Adult Books 4 Teens

Adult Books 4 Teens is one of a number of blogs which form part of the School Library Journal website. It was created to assist librarians to find books for the adult market which will appeal to the teen readers that they serve. The blog features reviews, recommendations (almost all reviews published are positive so a book appearing on the blog should be considered a recommendation), commentary and news on a wide range of genres and formats.

The blog is easy to navigate due to the genre options near the top of the page and the presence of lists displaying recent posts and recent comments in the right hand column. The tags box in the right hand column assists in locating items of a certain format or from a specific publisher making it easier to find specific reviews.

Each blog entry takes one of several forms including weekly reviews which consist of an introduction and a description of the book including the bibliographic information needed to order the book from a supplier followed by a review of the book(s) by a librarian who works with young people and an image of the cover.

Carstensen, A. and M. Flowers, 2012. Adult Books 4 Teens — @AngeReads and @droogmark A School Library Journal Blog. [online] Available at: http://blogs.slj.com/adult4teen/ [Accessed: 25 Jul 2013].

This blog is authoritative as the two authors primarily responsible for the content the blog entry are librarians working in areas that involve contact with young people so they have experience catering for the needs of teenage readers and editing or peer reviewing books relating to assisting libraries to better service teenage readers.

The main purpose of the blog is providing librarians in school and public libraries which provide reading resources to teenagers with information that they need to evaluate how useful certain books written for adults will be to their teenage clients and to assist the librarian in making recommendations for purchases.

The presence of advertisements in the blog appear to have been placed there as part of the School library Journal’s hosting of the blog so do not indicate bias. The authors also have chosen to avoid negative reviews to avoid biasing their readers against any particular book.

The blog is intended to be read by librarians working with young people but should be accessible to some teenagers as well.

This blog is well written and covers a wide range of topics and genres. The positive approach in selecting reviews is a good example to the readers.