Weeding: A Spooky Trip Through our YA Fiction

I often visit AwfulLibraryBooks.net to laugh at the ridiculous things some librarians find on their shelves during weeding.  This week, however, I didn't even have to leave my own library to get a good chuckle.  With the summer being so busy, there isn't time for things like weeding and reorganizing so it is one of the first things we're getting started on now that the kids are back in school.

Each member of my department has an assigned section to weed, and I am the proud gardener of our Young Adult books, movies, and series.  When I tell you I have literally guffawed this week at some of the things I've come across, I am not exaggerating.  While some of these were taken off primarily because of age, and the fact that I doubt any of our current teens would touch them, there were also a few that contained just enough bad or misleading information to make me cringe, but just enough ironic cover-choices or contents to make me laugh out loud.

I use the MUSTY system when weeding:
Misleading (factually inaccurate),
Ugly (covers or damages that make you cringe),
Superseded (a better edition has come about),
Trivial (of no merit),
Your collection (The book is not of interest to the members of your library community or out of place in your collection)

Some of the books I found were in fact still relevant, but the covers were so bad that I had to pull them anyway and put in an order for updated copies. Others were ancient, the oldest I found had been purchased in 1987, but hadn't been checked out in years, or not at all.  I've decided to showcase a few of my favorite weeds of the week.
Enjoy, LOL.



Weed #1 - Lurlene McDaniel's Death Series.
I'd never heard of Lurlene McDaniel before until I came across this series.  The covers put me in the mind of my mother's old Harlequin romance novels first of all, but then I noticed that almost ALL of the titles contained death, dying wishes, or other cryptic phrases.  A quick search on GoodReads, alerted me to the fact that ALL of  Ms. McDaniel's books are centered around teens dying or nursing others with terminal illnesses.  ACK!

The subject matter, while relevant, has been superseded by more current and relevant titles however, so Lurlene got the boot.  Except for "A Rose for Melinda", which our reference assistant wanted to keep for herself (her name's Melinda), LOL.

Weed #2 - A few bad trips through late 80's, early 90's high-schools.

Taking just a glance at The Girl of His Dreams makes me think of John Cussack...and the Grateful Dead t-shirt and ripped shorts on the Rimwalkers cover just shouts Goonies Part II.  They had to go.

As did Ferris Bueller,...and Clarissa Explains It All, I mean Melissa Joan Hart.
As for Bel-Air Bambi, she hasn't seen a barcode scan since 2001, and neither have her comrades.

Weed # 3 - Ixnay on the Nix-bays. The Awful Terrible Mysteries and Thrillers. These haven't been checked out in this decade.  They had to go.  I believe maybe one of them had some recent activity, so I reordered an updated copy.

Weed #4 - Nonfiction and Nonsense - Not since Bangin in Little Rock have I seen such seriously lame portrayals of Gang Life.  While the information found inside these books is still relevant, it is a bit outdated so I was able to pull them in the interest of finding more current titles.  I haven't deleted them though, because in nonfiction, MUSTY can be a bit more flexible, BUT, I put them in here because they made me laugh.  Especially the way the paid actor on the right is caressing his pistol.  Priceless.

Weed #5 - My FAVORITES of the week.

The 360 pages of this book were unjustified.  This cover looks like the unrequited love story of He-Man and his sister She-Ra.  NOTHING of this cover says Seminole to me but the words Seminole.   

Just deal with this cover!  I cannot.  So many lewd SNL skits could be written based on it.

A story of a young girl dealing with the after effects of her sister's suicide. The title makes me chuckle, though the subject matter is nothing to laugh at.  However, what made me fall out of my chair was the dedication page: 

"With Love, to the kids who choose to live".

WHAT THE Smelly Hell!?  Snarky, much?  That sounds like you're saying, "Because yall suicidal kids were some chumps who couldn't cut it!"  

This book, like the sweater dress on Diane's sister,  had to go.

 This one makes me think of those After-School Special type shows that HBO used to air.  The topic, once again, is serious, but come on and just deal with this cover!  

Welp, I hope you enjoyed this little trip into Weeding.  Trust me, I have more. LOL