YA Wednesday: Teenreads

As I have mentioned before, the BPL RA charge now includes YA leisure reading materials.  We are calling the section "TEEN."  I have been spending most of my free time over the last few weeks reading teen books, reading about teen books, and purchasing teen books. I am trying to help get the collection and myself ready for summer reading.

As you can imagine, I have a brain full of teen.  I did just finish a really great new YA novel over my vacation-- The Madman's Daughter.  I hope to have a review of it up real soon.

But in the meantime, I have been slowly but surely highlighting here on the blog a few of the teen resources that are working best for me.

Today I want to talk about Teenreads which is part of the Book Reporter Network. Like its sister sites, Teenreads is easy to navigate and chock full of information.  The site's content is written as it is talking to the teen reader, but that does not mean a librarian working with teens cannot get useful information here.

The main tabs are for reviews (in indexes by author, title, genre, or date), authors, features, an ultimate reading list (which is the anti-required reading list), coming soon, and then their blog and newsletter.

I use this site to stay up to date on the newest books and issues in the YA world. I enjoy that the reviews are written to a teen audience too because I can see why they would like the book.

Teenreads is best used as a collection development tool for identifying the newest books and as a way to find backlist reading options for your patrons. I feel confident pulling the site up and letting the teens read the reviews for themselves (which they seem to enjoy more than my adult patrons when given this option). It is a resource you can use on the front lines as you are helping readers to find their next good read.

I would also highly suggest also looking at the sister site, 20 Something Reads, for ideas and information.