handbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias: reference as bildungsroman

[deborah]

In 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 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.

Comments

[grrlpup]

In E.W. Hildick's The Active Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch Alison is working out of a book by an older witch.

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.

[deborah]

My god I read that first book at...whatever the appropriate age is, and all I remember is the title.

These are awesome.