Kristina Naftzger

Teens, with an intense national election just days away, I’m in the mood to talk about democracy. And not just about the facts you learn in American Gov. Let’s talk about the nitty gritty messy stuff. The kind of stuff that threatens to undermine our representative government, subverting the will of the people and leaving our influence diluted.

Wait. Do you know about the nitty gritty messy stuff? Many of you probably do. I thought I did too, but I didn’t totally get it until I read Elizabeth Rusch’s “You Call This Democracy? How to Fix Our Government and Deliver Power to the People.”

While the first part of the title sounds cynical, the contents are anything but. Rusch systematically unpacks the reasons American democracy is in peril, including problematic issues with the electoral college, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and more, and instead of just pointing out problems, Rusch provides readers—specifically teen readers— starting points for actively working towards solutions.

You may find it hard to believe that a non-partisan book about politics is riveting, but this one is. Using real-life examples, easy-to-understand graphs and charts, and compelling data, Rusch helps readers develop a nuanced understanding of a complicated topic, sometimes getting our blood boiling as we realize the real sources of power in our current electoral system. You may walk away from reading this book vexed. But you will also be energized, informed, and well-positioned to take concrete steps towards activism if that is your thing.

After you put down “You Call This Democracy?,” you will more than likely be ready for some fiction, but your political juices will still be flowing. No problem. Your next read may have to be Brandy Colbert’s new YA novel “The Voting Booth.” When idealist, die-hard activist, and first-time voter Marva Sheridan sees fellow teen Duke Crenshaw turned away at the polls, she can’t let it go. What follows is a wild election day filled with mad dashes between precincts and a series of rejections, experiences that give Marva and Duke a civics lesson they may not have anticipated. Did I mention there’s also a splash of romance? You should have seen that coming. I mean, is there anything more passion-inducing than working together to realize your democratic duty?

I know in my last mullet-inspired article I promised you a literary man-bun next, but this time I delivered more of an 18th-century powdered wig (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a long story…you may be better off not knowing). Before you go powder your own wig, I want to direct any first-time voters, or even second or third time voters, to the Teens page of the AKSPL website: www.akspl.org/teens/. There you will find a link to a Young Voter’s Guide to Social Media and the News compiled by Common Sense Media. This resource is designed to help you cut through the election hype and get to the facts. If you haven’t voted yet, be sure to check it out. And if you’re not old enough to vote yet, get a head start, check it out anyway, and turn yourself into an election fact-finding guru. And of course, if you’re 18 or older, VOTE.

Teens, think of this week’s article from A. K. Smiley Public Library as a mullet: a “business up front, party in the back” piece of writing. Read on to experience the world’s first—and probably last— literary version of a 1980s hairdo.

Of course, it is logical to begin with the business end of this mullet-essay, so first, let me introduce you to an indispensable database available through A.K. Smiley Public Library’s online resources: the Gale Testing and Education Reference Center.

It’s hard to imagine a more anxiety-producing database title than one that includes the words “testing,” “education,” and “reference,” but I promise you, this digital resource has a little something for everyone, especially teens. From SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) prep and practice tests to career advice and work-related exams and e-courses featuring cosmetology, firefighting, nursing, massage therapy, nail technology, real estate, military, and more, the Gale Testing and Education Reference Center is at your service. Need help writing a resume? Check. Want to know what college scholarships you may be eligible for? Check. Need a hand creating a customized list of dream colleges based on criteria that are important to you? Yep, that too.

With so much of the school year still cloaked in unknowns, rest-assured that this virtual test, college, and career-prep database is here for you whenever you need it. You can access it via A.K. Smiley Public Library’s website through the eLibrary tab or the Teens’ page, located under the Services tab. The first time you use it, you will create a free account, which will grant you access to all the aforementioned goods. But before you run off to check it out…

No self-respecting mullet manuscript would be complete without its “party in the back” component, so let’s get to it. This party takes the form of two hair-raising, must-read YA mystery recommendations: “One of Us is Lying” by Karen McManus and “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” by Holly Jackson. You can’t go wrong with either of these books—that is, unless you want to go to bed early and get your recommended eight hours of sleep.

In “One of Us is Lying,” four teens—a jock, a brain, a popular girl, and a bad boy— find themselves plunged into the heart of a murder investigation when their classmate and creator of their school’s most salacious gossip website dies under mysterious circumstances. The four, whose secrets were about to be exposed in the dead teen’s next post, are the obvious prime suspects, but which one of them is capable of murder? “One of Us is Lying” is a roller coaster ride of the most thrilling variety, with plenty of unexpected revelations and some final heart-pounding moments that make for delicious up-all-night reading.

Would you like to pull two all-nighters in the same weekend [disclaimer: this practice is not recommended]? “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder” is equally suspenseful, especially if you enjoy true crime podcasts. For Pip’s senior capstone project, she decides to open her own investigation into a suspected murder/suicide that happened at her high school four years earlier.

Pip never believed the official police report: that high school student Sal Singh murdered his beautiful and popular girlfriend Andie and then killed himself. She is determined to get to the bottom of what really happened, and as she digs deeper into the past, Pip exposes major gaps in the evidence and clues that point to other possible perpetrators. With help from Sal’s brother, Pip begins to unearth a string of secrets that someone wants to remain underground. And they’ll stop at nothing to keep them that way.

Both of these titles are available as physical books using our Books-to-Go program, or downloadable eBooks via OverDrive.

And there you have it. The world’s first mullet-inspired newspaper article. Be sure to join me next month for the world’s first literary man-bun. Or will it be a bowl cut? Stay tuned…

I have a lot of favorite things about teenagers, but one of my most favorite of all is your natural gravitation towards social justice.

Now I understand that “teenagers” are not a monolith. It would be a mistake to lump you into one category with identical interests/behaviors/gravitational pulls. But so many teenagers I’ve known have been masterful at sniffing out injustice and energetic about opposing it. Does this sound like you? Then read on—the following young adult titles may get you fired up.

First up is Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Authors make it clear that this is NOT a history book. Instead, they write, it’s “a book about the here and now. A book to help us better understand why we are where we are. A book about race.”

It’s blunt and fast-paced, delivered in a down-to-earth tone that will help you wrap your head around the long and tangled relationship between race and power in America—the one that most history books leave out.

In Just Mercy (Adapted for Young Adults): A True Story of the Fight for Justice, author, lawyer, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson gives readers an insider’s look into the criminal justice system, revealing how it sometimes fails society’s most vulnerable.

Through the story of Walter McMillan, a Black man falsely convicted of murder, Stevenson shines a light on the economic and racial factors that affect unequal justice in America. This story is powerful and intimate and exposes in grim detail the devastating effects mass incarceration has on the nation’s poorest people.

Bernie Sanders wrote a book for young people called Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution and just as the title promises, it’s a practical handbook designed to help young people transform their “idealism and generosity of spirit” into meaningful and robust social action.

From understanding and navigating the political process to mobilization, the book calls on young readers to be bold, think big, stand up, and fight back to correct inequality and imbalance in the status quo.

Because They Marched: The People’s Campaign for Voting Rights that Changed America by Russell Freedman is especially relevant in this moment. The book describes the events surrounding the 1965 march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, using graphic images and first-person perspectives to illuminate the energy, tenacity, courage, and single-mindedness required for social change. It’s an energy that will probably look and feel familiar to you, as it reverberates around the world right now.

Teens, these books are just the tip of the iceberg. If this topic is up your alley, here are a few more titles into which you may wish to dip your protest sign:

Unpunished Murder: Massacre at Colfax and the Quest for Justice, by Lawrence Goldstone (I’m reading this right now—it’s riveting…I’ll try to read fast.)

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Stolen Justice, by Lawrence Goldstone

We are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation, by Matthew Riemer *Please note, this is an Adult Nonfiction title

Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss and the Fight for Trans Equality, by Sarah McBride *Please note, this is an Adult Nonfiction title

All of the titles mentioned above are available to borrow through A. K. Smiley Public Library’s Books-to-Go program. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You is also available to borrow as an eBook through Overdrive. So get to it! Your voices are a force and it’s inspiring to listen to you use them.

I recognize the irony of me (middle-aged woman) telling you (tweens and teens) how to use an app, yet here I am, about to do it anyway. Forgive me, tweens and teens. I know if you were locked in a room alone with this app you would totally figure it out in under three minutes, but since I am currently unable to lock you in a room, writing this article is my next best option.

I want to tell you about the free OverDrive app—also known as Libby—available to A.K. Smiley Public Library cardholders either through the library’s website or the app store. Once you’ve downloaded the app onto your device, the first time you use it you will need to select the A.K. Smiley Public Library as your home library and then enter your library card number and pin (your pin is the last four digits of the phone number used to open your library card account). Once you have done this, you are golden, and a treasure trove of teen titles—and adult and kid titles too—will be at your dexterous little thumb-tips.

When I say a treasure trove of titles, I mean it. I would not engage in false advertising at a time like this. Titles like Karen M. McManus’ One of Us is Lying (and its sequel One of Us is Next), Melissa De La Cruz’s The Queen’s Assassin, Angie Thomas’ On the Come Up, Lamar Giles’ Not So Pure and Simple, Jack Heath’s The Truth App, Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why, Ransom Riggs’ Tales of the Peculiar, Marissa Meyer’s Supernova, Phil Stamper’s The Gravity of Us, Jenny Han’s entire To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy (and her other books too)…I could go on and on and on. Your eyeballs would glaze over as I continued naming all of the incredible titles you could (and totally should) check out RIGHT NOW.

If you don’t have a specific book you’re looking for, no problem. Just select “Teen” from the explore page and browse the categories. Dystopian, coming-of-age, horror, paranormal, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, nonfiction, humor, suspense, mystery, poetry, graphic novels—there’s a little bit of everything (just not all in one book…but how freaky/amazing would that book be? You should totally write it.).

Did I mention there are over 1000 teen titles to choose from?

Did I mention there are also more than 500 teen audio books to listen to if that is your thing?

Teens, why are you still reading this article? Go forth and lock yourself in a room, get this free app (with your parents’ permission, of course) and stare at your phone or Kindle or tablet and make the adults in your life think you are mindlessly addicted to technology while you secretly become more brilliant by reading beautiful, terrifying, funny, relatable literature. And if you are a resident of Redlands and you don’t have a library card yet, you may be eligible to get a free temporary electronic card…visit the A. K. Smiley Public Library website (www.akspl.org) for more info. We look forward to the day we will see you once again in the library.

Making time to read for fun is tough when you’re a teen. Between bio homework and basketball practice and SAT prep and community service and YouTube and Insta and Finsta and a steady stream of existential crises…it’s like everyone wants a piece of you. Well, if you’re ever tempted to run away from it all, throw your phone out the window* and hide under the covers, I’ve got some reading suggestions for you. These books make excellent companions for those moments when you’re maxed out on memes and you’ve already watched every episode of The Office twice, but I’m warning you, they may keep you up all night.

First up, In the Hall with the Knife by Diana Peterfreund. Have you ever played the board game CLUE? Remember Miss Scarlet and Professor Plum? This book is a totally modern, thoroughly edgy, perfectly spine-tingling take on the classic game…one that finds prep boarding school students Scarlet Mistry, Finn Plum, Beth “Peacock” Picach, Vaughn Green, Samuel “Mustard” Maestor, and others stranded in a school dorm after a violent winter storm. Things get worse when the teens discover the dead body of their school headmaster, Mr. Boddy. In the Hall with the Knife is a good old-fashioned murder mystery, teeming with a familiar yet fresh cast of characters, all of whom have shady secrets and dark motives that spill out in tantalizing bursts as the story unspools. Warning: this novel is the first in a trilogy, so don’t expect to breathe a sigh of relief after the last page.

Next, if you dressed up like the character Eleven for Halloween (a.k.a. you’re a superfan of the Netflix series Stranger Things) you must read the graphic novel series Paper Girls by Brian Vaughn. The year is 1988. Young newspaper delivery girls Erin, Mac, KJ, and Tiffany experience an Armageddon-esque morning-after-Halloween as they try to deliver their newspapers, clashing with mysterious black-clad figures, stumbling into a foreboding capsule, and slowly realizing they may be the only survivors in their hometown after a terrifying, unexplained blast. If time-traveling hippies, cave-people, dinosaurs, and the 1980s get your heart pumping, join these four bad babes as they battle to save the world…and each other.

Speaking of bad babes, the nonfiction book History Vs. Women: The Defiant Lives that They Don’t Want You to Know by Anita Sarkeesian and Ebony Adams is a comprehensive look at some of the world’s most ambitious, fierce, and impactful women across time. What I really love about the book is that these women’s stories are told in depth, not just as accessories or sidekicks, or a list of heroic accomplishments, but as real people whose experiences often aren’t rosy. These women had to defy cultural expectations to get things done and they did. If you want to epitomize cleverness during Women’s History Month in March, namedropping defiant women from around the globe, get cracking on reading this book now.

No offense to the quadratic formula, but sometimes you need to set that homework aside (temporarily, of course), mute your notifications, ignore your existential angst, and treat yourself to a juicy story. Come in to the A.K. Smiley Public Library and we’ll do our best to help you find one that you can’t put down.

*recommended for ground floor windows only