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deborahIn some YA novels, the heroes have to decipher their journey through a literal guidebook they find.
Sometimes it's a manual provided by the PTB, as in So You Want To Be A Wizard bydduane.
Sometimes it's a guide left by the parents' generation, as in Jellicoe Road, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, or the Marauder's Map of the Harry Potter books. There's something similar in the Rebel Angels books, right?
In Walter Dean Meyers' Handbook for Boys, there's no literal book, but the title layers an implication of guidebook nature over the advice given by the prior generation.
Other examples?astern and I will thank you.
Sometimes it's a manual provided by the PTB, as in So You Want To Be A Wizard by
dduane.Sometimes it's a guide left by the parents' generation, as in Jellicoe Road, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, or the Marauder's Map of the Harry Potter books. There's something similar in the Rebel Angels books, right?
In Walter Dean Meyers' Handbook for Boys, there's no literal book, but the title layers an implication of guidebook nature over the advice given by the prior generation.
Other examples?
astern and I will thank you.
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Date: 2012-08-31 12:16 am (UTC)Also, the plot of The Spiderwick Chronicles revolves around a Guide to Faerie that falls into the children's hands.
There is a book that is central to The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a book of Hugo's father's drawings of an automaton that contains the clues to help him fix it.
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Date: 2012-08-31 02:07 am (UTC)Re Harry Potter: The Half-Blood Prince's potions textbook might also qualify, in a skewed way?
Maybe along the same lines, Alan Garner's The Owl Service presents kind of a chilling example of what happens when the hero fails the test implied by the availability of a reference text/object (not learning from history, being doomed to repeat it)?
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Date: 2012-08-31 04:01 am (UTC)Thank you!
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Date: 2012-08-31 02:33 am (UTC)Will Stanton reads the Book of Gramarye in The Dark Is Rising.
There are teenage overreadings of classic romance, as in Sheila Greenwald's It All Began With Jane Eyre or Mary Calhoun's Katie John and Heathcliff. (And surely more recent Austen-related books in that vein?) But maybe those aren't really a match for your request.
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Date: 2012-08-31 04:02 am (UTC)These are awesome.
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Date: 2012-08-31 03:09 am (UTC)Neil Stephenson, The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Debatable whether it's actually a YA book or not - he probably didn't intend it to be, but it could be. But yeah, it fits this trope perfectly.
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