Still young at heart and in love with the literature you read in high school? The Forever YA book club might be the place for you! Forever Young Adult (FYA), founded in 2009, describes itself as a worldwide “community for YA fans who are a little less ‘Y’ and a bit more ‘A.’” Our local Westchester chapter is heralded by both the Yonkers Crestwood and White Plains libraries. Patrons from both libraries meet via Zoom on the last Thursday of each month to discuss that month’s read.
At the beginning of each meeting, the group discusses what media they’ve consumed recently, ranging from movies and TV show reviews to books or manga we’re eager to start. These include anything from the recent Wuthering Heights movie to T.L. Simpson’s Cope Field and Yukinobu Tatsu’s Dandadan. Every scathing review and newfound gem are shared!
Afterwards, we shift to the icebreakers and discussion questions that FYA posts on their page for the monthly read. February’s read was Not so Pure and Simple by Lamar Giles, a story about a teenage boy who joins his church’s purity pledge program to get closer to his crush. The book tackles topics like toxic masculinity, societal pressure, sex education, relationships, and identity. Last month’s icebreaker asked readers to reflect on what their sex ed classes in high school were like, which led to some comedic responses!
The discussion questions FYA offers give us a scaffolding to build off of. We started with the first question, “How did your feelings towards Del change throughout the book”, but allowed conversation and discussion to flow naturally into whatever topics or or points interested us the most.
A lot of discussion for this book involved our real world experiences with toxic masculinity and how we think that mindset forms and can be combated. Del, as a teenage boy, is not intimately familiar with the reality of being a woman and the dangers or nuances that accompany it. Throughout the book, the women in his life confront him and educate him on how misguided his attempts at love are and how what he perceives as harmless can easily make a girl uncomfortable, ultimately leading to him confronting his mistakes in one of his sister’s YouTube videos. We spoke about how hard this revelation can be for young men with the rise of manosphere content and incel culture, but we also shared stories about how we’d seen young men grow and become positive role models for their peers.
We here at Crestwood hope this post inspires you to pop in for our March FYA Zoom on March 26 at 7:00 PM. We’ll be discussing A Treachery of Swans by A.B. Poraneck, an “atmospheric romantasy based on Swan Lake, following Odile as her plan to restore magic to her enchanted kingdom gets disrupted by a murder mystery--forcing her to beg for help from the young woman whose identity she stole.”
Hanora Woodruff is a Part-Time Clerk and patron of Yonkers Crestwood Library since childhood. She recently graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Biology and Creative Writing. Her favorite reads at the moment are Sylvia Plath’s poems.
Alison Robles, a Yonkers native, received an MS in Information and Library Science from the University at Buffalo. She works at the Crestwood Library and is an avid reader with a passion for YA lit, historical fiction, and fantasy.