Invitations to the World: Teaching and Writing for the Young

Rating:
Summary: Every Teacher and Writer Should Read This
Review: I am an undergraduate English major with a passion for children's literature and young adult literature (which drives a few of my current professors crazy). What an amazing experience it was to pick up this non-fiction work by Richard Peck that details Peck's own passion for America's youth and his way of reaching out to them through his outstanding (I was already a fan of Peck's work) novels. The work is, as the inside of the dust jacket claims, part "memoir, social commentary, and writing manual." Peck tells how he came to writing young adult literature, he evokes the great need for the books, and he details what and why he has written. The works serves not just as an overview of Peck's work but also of the young adult genre since its inception. There is so much to gain from this work, and you certainly come away from it feeling just what an extraordinary man and writer Richard Peck is, and you feel the extant of the extraordinary accomplishments young adult literature has made and the great need for it to be read by today's youth. Invitation to the World is a work that anyone who will be teaching should read (including non-English teachers), and anyone who may be planning to write children's or young adult literture cannot miss this.