Spoon, by Stephanie Peters

Junior Macy is supposed to be the star on her volley ball team this year, but the arrival of a sharp new girl named Alliyah shakes things up.  Alliyah's skills threaten to eclipse Macy's rising star, but there's a bigger problem:  Alliyah has a manipulative side.  After nearly getting Macy in serious trouble, she uses that secret between them to blackmail Macy.  Macy doesn't know what to do to defend herself without disrupting the team as a whole and threatening their winning streak.  Everyone will think she's just trying to get rid of the better player who threatens her spot.

Meanwhile, Alliyah has introduced a game called Spoon in which everyone carries around a plastic spoon and then people try to steal them off of each other.  What starts as fun becomes disruptive and puts Macy in hot water with her employer, parents, and the coach.  When it becomes apparent that Alliyah will stop at nothing, including breaking the rules, to get what she wants, Macy has to make a choice that will be right for herself and for the team.

More of a novella than a full-length novel (149 pages of large type) and published by a small press, I didn't have high expectations for this book, but Peters has definite talent.  It takes major skill to write a sports story.  Too much detail and people who don't play the game get bored.  Too little or getting a detail wrong and real players throw up their hands and toss the book.  I know hardly anything about volleyball, but I found following the sports action easy and exciting.  Secondly, although the story could almost certainly be fleshed out, it didn't feel rushed.  And finally, while there was a boy in the picture, the story was all about the girls and their team.  I admired the decision to keep the focus on Macy's love of the game and her teammates.

A lovely story about the importance of loyalty and teamwork, and knowing how to tell who really are your friends.

Camila Núñez's Year of Disasters, by Miriam Zoila Perez

Camila suffers from anxieties.  Her best friend's idea to do a tarot card reading to predict the upcoming year hasn't helped any!  The cards that were laid out spelled suffering and loss, putting poor Camila on alert.  The cards prove both predictive and directive, but the year is not a loss as Camila learns to love and lose and come back again from it all.  She makes some terrible errors, but she is held accountable and takes responsibility and fixes what she can. As in life, things get messy and not everything is resolvable. Her character is refreshingly realistic.

But while the story is excellent, the writing itself feels clunky.  Written like it was Camila's diary, much of the prose is broken sentences and awkward tenses.  That gives the story telling some authenticity but it  isn't an engaging presentation. Her life as a gender queer Cuban American is well-depicted but pedantic and distracting. The strengths of the novel are more traditional features: an interesting protagonist who experiences growth and learns life's lessons.

Bye Forever, I Guess, by Jodi Meadows

Ingrid has a secret passion: curating a data feed dedicated to wrong number texts.  People seem to always be sending texts to the wrong numbers and the examples that people send to her can be hilarious.

Then one day she receives one of her own.  The sender is charming and she starts chatting with him.  When she learns that he likes to do on-line roleplaying, she invites him to join her game.  Soon enough, they are falling for each other.

What they don't initially realize (although he figures it out before she does) is that they are actually classmates.  And so a series of set ups occur where the two of them have near misses.  In the end of course all is revealed and a number of other loose ends including vanquishing a bully ensue.

It's cute and fast-paced, but it's hard to accept that Ingrid could overlook all of the clues regarding her online friend's identity.  There is also a mismatch between the characters' ages and the way they behave.  While there's a token effort to portray Ingrid's adolescent insecurity, she does a remarkable job of dispatching her tormenting ex-friend.  Her feelings for the mystery boy are strikingly level-headed (and his reciprocal feelings are equally grown up).  They simply don't sound like middle schoolers.

While We're Young, by K. L. Walther

Grace, Isa, and Everett are a three-some who have fallen apart.  But Grace hopes to bring them back together with a carefully crafted skip day in Philadelphia. Faking illness, she also manages to get Isa and Everett to join her and the three of them tour through the landmarks of the City of Brotherly Love -- climbing the Museum steps, eating South Philly cheesesteaks, hanging in Rittenhouse Square, and the sheer "joy" of driving and parking around the city.  Grace's plans get complicated by an unknown-to-her romance between Isa and Grace's brother, and the attraction of Everett to Grace.

A loving homage to Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Walther has moved the action to Philadelphia and given the main characters a gender swap, but she's also done a lot more.  I never cared for the movie as I found Bueller selfish and careless.  Grace in contrast is much more sympathetic character.  And the novel overall is a kinder story than the film.  The cost of this is the loss of the cruel humor of the original.  This is a more angsty retelling and the characters straighter.  So, while the inspiration of the novel is clear enough, it does not follow that fans of the movie will find the same things to like here.

Overall, I give this a mixed review.  I enjoyed their tour of Philadelphia.  As I said above, Grace was a kinder and more sympathetic protagonist than Ferris.  But overall, the romances were limp and lacked any spark.  For a lot of professions of love, I didn't see much at all.  And the misunderstandings that caused the kids to become divided and fed the drama were unclear and poorly explained.  I'm not really sure what all the fuss was about.

True Life in Uncanny Valley, by Deb Caletti

Eleanor is obsessed with tech titan Hugo Harrison, founder of an app that allows you to rate people and the developer of Frame, an AI program.  But she's not a tech geek.  She's the illegitimate offspring of the man.  Her Mom had a relationship with Harrison years ago and Eleanor and her older sister Ros were the result.  But Harrison no longer talks to them and Mom refuses to allow Eleanor to contact him.  So, Eleanor hatches her own plan.

With a little planning and a lot of luck, she gets herself employed as a nanny in the household, taking care of her half-brother Arlo.  It's tricky to juggle stories so that neither Harrison nor her mother find out who she is and where she is working, but she mostly works that out.  But her plan to simply get to know her father better gets complicated  when she discovers that Arlo is being exploited and abused by his father.

Being a Deb Caletti novel, there's much more to the story than that.  A short list of subplots would include: an homage to Golden Age comics, a diatribe against William Moulton Marston and Aldous Huxley, a fair smattering of childcare advice, extemporizations on German etymology, an extremely toxic family, a love interest (including one botched sex scene), and a screed against social media, robotics, and artificial intelligence.  Caletti's novels are never boring!  The overall point of all of this is the attack on artificial intelligence and the way it borrows/steals its material from artists. But I found the  repulsive mother and evil elder sister (drawn straight out of Cinderella) far more compelling.  The ending is a hot mess but it's an entertaining read.

The Song of Us, by Kate Fussner

Olivia and Eden fall in love at first sight in their middle school's poetry club.  But it's not smooth sailing.  Olivia has already come out to her parents and has a supporting family.  Eden is still struggling with her identity and has a homophobic father and sick mother.  Olivia wants to announce their relationship to the entire school, but Eden insists that it be kept a secret.

At a party, Eden tries spinning the bottle and kissing boys and when Olivia finds out, cruel recriminations ensue.  But then Olivia has regrets and tries to win Eden back. But Eden is trying to fix herself by learning how to fit in with a popular clique.  Back and forth they go, sorting out their feelings about relationships and about each other through verse and song.  And while Olivia tries to win Eden back with a grand gesture, in the end the reality is that at their age important decisions will be made by others.

A beautiful and bittersweet verse novel about first love and the sorts of mistakes we make in middle school.  I didn't see the intended retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that the blurb promised, but I didn't need to. What I found was a very sweet romance and two girls willing to fight for it.  Ofttimes creative verse is an added benefit.  Delightful!

Say A Little Prayer, by Jenna Voris

Riley and her sister Hannah were raised in the Pleasant Hills Baptist Church, where she's always found comfort in Pastor Young.  But after she comes out as bisexual, the hostile reaction of the congregation and Pastor Young drives her away.  And when Hannah is expelled from the church for having an abortion, the entire family decides that they have had enough of Pastor Young.  Still, it's a small town and almost everyone she knows is affiliated with the church.  Even Riley's best friend Julia is the pastor's daughter, although they have an agreement  to never mention Julia's father.

Riley gets into a fight defending her sister at school and the principal lays out an ultimatum:  if she wants to avoid getting suspended she'll have to prove her intent to reform by attending Pleasant Hills's upcoming bible camp, led by none other than Pastor Young.  Getting suspended is not an option, so Riley buckles down and goes to camp, spending a week with her old friends and enemies.  She decides from the onset to cope with the week by subtly undermining the program, but as the week progresses she finds that harder to do.

My initial inclination was to cast this book off as the usual dig against Evangelical Christianity.  And the depiction of Pastor Young breaks no new ground.  He's your typical two-dimensional hypocrite/bad guy that YA novels like to truck out.  But the novel surprised me for its more nuanced views of the teenagers' faith and beliefs. That background, combined with a well-paced story that added humor and a small touch of platonic romance, provided a very readable story about young people hewing their own path through religion.