Brainstorming 2014

[evil_plotbunny]

The Exchange at Fic Corner 2014 Schedule
May 11th - Brainstorming Post will open.
May 26th - June 7th - Nominations
June 8th - June 14th - Vetting
June 15th - 25th - Sign-Ups
June 27th - Assignments Sent Out
September 1st - Deadline for Stories
September 6th - Collection Goes Live

Got a favo(u)rite kids or YA book or series or story you want other people to write for or request? Want to know if you're "the only one" who ever read that one particular book or who loves that certain character?

Go forth in the comments and pimp your favo(u)rites.

ETA: Some helpful brainstorming links provided by elf and a few added by me.
Newbery Medal list
Links to other Youth Awards from ALA including the Batchelder (translation) and Belpre (Hispanic/Latino). Scroll down for links to the Coretta Scott King (African-American/Black) and Printz (YA) The Notable Books lists linked in the sidebar are also of interest.
Juvenile Series and Sequels
from the MCPL database (looong list.)
Goodreads Top 100 Middle School Must Reads from Goodreads
Obscure:
A List of Series and Sequels for Juvenile Readers. Compiled in 1915. (Edith Nesbit is included. And Lewis Carroll. And Dumas was apparently considered youth reading.)
Mary Crosson's "Plain Jane" Series List. Public domain (pre-20s) children's and teens series available on the web.
Girls Series Books 1840-1991. List only, hosted at the Kerlan Collection.
Diversity in YA's booklists. Thematic multicultural/ethnic/sexual lists of recent YA novels compiled by the blog owners.

Comments

[graycardinal]

A list of obscure-ish favorites, revamped and re-annotated from what I posted last year:

Guns in the Heather, Cape Cod Casket, and The Sly One (Lockhart Amerman)
1960s. Jonathan Flower's father is a spy; Jonathan and his friends occasionally run into mysterious situations that either overlap with his father's cases or end up requiring secret-agent panache to resolve. Amerman manages the difficult trick of making these both highly amusing and genuinely suspenseful.

Tom Swift series #4 ("Victor Appleton")
Early 1990s. The second series ("Tom Swift Jr.", with gold spines to Nancy Drew's yellow and the Hardy Boys' blue) is probably the most famous, but my favorite iteration of Tom is the 1990s Archway paperback revival, in which Swift Enterprises has moved to southern California, there's a newish extended cast (with decently written girl characters), and the plots are actually pretty high-grade classic SF. This iteration also gave a solid to earlier continuity, and produced a pair of Superthrillers co-starring the Hardy Boys.

Meanwhile, Back at the Castle (Hope Campbell)
1970. A somewhat eccentric family buys a tiny island in the St. Lawrence, and discovers that the US/Canadian border goes around the island -- on both sides, such that it's arguably not in either nation. So they set up the independent republic of Great Mosquito Island; comedy and political silliness ensues.

Diana Winthrop mystery series ("Kate Chambers")
1983-84. Six slim paperbacks, featuring unusually well-plotted "teen sleuth" puzzles and a large extended family. "Chambers" turns out to have been a pen name for Nicole St. John, who wrote as "Norma Johnston" among several other pseudonyms.

Terror Wears a Feathered Cloak (Thelmar Wyche Crawford)
1969. I didn't realize this was part of a short series till quite some time after I first came across it (and had no trouble reading it as a standalone). Teen adventure in Mexico; our heroine, Carol, is part of a group that gets tangled in conflicts involving a present-day archaeological project and a classic lost city populated by old-school Mayans. I've often described this as "Elizabeth Peters lite"; I recall it as well plotted and much more believable than the premise suggests.

The Ice Ghosts Mystery (Jane Louise Curry)
1972. This is what one might have gotten if Madeline L'Engle had written a "Happy Hollisters" or "Bobbsey Twins" mystery -- lively family interplay, hair's-breadth suspense, and a clever science-fictional suspense thriller plot. Curry is better known for fantasy (I also really like The Sleepers, a modern-Arthurian yarn that compares favorably with parts of the Dark is Rising sequence), but this may be my very favorite of her works.

Go to the Room of the Eyes (Betty K. Erwin)
1969. Modern (for its time) kids' treasure-hunt adventure with clever clues and a more-than-usually-realistic Seattle setting. I remember liking both the plot and the family.

The Night of the Solstice (L. J. Smith)
My favorite of L. J. Smith's books; I've enjoyed virtually everything she's written (though I think the Vampire Diaries series may have run its course even without the TV series' influence), but Solstice and its sequel, Heart of Valor, strike me as her most intriguing and best-written material, right up there with Jane Louise Curry and Susan Cooper.

Planet Builders series (Robyn Tallis)
1980s. Ten-volume paperback series; YA sci-fi featuring a large ensemble cast, an interesting colony world, and a slew of excellent writers behind the Tallis name (including Sherwood Smith, Mary Frances Zambreno, and space-opera geniuses Debra Doyle and James Macdonald). A rarity: while the teens are the stars, the grownups are surprisingly well-rounded.

The Amazing Vacation (Dan Wickenden)
Entry kentry cutry corn, apple seed and apple thorn.
Wire, briar, limber lock, a witch and griffins in a flock.
We fly o'er hill and over plain; we fly through sun and wind and rain.
We even fly when it's sleeting or snowing, so Open Sesame -- let's get going!

1956. A brother and sister step through a magic window into the Country Without a Name. Adventures ensue, involving a porpentine, long-simmering conflicts, puns, and the unexpected solution to a long-standing family mystery. This is roughly contemporary with Edward Eager's books, but it's pitched a bit differently (perhaps for an older reader) and feels slightly more modern.

Danny Dunn series (Jay Williams & Raymond Abrashkin)
1956-1977. (I just looked up those dates; d*mn, that's impressive.) Science fiction adventure for middle-graders in which action and science get equal emphasis. Danny is much more the smart suburban kid than Tom Swift, and the adventures are mostly a bit tamer, but the Dunn series is much better at general sense-of-wonder niftiness.

[graycardinal]

Oy, and I get to nominate just four of these?

Cue the tearing of hair on this end of the process.... :-/