Michael Cart News Today

From the May/June 2023 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Diverse Books: Past, Present, and Future.

The first YA book to deal with HIV/AIDS was M. E. Kerr’s Night Kites. Published in 1986, the novel features a teenage protagonist whose older brother is sick with AIDS-related illnesses. As Christine Jenkins and Michael Cart point out, this novel did not inspire a trend: HIV/AIDS “would receive major thematic or topical treatment in only three other YA novels in the eighties.” In addition to the four novels published in the 1980s, only thirteen texts “that included any character who wa...