Two Local YA Books

Thanks to this SMS, and to the relative nearness and accessiblity of the venue, I attended the Buklat Bulilit Children's Book Festival last August 1, 2009, at Trinoma, sponsored by, among others, the PBBY and the NBDB.

During the afternoon seminar, publisher Ramon V. Sunico and two of his writers, Perpilili Tiongson and G.T. Los Baños, talked about writing young adult novels to a fairly large group of listeners. They said that the approach to writing such stories is different, as the concerns of young adults are different from adults, but they also emphasized that the need for characters and situations that are believable and that come alive to a reader is the same, as with any story aimed at anybody.

They also said that there aren't that many YA novels by Pinoy writers about local characters in a local setting, which was why they wrote the books they did. Perpilili Tiongson wrote the book "I Hate My Mother", a story of the relationship between a Pinoy daughter and her mother; and G.T. Los Baños wrote "Playing It Safe", a love story set against the backdrop of sports and university life. Give these local YA books a try; they're available at Powerbooks, where I bought my copies.

Reviews of these two books can be found here and here, at Into The Wardrobe.