COming of age books

I am hoping to build a larger and larger collection of coming of age everything at http://www.comingofagebooks.com If y'all have more recommendations I would greatly appreciate hearing them. Even better, if you have a quote that you feel sums up the coming of age idea/theme I would greatly love to hear it.

Thanks for your time and help

Best to you all

James
http://www.comingofagebooks.com

I loved Asta in the Wings and The Outside Boy. Just finished reading Season of Water and Ice which I didn't like but has gotten better reviews from others as a coming of age story. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was good too.

I suspect this is just spam for his website, but on the off chance it's not, and to help anyone else who reads this thread. All such similar thoughts, the best place to start looking is the LT Tag Page for the topic in question.

This gives the cather in the rye and to kill a mockingbird as the top 2 hits, with at least 1000 titles in the list.

Not sure how broad the definition of "coming of age" is here ... my first thought was Judy Blume's introductions to puberty for girls in Are You There God Its Me Margaret and boys in Then Again Maybe I Won't. Each of those books is also about other things of course, but that is how they were presented to me and how I read them at that age. I found them very informative.

Where "coming of age" entails a child becoming an adult, you could quote anything from Hinton's The Outsiders to the Little House on the Prairie sequence, the field's wide open.

Publishers seem to use it as a marketing tag for any story in which a young protagonist has a significant experience. I think it must have started out as a euphemism for "first novel", but it's now so ubiquitous that it's almost meaningless.

I think a LTER book I read a few months back qualifies as a "coming of age" novel (although I agree with #4 and 5 above that the term is overused), Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok. Also, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford.

edited for touchstones

I thought of All the Pretty Horses as a kind of coming of age book.

The Graveyard Book comes to mind as something recent... Really you can't swing a dead coyote in a bookshop without hitting a bildungsroman though.

my two cents

Out of the Shelter David Lodge
The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson

Incidentally - does anyone know when publishers first started using this term for novels? I have the feeling that it's been around for a while, but when I did a quick trawl through a few dictionaries and things, I could only find "coming of age" in legal, religious, or anthropological contexts. Bildungsroman has been used in English since at least 1910 (OED), but "coming of age novel" seems to be a much broader concept than Bildungsroman.
I think I first remember seeing "coming of age novel" in the context of LGBT fiction - could it be a term that started there and then spread into the mainstream?

Best ever surely has to be The Go-Between.

Then there's Stephen King's The Body (no touchstones?) from Different Seasons.

two more Stop - Time by Frank Conroy
Call it Sleep by Henry Roth

Days of Grace by Catherine Hall