Coming-of-age tales?

Originally posted by: Ribbon

To Kill A Mockingbird is a must-read book. The book grows on you. On finishing the book, I realised that I had grown to love the characters. The story surrounds a strong sense of morality which the author disguises well behind the plot. I finally understood the meaning of the title after checking out a website on the internet.

Originally posted by: zephyr29

I second Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. When you mention coming-of-age this is the most talked about book in that genre (if you could call it that). Its been a long time but I remember being so influenced by it when I first read it.

Here's a review of it from Goodreads:

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.