I’ve taught English for 20 years and the novels I’ve enjoyed teaching most – because the students have enjoyed them most – are those with the first-person perspectives of young narrators. These characters’ voices ring loud and clear as they learn, change, and grow, often suffering and having to find resilience and strength to survive. The limited perspective also takes us into the mind and heart of the protagonist, so that we feel all the feels with them. This is why I chose a first-person perspective for the narrator of my own book ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’: Jackie Chadwick is sarcastic, funny, and observant. Readers love her.
It's the heatwave summer of 1976 and 14-year-old would-be poet Jackie Chadwick is newly fostered by the Walls. She desperately needs stability, but their insecure, jealous teenage daughter isn't happy about the cuckoo in the nest and sets about ousting her.
When her attempts to do so lead to near-tragedy – and the Walls’ veneer of middle-class respectability begins to crumble – everyone in the household is forced to reassess what really matters. Funny and poignant, Cuckoo in the Nest is inspired by Fran Hill’s own experience of being fostered as a teenager.
Holden Caulfield’s sardonic, world-weary teenage voice grabbed me when I first read this book in preparation for teaching it to a class of boys.
He makes out he doesn’t really want to tell his story. Take it or leave it. He doesn’t care. Reverse psychology! I wanted to read on and find out what had gone wrong in his world to cause his cynicism.
My teenage students, during our lessons, raged at Holden, hated him, laughed at him, envied him, loved him, and felt for him as we tracked his progress in Manhattan where he pretends to be adult and fails. And they did well in their exam, I’m happy to report.
Paddy Clarke’s 10-year-old voice is compelling and funny.
He lives in Dublin, Ireland in the 1960s, and the way he tells his story is breathless, fast-paced, and naïve: a child’s mind, puzzled at life’s complexities. I wanted to have him round for tea and reassure him.
His narration is full of left turns and right turns and about turns as we follow – or try to follow - his train of thought. He doesn’t understand many of the things that happen at school, at home, and with the friends with whom he roams town, playing war games and making nuisances of themselves.
But, as his family begins to fracture, we weep for him.
Paddy Clarke is ten years old. Paddy Clarke lights fires. Paddy Clarke's name is written in wet cement all over Barrytown. Paddy Clarke's heroes are Father Damien (and the lepers), Geronimo and George Best. Paddy Clarke knows the exact moment to knock a dead scab from his knee. Paddy Clarke hates his brother Francis because that's the rule. Paddy Clarke loves his Ma and Da, but it seems like they don't love each other, and Paddy wants to understand, but can't.
You know when you first go to someone else’s house and realise that not every family lives the way yours does?
It’s part of the coming-of-age process and can be both illuminating and destabilising. In Adichie’s story, set in post-colonial Nigeria, 15-year-old Kambili gets the chance to escape her wealthy but religiously-oppressive household and stay with her vibrant, liberal aunt.
I love the way Kambili’s narrative expresses the new freedom she feels there: she has a voice at last and the liberty to experience a sexual awakening. She needs these new strengths as her own family disintegrates into tragedy.
“One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation.” —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker
From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists
Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that…
I read this book years ago but it’s always stayed with me.
The teenage protagonist, 13-year-old Jason from Worcestershire, England, has a stammer: a speech difficulty that haunts him and has him performing all kinds of manoeuvers to avoid saying certain sounds in class. This would only add embarrassment onto all the other embarrassments he feels as a boy going through puberty.
He calls his stammer ‘Hangman’. As well as this daily struggle, he realises his parents are arguing, and he gets bullied at school.
As a reader, I was touched by his resilience and doggedness. David Mitchell has admitted that the book is semi-autobiographical and this adds another layer of poignancy.
David Mitchell comes home - to England in 1982, and is in the cusp of adolescence. Jason Taylor is 13, doomed to be growing up in the most boring family in the deadest village (Black Swan Green) in the dullest county (Worcestershire) in the most tedious nation (England) on earth and he stammers. 13 chapters, each as self-contained as a short story, follow 13 months in his life as he negotiates the pitfalls of school and home and contends with bullies, girls and family politics. In the distance, the Falklands conflict breaks out; close at hand, the village mobilises against…
This is another book I have taught to English classes and they’ve all fallen in love with its narrator, motherless Scout, cheering her on as she rages against being made into a more suitable ‘girl’ and urged to behave with more propriety.
At the beginning of the story, she is six. She lives in Maycomb, Alabama, in the early 1930s, and has yet to discover the injustice of the society within which she plays in the street, annoys her brother, and goes to school.
Harper Lee shows us very clearly, in the difference between Scout’s retrospective narrative and the child’s often hilarious dialogue, the innocence of a girl yet to discover the inhumanity and racism endemic in her town.
'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
Long before Trump, each of these phenomena grew in importance. The John Birch Society and McCarthyism became powerful forces; Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first “personal president” to rise above the party; and the development of what Harry Truman called “the big lie,” where outrageous falsehoods came to be believed. Trump follows a pattern that was long established within the Republican Party. This is an untold story that resonates powerfully in the present.
Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism
It didn't begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status-a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened-not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a…
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