Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tales of the Madman Underground | 2009 | John Barnes | Buy |
| 2 | Losers in Space | 2012 | John Barnes | Buy |
Tales of the Madman Underground, published in 2009, won the Printz Honor and is generally considered Barnes’s most successful young adult novel. It is set in a small Ohio town in 1973 and follows a teenager trying to survive the start of a new school year while managing an alcoholic mother, a group of misfit friends, and the legacy of a therapy group the school has just cancelled. The book is grounded in period detail and has a strong, distinct narrative voice.
Losers in Space, published in 2012, is quite different in setting – a near-future solar system where a group of teenagers stow away on a spaceship to get reality TV fame, and things go badly wrong. It is more straightforwardly genre science fiction, though Barnes includes technical appendices explaining the real physics behind the story. The novel is aimed at older teen readers and has a harder edge than typical YA SF.
Together the two books show Barnes adapting his skills to a younger audience across very different genres. Neither is a minor work; both reflect serious effort to engage with teenage readers on their own terms.