Indigo Junior Advisory Board

Indigo Books & Music (Canada) has been using a youth advisory board to understand what teens are looking for in their reading material. The youth board is 15 members strong and they meet with people from Indigo Books and Music Inc., RandomHouse, Harper Collins and Scholastic. Today, Indigo released a press report to let us know how that's going.

Here are the top picks from today's advisory board:

• Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
• Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling)
• Holes (Louis Sachar)
• Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
• Q and A (Vikas Swarup)
• The Eternity Code (Eoin Colfer)
• The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
• Gathering Blue (Lois Lowry)

Several of the teens comments are really interesting too. This is my favorite suggestion: "'I'd really like to see more historical fiction novels written for teens,' said Braden Lunn, 14-year old JAB winner from Calgary, Alberta. 'I'm interested in war and world history, but the books for adults are a bit too complicated.'"

I completely agree with this assessment. I'm reading The Unresolved, by T.K. Welsh, right now and it's a combination of historical novel/ghost story and it's so amazing.