40. The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl

The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (Barry Lyga, 2006)

Fanboy is a fifteen year old kid with one friend to his name, who's unhappily living with his pregnant mother and stepfather following his parents' divorce, is alternately bullied and ignored at school, and is obsessed with/writing comic books. Excuse me--graphic novels. Goth Girl is the fellow outcast who befriends him. The teenage alienation rings really true here. Nothing's exaggerated and the characters seem three-dimensional. It wasn't predictable and kept me interested the whole way through. So many YA titles seem to fall apart at the end. So I liked it.

The only problem I had with the book is that I kept comparing it to Hard Love, which features an angsty kid dealing with divorced parents, who has only one friend, and meets a cool and mysterious girl, and is obsessed with/writing zines. And as Hard Love is one of my all-time favorite books EVER, Fanboy and Goth Girl suffer from my comparison.

38. American Born Chinese

American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang, 2006)

The graphic novels I've been ordering are coming in, and I keep forgetting to grab and read them. This one was a National Book Award finalist and won a YALSA award, for good reason. I have a hard time describing books like this without making them sound cheesy. Three interconnected stories make up the book, and I really enjoyed the way Yang moved back and forth between them. It took me a while to get how they were related, but I didn't care because I liked it all so much. I enjoyed the story and the artwork are equally, which isn't always the case for me with graphic novels.

34. Fun Home

Fun Home (Alison Bechdel, 2006)

This book will definitely make my best-list this year. I'm a little annoyed with myself for not getting to it sooner. I picked it up for free at Midwinter on the last day, when the Houghton-Mifflin rep was trying to get rid of stuff (other scores included The Worst Hard Time and the latest Best American Short Stories, Essays, and Graphic Novels--worth hauling home). So it's been sitting in my massive, unwieldy pile for months. Damn.

What can I say that hasn't already been said much more eloquently than I'm capable of? I loved this book. The drawings are clever and funny and really descriptive. The dialogue is perfect and heartbreaking. I tend to shy away from stories of family drama, but I'm so glad I read this. It's wonderful.

1. The Plain Janes

The Plain Janes (Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg, coming May 2007)

The story seemed promising, but never really paid off. I'll have to check out the final edition when it comes out later this year to see if anything changes. The idea of a city girl looking for her niche in the suburbs is nothing new, but the addition of the attack she survived made it a little different. I just wasn't sold on the voices of the characters. It was very obviously adults writing for teens and not quite getting it right. I think I should check out Castellucci's other work to see if I like it any better.