Dear Librarian Friends,
I am doing a paper in my Young Adult Services class on christian teen fiction. If you have a library, I am asking for your help. Do you have christian teen fiction? What prompted you to buy it? How well does it circulate? Who are the popular authors? Have you gotten any backlash about having christian fiction? Is it identified somehow (ex. spine stickers, separate shelving, etc.)?
All help is appreciated. Feel free to leave info in comments, or let me know you can help and I can email you to get info.
Many thanks!!!
P.S- Does anyone know how I can get in touch with Melody Carlson? She is THE GODDESS of YA Christian fic and I’d LOVE to interview her.
I would love to help you! My sister is going to library school and … you may even know her! She has crazy hair and a nervous giggle and she’s a hundred percent adorable. Oh and her name is Jennifer. Anywho! I order for the teens and kids, and when I first started there we had NO christian fiction AT ALL! That might not be completely weird, but we share a parking lot with a church and we have a staff member who is married to a minister. Plus we’re in a pretty conservative area with a high concentration of churches. It seemed to me that we should have some christian fiction. So after buying all the veggie tales dvds, I checked out Moody Publishers and bought a ton of their books. I’m also on a graphic novel email list and I found out that there are comic book versions of the bible coming out.
We have gotten quite a few compliments, no negative feedback and I think it circulates pretty well. I can check up on that for you if you’d need that. We don’t separate it, but I do put blue stickers with a big white cross on the books.
Feel free to email me with any other questions you have: ckyle@libraryweb.org
Good luck!
I am a youth services librarian but I don’t do any collection development. We do have Christian teen fiction, because our library is in North Carolina (though not the most conservative part of North Carolina) and there are a lot of Christians here and a lot of them want to read either fiction that explicitly has religious content, or fiction that is “clean.”
The most popular Christian authors at this particular branch are Melody Carlson, Stephanie Perry Moore, and ReShonda Tate Billingsley (who are African-American Christian authors). They circulate pretty well, and I’ve certainly never heard any negative feedback. We don’t have a separate section, but we do have “Inspirational” stickers on the spines.
Feel free to e-mail if you have any other questions.