By Chris Conroy
Port Moody Public Library

Over the last number of years much has been made of crossover novels.  This is when a book is written for a particular audience but also becomes popular with another audience.  Think Harry Potter.  Actually, it isn’t a new occurrence.  Consider books like Robinson Crusoe, To Kill a Mockingbird, Watership Down, and The Catcher in the Rye to name a few.  While teens will always find interest in adult books, it seems that the boy wizard and other’s like Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy gave adults permission to openly read novels that were originally written for young people.  What follows is a list of crossover novels that transcend boundaries and will move readers of all ages. 

Author Alice Sebold begins her novel The Lovely Bones by throwing the reader into the deep end: with the murder of the main character and narrator, fourteen year-old Susie Salmon.  It is the story of how her family deals with her disappearance.  As told by Susie from heaven she follows not only her family and friends, but her killer.  It is a compelling read that incorporates grief and death, and also humour.  The movie version is now playing.   

There’s something strange yet compelling about the five Lisbon girls.  The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is the story Lux, Mary, Bonnie, Therese, and Cecilia who one by one commit suicide.  Though gruesome-sounding, the story, as told by a nameless male narrator who went to school with the girls 20 years before, is shrouded in mystery and beauty. The town’s folk watch helpless as the family implodes: the father a mild mannered math teacher and the mother who struggles to discipline and control her daughters.   

Don’t forget about graphic novels.  Adults of a certain age will know these as comic books, and there are a number of crossover graphic novels.  Persepolis is one.  It is the autobiography of Marjane Satrapi from age ten to fourteen growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution.  The only daughter of educated, Marxist parents, the story weaves her family’s growing fear of the new fundamentalist regime with her own coming-of-age.  Parties are banned, friends are killed and women’s dress is regulated by the government.  Satrapi’s spare black and white drawings starkly illustrate the tension of the times.

In Miriam Toews’ novel A Complicated Kindness Nomi Nickel is a 16-year old girl living with her distracted father in a rural Mennonite community in Manitoba.  Nomi struggles against the loss of her sister and mother who left the community three years earlier.  She dreams of escaping herself though it is the only community she has ever known.  The story moves between past and present. Nomi rebels with drugs, skips school, listens to rock and roll as the painful story of her mother and sister is reveled.  

Mark Haddon’s book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was published simultaneously in the United Kingdom for adults and young people with different covers for each audience.  The story is told by Christopher Boone, who is 15 years old, autistic and obsessed with Sherlock Holmes.  One night the neighbour’s dog is brutally killed.  Christopher decides to solve the mystery in true Holmes style.  Unfortunately, the trail leads him down a difficult path culminating with his own family’s crisis.  A remarkable story full of emotion and humour as told by a character who cannot feel either trait. 

Lastly, M.T. Anderson’s novel Feed is a story about Titus, a teenager in the future and his group friends.  In his world people are physically linked to a network that constantly feeds them advertisements for consumer goods to purchase at a mere thought.  On a trip to the moon Titus meets Violet, a smart girl who has a depth and insight into the world that is different from him and his friends.  When a hacker severs the teens’ feeds it plunges Titus and Violet into a situation where the truth is devastating.   Feed harkens back to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.  Though Feed takes place in the future, readers will recognize feelings and experiences from their own lives as well as themes from our present world.   

I could go on but I’ve run out of room.  Visit your public library to find these books and much more crossover fiction.