I was really happy to see Jenny Downham’s Before I Die score the featured review in this week’s Entertainment Weekly. But then Thom Geier irritated me with this bizarre paragraph:

Unfortunately, Downham’s publisher has handicapped Before I Die by labeling it a young-adult novel, thus ghettoizing this gem to the back of most bookstores. It’s a shame, because this book is vastly superior to most so-called adult novels with high-school-age protagonists that have been embraced by the literary establishment.

Still, he finishes up:

In luminous prose that rings completely true, Downham earns every tear she wrings from her readers. I trust there will be many of them–many readers and, of course, many tears.

And how will these readers ever find the book, since it’ll be hidden in the back of most bookstores? Seems like sloppy thinking that doesn’t quite compute. (The implication that younger readers or readers frequenting this part of the store are somehow less worthy than those lofty adults it would garner up front grates as well.)

The sad thing is that if Geier routinely read the young adult fiction he believes constitutes a ghetto, he’d find many, many examples of books that surpass "most so-called adult novels with high-school-age protagonists" (and many of those with adults). Now I haven’t read Downham’s book, but it sure sounds like what he’s picking up on–and one of the things that made it so affecting for him–is the immediacy of the best YA fiction. And that’s one of the things that is commonly missing from adult books about teenagers, which tend to come from a place of remove or distance. This leads me to believe that Downham’s publisher has been wise, and understands better than Geier the type of book they have on their hands.

The review doesn’t seem to be online yet, but here’s an interview Jennifer Reese did with Downham about the book. More once I’ve read it.

The Washington Post’s profile of the thoroughly charming Junot Diaz recounts a classified find when he was just a kid that led to his getting 500 books from a little old lady:

"That was the first time I found ‘The Borrowers,’ " he says, referring to Mary Norton’s children’s classic about unseen, Lilliputian-scale people who live by "borrowing" from normal-size humans. Other favorites from this unlikely trove were titles by explorer and naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, "the guy who went to Mongolia and found the dinosaur eggs" — Díaz still dreams of traveling to Mongolia himself — and a variety of "books for young people, like ‘On Hygiene.’ Great stuff!"

There’s nothing so great as the first really significant book score of your life. I’ve posted about mine before (number 10).

Also, I can’t wait to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:

Tolkien shows up everywhere — Trujillo is Sauron, his henchmen are Ringwraiths, a guarded upper-class enclave is "so Minas Tirith" — but the references are never explained. Neither, for the most part, are allusions to the Marvel universe and to numerous other works of pop or high culture. If you’re unfamiliar with Galactus the planet-eater or the works of Joseph Conrad, you’re on your own, just as you are in the many untranslated Spanish passages.

Rubs hands together…