Jay Asher's Top 3 Books

Perhaps the “Young adult” label is an excuse to escape any reservations about literature more focused on adults than on young people. The truth is that the authors of this genre have proliferated in recent years with great success, combining love stories with an intermediate point between the candid and the torrid, or alternating youthful action and fantasy with notes of undoubted violence or blood.

And there, in that no man's land, young adults from all over the world feel like a fish in water, enjoying their literary dips adjusted to the times in which everyone has access to everything, the good and the bad .

It is not a criticism of this genre. I think it's good that kids already read almost everything. It is rather an x-ray of what exists and that in other cases such as access to gambling (promoted even by administrations) or to prohibited industries (also forgotten by administrations), they are openly denounceable.

In Spain some of the most successful authors of this genre can be Blue jeans o Laura Gallego, among others. And beyond our borders, the issue has its replica in Stephenie Meyer with their teenage vampires, Suzanne Collins with his fantasy and violence in the fight against good and evil.

And from the United States comes a Jay asher which has also captured the attention of young adult readers of all the world. Intense stories in that tone of youthful existentialism peppered with vitalism, love and contradictions typical of adolescence.

Jay Asher's Top 3 Recommended Books

For thirteen reasons

Thirteen is not exactly the lucky number. And this novel has a lot about the misfortune of living. At least from the fatalistic perspective of that adolescence that sometimes falls into the temptation of defeat before its time.

Only that sometimes the defeat is marked by the environment, by circumstances that mark the protagonist. I remember that, in The Catcher in the Rye, of salinger, we delve into the most chaotic world of youth, into the disorder unleashed from the distortion of the world.

In this case the distortion is given by Hanna's environment, who ends up committing suicide to end everything. Clay is in charge of recomposing the analysis prior to Hanna's death, thirteen videos in which the young woman links in her story of mobbing turned into a crime novel, her tortuous path towards acceptance only constantly on track towards repudiation ...

It often happens that the soul is broken with the most beautiful, the most capable of seeing with devastating clarity the darkest and most beautiful in the world. Hanna's testimony reveals the brilliant human being whose light is turned off by the condemnation of the rest of the human mob.

For thirteen reasons

Two lifes

The double life as an argument for one of those stories that presents us with tightrope walkers, in an impossible balance.

The author Jay asher moving in that terrain of impossible loves. The routine, with her daily reality, is disrupted for the young Sierra when she has to leave Oregon to travel many kilometers south, to California. But this change brings her closer to a new perspective on the world that her approach to Caleb gives her.

And Caleb is not the son-in-law that any mother would want to have. His past is anchored in a background that has him marked between guilt and the need to escape from something that was, but he knows perfectly well that it was only a mistake in a stage of his life consumed by the madness of youth.

Sierra finds a new cause in Caleb. He knows that he is a good boy, but he also knows that his family's prejudices would never allow him to be incorporated into the in-laws. And when fitting in becomes difficult, but feelings make it impossible to adjust to what others expect of one, splitting appears. Sierra lives that second life, and among the surreptitious the feelings run wild even more, the feeling that Caleb is that special being with whom she would want to be her entire life becomes a rational idea, a desire for the present and the future.

When the reality of that second life begins to glimpse for the closest surroundings of Sierra, the storm looms over her. They all insist on making him see the impossible in his relationship with Caleb, drawing the shadow of doubt on the boy, sensing evil intentions in him. Only she knows that everyone is wrong about her new love.

In addition to accompanying him on a tortuous path towards liberation from guilt, Sierra has found in Caleb his own lifeline, that other life that he somehow longed for, and that had he left it for later, he would have strongly repented.

Two lifes

You and me, here, now

Let's say Jay Asher writes about youthful love from an unusual perspective, with the intention of telling something new beyond back-and-forth romances, of destinies hell-bent on destroying love.

Emma and Josh are two young people headed towards that strange friendship so intense that it invites the test of love. The fit of the sensual between two minds that are extremely in tune is a risky bet. And the play didn't end up going well when Josh tried that more physical approach that would culminate his emotional attunement.

The separation is immediate... and yet, some predestination makes them see that perhaps they are souls condemned to share space. With a touch of wonderful fantasy about future and present, Emma and Josh share their current steps and the echoes of what is to come, reflected in a discovered Facebook profile that looks like theirs in many years.

A novel that turns the real and the virtual into a kind of book of destiny. Interesting new interpretation of time travel most associated with the emotional, with what our soul seeks in its time of existence ...

You and me, here, now
5/5 - (6 votes)

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