Black-Eyed Suzie By Susan Shaw

The book Black-Eyed Suzie written by Susan shaw is about a young girl named Suzie who feels she has lost ability to talk. She sits in the same yellow chair in her house with her knees raised up to her face and tries to stay out of the way, especially when it comes to her mother.

Suzie gets institutionalized and deals with the struggles of depression, abuse and feeling unloved. Suzie is the narrator of the story, so we see everything from her eyes.

This is a sad, but in the end, inspirational story. The chapters are very short and are constantly interesting. Although the book is confusing in the beginning, (we aren't quite sure why Suzie acts the way she does) all the confusion gets cleared up.

Am I Blue? Edited by Marion Dane Bauer (many different authors)

The first book I read on my young adult literature reading list was Am I Blue edited by Marion Dane Bauer. I feel like this book was greta to start off my list because it was a book full of short stories written by various authors.

All of the stories focused on teens who were trying to find and define (or in some cases break down any definitions) of their sexuality. All of the stories were fictional, but most of them were inspired by true stories. Some of the stories in this book made me mad, some made me cry, but each story impacted me emotionally.

The thing I liked the most about this book is if I thought one story was not interesting (which rarely happened), I could easily move on to the next story because they were all very short.

I would recommend this book to any high school or middle school student. It helps teens facing sexuality and identity issues cope. It would also help other teens be more accepting.