest idea ever invented,' Kinney writes. 'You got kids like me who haven't hit their growth spurt yet mixed in with these gorillas who need to shave twice a day.' But what is interesting, too, is the way Greg shrugs off his setbacks, wakes up the next morning, and starts a new adventure. Diary reminds us not only of the pain of growing up, but also of the resilience that allows kids to survive those comical but difficult years."
The Ramona series
By Beverly Cleary (HarperTrophy)
"I read a lot of these books as a kid. And I was surprised how much I still liked them when I reread them as an adult. It's interesting, because Ramona is not that lovable, even as a 4-year-old. She's incredibly stubborn and difficult. One time, she invites all these kids to her house without telling her mother. When they show up unannounced—the kids and their parents—Ramona's mother has to improvise a party. Later her mother says, 'Why didn't you just ask me?' And Ramona says, 'Because you would have said no.' "The most anyone grants Ramona is that there is a certain crazy logic to what she does. As a parent, I remember occasionally being surprised at how much trouble I had feeling affection for a couple of my kids' playmates. These were strong, challenging personalities, even at 4 or 5, and I found myself reacting to them as if they were unappealing adults. Ramona's that kind of kid, and it's refreshing that Cleary puts her at the center of these novels and makes us laugh at her annoying antics."
This Boy's Life: A Memoir
By Tobias Wolff (Grove)
"This is one of the masterpieces of American lit of my era, as well as one of the best coming-of-age stories I've ever read. It's about a boy growing up with an abusive stepfather and the unlikely scheme he concocts to escape from him. I pressed it on my daughter last year. She liked it, but I think she'll like it even more when she's older and better able to appreciate the complexity and irony in Wolff's writing. The great thing about it is the narrative voice: It's a depiction of what, in some ways, is a nightmarish childhood, and yet there is a kind of wisdom and humorous acceptance of the past that tells you at every moment that this kid survived and became the man who could write this wonderful book. "Readers might fairly accuse the main character of being a liar and a fraud—to get into boarding school, he creates a false transcript for himself, a record reflecting the better self he knows deep down he really is. But it's hard not to sympathize with his desire to escape and actually become the person he secretly believes himself to be. It's a heartbreaking and exhilarating story of self-invention."
