Like all librarians, working in The Scholastic Library & Archive we get questions that require the use of elbow grease, a.k.a. library and information science muscles (such as Boolean searching, collating, and machine readable cataloging). Our colleagues/patrons are often looking for research, statistics, specific items, and authoritative sources, but it might surprise you to know that we also do a lot of readers advisory!
Last month I was presented with this challenge:
Looking for books in which the main character has ADD or ADHD, preferably in a middle school or high school environment (although elementary could work). Any suggestions?
After perusing our library catalog, WorldCat, CLCD, and the web, I emailed a short list of titles where the character/author/book jacket specifically identifies ADHD, and then we turned the page on the calendar. Lo and behold – October is ADHD Awareness Month!
Here is what I found:
- Club Meds (Katherine Hall Page): on the Booklist ‘Core Collection: YA Characters with Special Needs’ list
- Freaks Like Us (Susan Vaught): Kirkus calls it “An illuminating, recommended read.”
- Joey Pigza (Jack Gantos): Joey Pigza Loses Control won a Newbery Honor in 2001, check out this interview with the author
- L.O.S.T. (Susan Vaught & Debbie Federici): SLJ calls it “a quick read with some fantasy, a bit of romance, and a little tragedy”
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (Rick Riordan): read this Guardian article about the author and his son Haley
- Playing Tyler (TL Costa): won a silver Nautilus book award in 2014
- The Spaghetti Detectives (Andreas Steinhöfel): winner of the German Youth Literature Prize in 2009, PW describes it as having “a diverse and well-developed cast”
- Trout and Me (Susan Richards Shreve): PW notes that it has “characters of uncommon dimension and complexity”
These are the handful that I found in an afternoon of sleuthing. I know that if I devote more time to the search I can find more books, but sometimes when doing readers advisory I have to force myself to pause before I overwhelm (or because I have to move on to the next question!).
As I tell my patrons, at the end of an email or when I send them out of the library laden with books, “Look at what I’ve found so far and let me know if you need me to keep searching!”
