Rebel Without a Cause to The Hunger Games: A totally excellent history of how teenagers took over the big screen

What’s good, what’s bad, and what’s in between in literature? Here we review the latest titles. See all 51 stories .

CINEMA

Hollywood High – A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies

Bruce Handy

Simon & Schuster, $61.99

Bruce Handy is a gifted writer, well-equipped to draw subtexts to the surface. Here he is on The Hunger Games : “When you create a futuristic dystopia organised around a televised blood sport in which teenage gladiators are forced to fight to the death, you have either wittingly or unwittingly created a pretty nifty metaphor for high school – the battlefields of The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls made literal.”

And on Twilight’s sexual politics, building on Bitch magazine’s description of it as “abstinence porn”: “The books and the films … c