The literary quality of the stories in Am I Blue? varies from good to superb. Overall, the majority of the stories (like much of young adult fiction) is first-person narration by the teen protagonist: this is true of ten of the sixteen stories. Two of the stories, Francesca Lia Block's "Winnie and Tommy" and Gregory Maguire's "The Honorary Shepherds" are somewhat experimental or postmodern in their narrative approaches.

Fourteen of the stories are realistic tales, almost all of them set in the present. One story, Jane Yolen's "Blood Sisters," is a fantasy tale, and William Sleator's "In the Tunnels" reads almost like a fantasy tale: it is set in the Vietcong tunnels during the Vietnam war, and told from a Vietnamese point of view. With such a wide variety of tales, there is bound to be a wide variety in literary quality as well.

Many of...