Decatur Book Festival: The Place to Discover Your New Favorite Author

    According to David Levithan, one should not "think of friendship and romance as being different. They're not. They're just variations of the same love. Variations of the same desire to be close."   This statement is in Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List, one of my many favorite books by this author.  If I had not gone to the young adult panels of Decatur Book Festival in 2009 and 2010, I never would have discovered Levithan's books.  I am a middle school teacher and I try to keep up with books that are popular with adolescents, but unfortunately, I think that books with more controversial or "racier" subject matter are sometimes not as marketed in the south.  Levithan, like other young adult authors, is honest about the issues that teenagers face, and I think there are parents who do not want their children to be exposed to books with drugs, sex, and (sadly) homosexual characters, (which shows how prejudiced our society still is toward people who are different).  Yet I think books are actually the safest place for children to learn about the realities of the world.  A wise librarian who worked at my school a few years back once said, "I have never known of a book to harm anyone."  Therefore, I applaud the Decatur Book Festival's young adult literature track for exposing people of all ages to books of various genres and subject matters.  

     Back in 2009, David Levithan read a passage from Love is the Higher Law that brought tears to my eyes.  The books is about a group of teenagers in New York City who are learning to cope with the aftermath of 9/11.  Because I had friends who lived in New York my senior year of college, when 9/11 happened, I was particularly interested in the subject matter and bought a signed copy of the book right away.  I don't want to tell any more about the book because I hope that many of you will read it.  After I read that book, I also bought Are We There Yet by David Levithan and Dash and Lily's Book of Dares along with Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List, both collaborative works by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn.  Now that I am a working adult, it is harder for me to find books that will entertain me, teach me a lesson, and keep my attention.  These books did all three for me.  Now, I have just ordered Crush and The Love Dictionary because I want to read more works by Levithan, who is now one of my favorite authors.  I hope others will visit the Decatur Book Festival in Georgia this labor day weekend and have a chance to discover a new author and/or artist who they love.