deborah: the Library of Congress cataloging numbers for children's literature, technology, and library science (Default)
[personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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? [personal profile] astern and I will thank you.

Date: 2012-08-31 12:16 am (UTC)
kareila: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kareila
Does The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy count as YA? Everyone I knew in high school read it then.

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.

Custom Text

Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.

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