Am I really old enough to be called HISTORICAL?

ALA 2015 Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults
Chicago Weekly Best Books of 2014
A Michael L. Printz Honor Award Winner
Winner, 2014 Helen Sheehan YA Book Prize
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2014
Finalist, William C. Morris Award
It's 1993, and Generation X pulses to the beat of Kurt Cobain and the grunge movement. Sixteen-year-old Maggie Lynch is uprooted from big-city Chicago to a windswept town on the Irish Sea. Surviving on care packages of Spin magazine and Twizzlers from her rocker uncle Kevin, she wonders if she'll ever find her place in this new world. When first love and sudden death simultaneously strike, a naive but determined Maggie embarks on a forbidden pilgrimage that will take her to a seedy part of Dublin and on to a life- altering night in Rome to fulfill a dying wish. Through it all, Maggie discovers an untapped inner strength to do the most difficult but rewarding thing of all, live. The Carnival at Bray is an evocative ode to the Smells Like Teen Spirit Generation and a heartfelt exploration of tragedy, first love, and the transformative power of music.

The above is copied and pasted from Amazon.com.  It was the description I read online after a student recommended The Carnival at Bray to me.  Yes, you read that right.  I take recommendations from my kids very seriously.  If they are reading it, I want to.  Why does this book appeal to them?  Better question, why do they think I would like it?  What makes them want to share this book with me?  In this case, I was actually sorting the summer reading booklets into piles by teacher names with my phone playing music to keep me focused.  It was on random shuffle when a Nirvana song came on.  And off she went into the book (Nirvana is a central element of the plot, bet Cobain never expected that).  I requested it through the Graham Room at WHPL since it is technically YA lit.    

Now, that description from Amazon does a pretty good job with the hook.  But let's be clear here.  This is sex, drugs, and grunge.  There is profanity, drinking, and plenty of disrespect to adults.  In short, it's 1993-1995 in the midst of teenage angst in the grunge era.

It's also, gulp, my teenage years.  I was 13-15 in the years this story is set.  And by the spine label, those years have now been dubbed historical fiction.  WHAT?  No, that's the Civil War and Red Badge of Courage.  That's Vietnam and The Things They Carried.  Surely, I'm not that...old?

Wait, maybe I am.  Maybe that's why this book took me in.  It's a glimpse of the past that I remember and changed the lives of so many people, some for good, others not so much.  It's kinda like when I talked about TTTC with my Dad.  He LIVED during Vietnam.  He had friends who didn't come home.  Cobain's death shook the music industry for sure, but it shook Nirvana's fans a whole lot more.  People of my Gramma's generation talk about remembering when Kennedy was shot (she was taking a bubble bath, FYI).  I remember hearing the news of Cobain's suicide during the ride to Bailey in my Dad's white truck.

And there you have it.  This is fiction.  During a historical event.  Wow.