The Grounding of Group Six and other strange YA novels

[rachelmanija]

iknowcommawrite has a great review of The Grounding of Group Six, a deeply peculiar YA novel which I bet at least some of you read and were boggled by, and which I loaned her if she'd post on it. Go forth and discuss! (The Grounding of Group 6 on Kindle.)

coffeeandink solves a decades-old mystery for me by naming the book whose name I could never remember, The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and The Splendid Kids, and asks about subversive children's literature.

What books have you read where you thought, for reasons other than that it sucked, "How in the world did this get published?"

Comments

[naomikritzer]

I looked up the reviews of it and that plus my very disjointed memories suggests you're spot-on.

As a teenager I had poor boundaries and an excessive desire to fix my broken friends and I think Lisa Bright and Dark fed into this, but I think you're probably correct that this wasn't really the fault of the book and more an illustration of how YA books sometimes feed precisely the stuff they're trying to warn against (see also: every eating disorders novel ever, and Thirteen Reasons Why).

[mildred_of_midgard]

That sounds entirely plausible to me!

My partner said that during her misspent adolescence, there was a book about how Drugs Are Bad, except it explained in great detail everything the protagonist took and mixed, and gave my partner lots of ideas she would never have come up with on her own, and it worked really well as a how-to manual for her and her friends, and we were boggling at how anyone ever thought publishing this book was a good idea.

I don't know the title, and it may have been in Portuguese. I'd have to ask.