Our top pick in fiction this month is Teddy Wayne‘s novel The Love Song of Jonny Valentine. Jonny Valentine is a Bieber-esque 11-year-old thrust into a world of fame and fortune, who puts on a packaged face for his fans, but yearns to find his absent father and to be loved by his manager-mother just as much as any other kid his age.
Wayne explains his motivation for writing a book about tween fame in an interview with BookPage:
When my first novel, Kapitoil, came out in 2010, I experienced what most writers go through: a feeling of vulnerability that something you’d worked on in private for so many years was now out there for the public and critics to dissect. I started wondering how people who experience real fame handle it. It seemed even more mind-boggling that a teenager could manage the rigors of celebrity. [Justin] Bieber seems very poised and capable; I imagined what it might be like for someone even younger and with a less hardy constitution to negotiate a global spotlight.
Read our review of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine here and watch the funny infomercial style trailer featuring the author:
Will you read The Love Song of Jonny Valentine? What do you think about teenage fame?
Ooooooh this sounds really interesting!