The payoff isn't just parent-child communication. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that students who regularly talk about reading with family or friends have higher reading scores than those who rarely do so. Unfortunately, years of bad marketing have made it difficult to convince teens that there are young adult titles worth reading. High schoolers, turned off by the schlocky romance and horror serials that crowd YA sections in bookstores, often give up on books altogether or skip from kid books to John Grisham and Stephen King. Not all new offerings are high art, of course.
Internet retailers have wrought change, too.
Librarians have been trying to figure out how to do this for a hundred thousand years. A boy on trial for murder tells his chilling story. Portraits of teens who left, or were left by, their parents.