Good or bad, long or short, about wizards or vampires, successful young adult novels make their fans go crazy. Really, really nuts.

Commodifying the Fetish: Everyone writes down a kinky fetish on a piece of paper. Preferably it’s their own, but an especially “sensuous” or perverted one is also applicable (zoophilia anyone?).

Anyone who was recently a nine-year-old boy shed at least a mouse-sized tear last week, when Brian Jacques passed away at age 71. He was the author of the Redwall series, which was, in the pre-Potter era, the best set of chunky addictive novels a kid could get a hold of.

Jonathan Safran Foer has had a trajectory in the publishing world that is close to ideal. In 2002, at the age of 25, he published Everything is Illuminated, a novel that developed out of his senior thesis at Princeton where he was a philosophy major. The book was a major ...

The Cloud Corporation, Timothy Donnelly’s new collection of poems, is a difficult book. That is to say, it’s much more complex than the poetry I usually read. I’m a fan of talky poets, writers like Dean Young and Tony Hoagland who, even when they’re being opaque ...

Years ago an American army captain ordered a million copies of a short novel, something to help keep the troops’ spirits up in Europe. Many credit the mass production of this book, The Great Gatsby, as the reason why F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had died in obscurity in 1940, rose ...

Simply put, The Alchemist is a thinly-disguised self-help book, a fairy tale for all those of us who are, for whatever reason, not living the lives we once imagined for ourselves. Rather than offer some new kernel of wisdom, however, Coelho slinks back into the old clichés, encouraging us to listen to our hearts and trust Providence. “The Universe is conspiring in our favor,” he assures us, “even though we may not understand how.”

What The Choice suffers from is a machine-like lack of imagination, its plot twists as predictable as mathematical calculations. In 2008, the scientist P. M. Parker claimed to be the first person to code a book-writing formula, which can churn out novels at the flip of a switch. Apparently he never heard of Nicholas Sparks.

Platitudes undercut any sense of character development. An eight-page denouement covers a shabby and stale period of mourning: grief washes over in a quick bout of puffy eyes, then all move on. Perhaps Ms. Jacobs will flesh out the wounds of loss in her sequel, “Knit Two,” arriving November 25, but I recommend that she stick to the camaraderie of social knitting.

There’s a lot of honey in Sue Monk Kidd’s debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees.