A blog for young readers (and YA lovers) from the Providence Athenaeum.
The Providence Athenaeum is a unique library and cultural center in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island. Growing out of the Providence Library Company (fourth library in the United States), the Athenaeum as we know it was formed in 1836. Our handsome building on the corner of Benefit and College was completed in 1838.
We are one of the few surviving membership libraries in the nation. Student memberships are available - visit or call for more information.
This blog is updated by one of our circulation assistants (and YA enthusiast), RJ. Follow us to find out what's new in our Young Adult corner, or just for a daily dose of literary shenanigans.
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
What’s New: The Year of the Beasts by Cecil Castellucci and Nate Powell
New to the Providence Athenaeum’s YA shelves is The Year of the Beasts, written by Cecil Castellucci (Boy Proof, The Plain Janes) and illustrated by Nate Powell. This unique novel tells two interweaving tales in prose and comics. From Cory Doctorow at boingboing:
[Year of the] Beasts is the story of Tessa and her younger sister Lulu, townie girls in a place where holidaymakers come for the summer, and the year they discovered boys. The carnival comes to town every June, and Tessa and Lulu go, and it is young Lulu, not Tessa, who finds herself kissing Charlie, the boy that Tessa has had a crush on forever. The summer yawns before them, as the sisters and their friends navigate the stormy, irrational seas of romance and hormones and coming of age, in a prose narrative that lays its characters’ hearts raw and bare in that way that Castellucci is so good at.
Interleaved with these prose chapters are chapters from an allegorical graphical story, a comic about a girl who has become an avatar of Medusa and must attend high-school, despite the fact that when the scarf covering her snake-hair slips, she turns her schoolmates to stone, just as she has done to her parents. These comic-book chapters are a mystery to be solved by the riddle, which comes together in the final chapter.
Year of the Beasts is one of those stories whose earlier chapters are a kind of greased slide that makes the reader hurtle faster and faster toward an unseen landing, hinting at different possibilities until the climax is revealed in a thunderbolt, and it is at once inevitable, unforeseen, and terrible.
