Welcome back, readers! We're excited to share our May 2022 Young Adult Author of the Month. This month we are featuring author Sarah Dessen. She's charmed young readers with her romance stories and coming of age dramas for years now.
Sarah Dessen is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen novels for teens, including The Truth About Forever, Just Listen and This Lullaby. Her work has been published in over thirty countries and sold millions of copies worldwide. She is the recipient of the 2017 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for outstanding contribution to young adult literature.
She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Born in Illinois, Dessen graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her first book, That Summer, was published in 1996. She has since published more than a dozen other novels and novellas. In 2017, Dessen won the Margaret Edwards Award for some of her work. In 2019, Dessen was involved in a public controversy after she criticized a student who had opposed a book of hers in a university reading program. Two of her books were adapted into the 2003 film How to Deal.
In 2017, Dessen was interviewed by Anna Gragert. During the interview, Gragert asked Dessen about the style she uses in some of her books, otherwise known as "effortless perfection". Dessen describes this term as the young girls in her books being able to have friends, look good, be a good student and have your life together and make it look easy.
At the start of the book, the reader is supposed to relate with the main characters and throughout their changes in the book, the reader should see that it is okay to not have everything together and not be perfect. Gragert asked Dessen about her anxiety coping mechanisms because writing tends to cause an author to be anxious. Dessen said that she likes to exercise and read in her free time because all writers are going to be anxious, it's part of the process, but it also opens their mind more because they see the world differently than readers.
Want to check out some of Sarah's work or make a recommendation to a young reader? Check out our selection on her stories on our ebook site WV Reads!
Did Dessen's novels touch your life or maybe one of your friends couldn't put her books down? We'd love to hear from you in our comment sections, in person, or on our social media pages.
As always, images and info are courtesy of Google, Wikipedia, WV Reads, author webpages, and more.
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