Hazel & Katniss & Harry & Starr

The wait is over! We're back for 2020 with a brand new full length episode that delves deep into Brenna's childhood love: Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908). This is easily the most popular Canadian YA text of all time, especially when we're considering its adaptations, including the 1985 miniseries and Moira Walley-Beckett's recently cancelled CBC/Netflix co-production, Anne with...

Jan 2020 is now firmly underway, so it's time to update those library hold lists! Brenna and Joe have poured over the month and selected their top 3 picks, along with a few honourable mentions, to start the year off strong.  Joe   Deep and Darkest Red by Anna-Marie McLemore We Used To Be Friends by Amy Spalding You Too? Edited by Judith Gurtler Plus: Spellhacker by M.K. England, Tweet Cute by Emma...

In our second minisode wrapping up 2019, we're going all in on binge mode! It's the holidays, so hopefully you have a little more free time on your hands. Brenna and Joe walk through the films, TV and books that they plan to binge over the break, in addition to teasing a few TV shows that will drop in and around the New Year. Wanna connect with the show? Use #HKHSPod on Twitter: Brenna: @brennacgr...

Brenna and Joe are wrapping 2019 with a double dose of minisodes!  First up: a look back on the year that was, including books that Brenna finally caught up on, our favourite serious, not-so-serious and least successful episodes (sorry CC - we did you wrong with Ghost World !). Also, the two biggest news stories that we think encapsulate YA at this moment, including Heartprint, an Indigenous Impri...

For the final regular...er...full length episode of the year, Brenna and Joe embrace the festivities of the season with a trip to Starbucks and a dip into 2008's Let It Snow , the trio of novellas by Maureen Johnson, John Green, and Lauren Myracle. We're also checking out the 2019 adaptation by Luke Snellin, which coincidentally stars every teen actor under contract on a Netflix series. Up for dis...

On the eve of a brand new interpretation by Greta Gerwig, Brenna and Joe travel back 151 years to discuss Louisa May Alcott's defining American text Little Women , as well as Gillian Armstrong's 1994 adaptation and the excruciating 2018 modern take by Clare Niederpreum. Comparisons to Jane Austen abound as we try and identify the source of the text's popularity, which prospers in the first half an...

Brenna and Joe are feeling a little "Under Pressure" so we're taking a mental health break with Ned Vizzini's 2006 novel It's Kind of a Funny Story and Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck's 2010 adaptation, starring Keir Gilchrist (Brenna's favourite!), as well as Zach Galifianakis and Emma Roberts. Brenna struggles to grapple with the disconnect between the hopefulness of the book and the real life circumsta...

For the first time in ages, Brenna and Joe venture outside of North America and the UK to tackle a foreign text: German author Wolfgang Herrndorf's bestselling 2010 novel Tschick (published in English in 2014 as Why We Took The Car ), as well as Fatih Akin's 2016 film adaptation (English title: Goodbye Berlin ). Brenna and Joe discover that this deceptively complicated road trip narrative is the a...

Brenna and Joe are joined by Heather Cyr to discuss the first book in Philip Pullman's   His Dark Materials trilogy: Northern Lights or, to North American audiences, The Golden Compass (1995). We're also chatting the failed 2007 $180 bloated children's film adaptation, as well as 2019's HBO/BBC One co-production, His Dark Materials . Brenna and Joe have more interest in the complicated politics an...

One year ago, Brenna and Joe embarked on a grand podcasting adventure. This episode marks our birthday/anniversary and we can't think of a better way to celebrate than read the book that we bonded over back in university: Watership Down , the horribly traumatic story of a group of intrepid bunnies who embark on their own adventure to find a new home.  Yes, folks, the time has finally come to discu...

The time has come for Brenna and Joe to discuss Laurie Halse Anderson's revelatory 1999 YA bestseller, Speak , its 2004 made-for-television film adaptation starring Kristen Stewart and the recent comic with art from Emily Carroll. Joining us for some difficult conversation is Lucia Lorenzi, who helps to unpack why both book and film are so powerful and important. This episode is quite broad, and i...

Lock up your hat store and prepare to meet the wizard because Brenna and Joe are jumping aboard British author Diana Wynne Jones 1986 fantasy novel Howl's Moving Castle and Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's 2004 animated...interpretation. That's right, we're calling it: in a first for the podcast, we have two titles so radically different that the film is barely an adaptation of the source materi...

Is the third time the charm? After The Fault in our Stars and Paper Towns , Brenna and Joe are checking back into Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory with John Green's problematic first novel Looking for Alaska , which was just adapted by The O.C. and Gossip Girl scribes Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage into an eight episode Hulu series.  Up for discussion: does the book contain enough sign posts t...

Part of HKHSPod's mandate is to highlight the work of Canadian YA Lit writers. In this exclusive interview, Brenna and Joe are joined by writer, performer, cultural worker & speaker Kai Cheng Thom to discuss her YA novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir , her refusal to write a conventional trans narrative for cis audiences, her political and historic...

With Halloween fast approaching, Joe forces Brenna to indulge in a creepy (not scary) pick for the pod: noted speculative science-fiction author Ray Bradbury's 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes and Jack Clayton's 1983 Disney adaptation. How does Brenna fare with this tale of a dark carnival that arrives in the middle of the night to feed on the souls of small town Americans? Just fine, it...

Riverdale is SO last week! This week, Brenna and Joe are solving mysteries - with convenient expertise - in River Heights, as we both tackle our first ever Nancy Drew mystery in advance of the new CW series.  Just to make things extra complicated, we're discussing the first two books by Carolyn Keene ( The Secret of the Old Clock & The Hidden Staircase ) as well as two movies - Andrew Fleming's Na...

Building on the discussion that began in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and continued in Josie and the Pussycats , Brenna and Joe travel to a place outside of time and space to discuss the long history of Archie comics. Specifically we're tackling Mark Waid and Fiona Staples' revitalizing run on Archie, Vol 1 & 2 that began in 2015, as well as Roberto Aguirre-Saca's television series, Riverdal...

For only the second time, Brenna and Joe venture far into the past for a classic lit / contemporary adaptation comparison. Thankfully we have Jane Austen superfan Brennan Klein around to lend a hand unpacking her 1815 text, Emma , as well as Amy Hecklering's "loose" adaptation Clueless (1995). On deck for discussion: how Austen uses her narrator to comment on her most "unlikable" heroine, Brennan'...

Brenna, Joe and special guest Alex Heeney are ready to volunteer as tribute as we dive into the 74th annual Hunger Games , courtesy of Suzanne Collins and filmmaker Gary Ross. The trio have plenty of thoughts on the value of Peeta to the text, how the film sets up future franchise instalments for failure, why Collins is such a skilled world-builder and the retroactive damage of Mockingjay on persp...

Prep your cynical disdain and your green tint (or is it blue?) because Brenna and Joe - plus special guest CC Stapleton - are headed back into comic territory with Daniel Clowes' 1997 comic and Terry Zwigoff's 2001 film adaptation, Ghost World .  The discussion includes the depiction of teen ennui, the idea that certain texts are more meaningful if you read them at a particular stage of developmen...

Brenna and Joe have patched up their differences and just in time, because they find themselves locked up with the Gladers, a bunch of annoying, mediocre (mostly) white boys from James Dashner's 2009 dystopian YA, The Maze Runner and Wes Ball's 2014 film adaptation, starring Teen Wolf break-out Dylan O'Brien. Brenna is firmly displaced with both texts unwillingness to explain the need for an all-m...

Brenna and guest star Hannah McGregor arrive at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but Joe is nowhere to be found! The result is more drama than a Gryffindor v Slytherin Quidditch match as Brenna has to duck out early, meaning Hannah is less guest, and more like the glue holding this episode together. When Joe finally joins (presumably after his Remembrall turned red), the trio discuss th...

Part of HKHSPod's mandate is to highlight the work of Canadian YA Lit writers. In this exclusive interview, Brenna and Joe are joined by Governor General award-winning novelist Tim Wynne-Jones to discuss his new adventure novel, The Starlight Claim , his unusual connection to Rafi and JK Rowling, and why it is important that his characters are never black or white. Find out more about Tim's work o...

Brenna and Joe head off to College for a sexy educa- Nope! Can't do it! There are no jokes to be had regarding the painfully unsexy and potentially damaging "erotic" coming of age book by Wattpad "author" Anna Todd. On the other side of the gulf is director Jenny Gage's bland-as-white-toast film adaptation starring human block of wood Josephine Langford and horribly miscast (an...

Brenna and Joe aren't feeling quite themselves - in fact they may be experiencing an out of body event as a result of reading David Levithan's 2012 book Every Day and screening Michael Sucsy's 2018 film adaptation. Or perhaps it is simply that they are struggling with pronouns and personhood as a result of A's constantly changing bodies. In addition to callbacks to the repetitive cycles of Before...