Tomes for Teens
M.T. Anderson Gives Young Adults What They Want:

Complex Epic Tales They Can Get Lost In

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, November 29, 2008.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
M.T.Anderson is defending the intelligence of teenagers, and he's getting quite worked up about it.
"It's insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should," says the author of "Feed" and, most recently, "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation," (Candlewick). Teens like challenges, he says. They know the world is complicated, and "they can tell when a book is simplifying life."
And hey: "If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean."

Anderson's attitude helps explain "Octavian Nothing," an ultra-challenging, two-volume young-adult novel that runs 900-plus pages and asks teen readers to contemplate the American Revolution from a wildly unfamiliar point of view.

In case that's not challenging enough, he wrote it in "the particularly complex form of 18th-century English" that its title character would have used.
The first volume won a National Book Award in 2006. The second was published last month to further acclaim.

Read the full report at the Washington Post online.