Chaos Theory, by Nic Stone

A story of two young people with an incredible amount of emotional baggage who fall into an ill-advised relationship.

Shelbi suffers from a bipolar disorder that sends her into extreme bouts of depression.  While medication helps, keeping her head down and out of any relationship is the best course.  But she can't help herself with Andy, who seems nice and sensitive, even if the first time she meets him it is due to him drunk dialing her.

Andy wants to be a good guy and, after Shelbi explains her issues, he promises he can be trustworthy.  However, that's hard to do as he's dealing with the recent death of his baby sister and a somewhat more shocking loss (which is not revealed at first).  His recourse to his problems is to escape into the bottle.  Shelbi recognizes the risks, but she still wants to believe Andy when he promises it is all under control.  It isn't and when Andy falls off the wagon one time too many and hurts Shelbi, things fall entirely apart.

A brisk, fast-moving story that feels authentic and addresses emotional health issues.  The writing, however, lacks clarity at times and Stone has an excessive supply of melodrama to toss in from time to time when the story lags.  The characters are strong and really make the story.  Despite their faults, Andy and Shelbi are both sympathetic protagonists, but one wishes the adults had been a bit faster on their toes in keeping their children on the rails.  A lot of well-meaning denial causes a lot of unnecessary pain (and some learning experiences).

I Kick and I Fly, by Ruchira Gupta

A gripping story of an Indian girl named Heera who lives in a red-light district in Bihar.  Raised with the understanding that when she reaches puberty her father or brother will pimp her out, Heera wants more in life than to be a prostitute.  But faced with bullying at school and the hostility of her father, receiving an education seems like an impossible dream.

Things change when she starts to study kung fu through a local program for endangered girls.  She excels at the sport and gains confidence.  However, the more she becomes determined to break free, the harder the forces arrayed against her try to keep her down.  Several times, her martial arts skills actually save her life.  Featuring unapologetically explicit depictions of child prostitution and international sex trafficking, the compelling story is impossible to forget.

The author, an Emmy winner for her documentary about the same subject, has created a very digestible novel for young adults.  The strength of the story is it veracity.  While names are changed, every hero and villain in the story is based on a real person.  The storytelling leans towards the melodramatic and the events depicted are conveniently coincidental (probably for the purposes of compressing the storyline), but this helps move everything along at a fine pace.  While an upsetting read, the novel balances its grim depictions and its urgent calls for reform with glimmers of hope that provide what is ultimately an inspiring conclusion.

The Ghost of Us, by James L. Sutter

Cara has spent years trying to live down the infamy of a sexting mistake by hosting a YouTube channel about ghost hunting.  Accompanied by her Christian friend Holly, she's searching for evidence of the existence of ghosts.  So, when she stumbles across a real one -- Aiden, a kid in her school who was killed in an accident last year -- she finally has something that can make her famous and get her out of her deadend town.  

Aiden's ghost, however, has goals of his own.  He wants Cara to ask his sister Meredith to the Senior Prom to raise her out of a year of depression and mourning.  Cara agrees to help out and (against the advice of her friend Holly) starts romancing Meredith.  While initially she does this as part of a deal to be able to use Aiden for her channel, she finds herself falling for Meredith for real.  But what will happen when Meredith learns the truth?

A rather clever supernatural romance that has a lot to say about self-acceptance, as well as some wise words about friendships and familial bonds.  The pacing is off and things get compressed at the end, but Sutton has created very full characters who interact nicely.  Sutton manages the rare feat of being a male author who can cross the gender divide and create authentic female characters.  The writing is witty and the story is lively and fun.

Unbecoming, by Seema Yasmin

In this nearly-fictional YA dystopian novel, Texas is imagined as a place that has outlawed and criminalized all abortions.  Even hormonal drugs and basic medical supplies (like the gel for ultrasounds) are carefully monitored and regulated.  Some activity is even a capital offense, creating a state of fear.  But in the midst of all that danger, a system of undercover mobile clinics still struggle to make OB-GYN services available, including birth control, IVF, and abortion.  Working against them are not only the police, but gangs of armed vigilantes trying to track down the renegades at all cost.  Nearly fiction or maybe not fictional enough?

Laylah and Noor are two Muslim teens who have taken it upon themselves to produce a guide for their fellow Texas teens about what to do if you find out that you're pregnant and want to terminate it.  Noor is a diehard journalist with a conviction to getting her facts right and keeping the guide relevant and up-to-date.  That's a particular challenge when the people who are providing services are constantly on the move and trying to stay hidden.  Laylah is the scientific mind with plans to enter a pre-med program and become an OB-GYN.  So when she discovers that she is pregnant, she is afraid of what the pregnancy will do to her career plans.  Suddenly, the guide is even more important to her and her fact checking work takes on a personal urgency.

For a book vying for Most Likely to Be Banned From Your School Library, the novel disappoints.  A great premise and a strong start get quickly bogged down in a series of poorly paced adventures as Laylah struggles to find a source for medications for her abortion.  Whether it's to create dramatic tension or to simply pad out the story, everything is s t r e t c h e d out and made entirely more complicated than it needs to be.  As the story progressed, I great more and more annoyed at the digressions.  This is topped off towards the end by a very powerful but largely unrelated story that packs a punch but serves to suck the energy out of the climax.  We get feels and a lot of deep thoughts but no decent release of the dramatic tension of the main plot.  

It's a gutsy book with a lot to say and occasional laugh-out-loud moments, but overall poor storytelling.

Six More Months of June, by Daisy Garrison

Caplan and Mina have been next door neighbors and best friends through their school years.  Mina is shy and withdrawn, an outcast at school.  Caplan is popular and dating the school's Queen Bee Hollis.  But there has always been some sort of connection between Caplan and Mina that no one can explain (but people assume that it is some sort of crush).  But now, approaching the end of high school, Caplan is forced to face some uncomfortable truths about his feelings for Mina when she starts dating his best friend Quinn.  And as things explode emotionally around them and the curtain closes on their childhoods, a reckoning comes to all.

A beautifully written story that has all of the tropes but none of the expected endings.  The biggest surprise is Hollis who, far from being some uber-popular bitch, ends up being the nicest person of all.  Yet each of the other main characters (Caplan, Mina, and Quinn) manage to surprise with their independent non-stereotypical actions.  The book is littered with favorite scenes and fulls of brilliant quotes and one suspects that Garrison has spent her lifetime collecting favorite anecdotes to stuff into this first novel.

Anecdote packing, unfortunately, is also the weakness of the book.  For while the book is an exquisitely exposition upon the cusp of adulthood, it is bereft of an actual story.  The plot boils down to "four kids graduate and realize that they love each other in ways that transcend romantic or sexual feelings" and that's basically it.  You'll want to read it very slowly and carefully to suck out all the goodness, but in the end there isn't much substance here -- no deep meaning, no emotional climax -- just a sense of young people (through the author) making fantastic observations about life and growing up.

On the Bright Side, by Anna Sortino

For Ellie, living at a boarding school for deaf students was a godsend, helping her come out and thrive.  So, when the school closes and she's forced to come home and finish her senior year at home, it's hard to adjust to being the only deaf student at the public high school. And it's never been easy with her family.  Her parents are less than understanding about her needs and subconsciously favor her (hearing) older sister.  She can't wait until she graduates so she can get away from everything and everybody.

After a pretty rough introduction on her first day of school, the counselor arranges for chronic overachiever Jackson to help show Ellie around.  Ellie resents Jackson's enthusiasm despite his earnest (albeit awkward) attempts to ingratiate himself to her.  However, being a romance, it just takes some time and few more awkward incidents for the two of them to find each other and connect.  And along the way, we explore the many difficulties of building a relationship between a hearing person and a deaf one.

But there's more to the story.  Jackson has been experiencing random loss of motor control and sensation, and bouts of vertigo and nausea.  After some misdignosis and a harrowing scene where Ellie has to rescue him, the doctors eventually determine that Jackson has Multiple Sclerosis.  Faced with such a complex and terrifying condition, Jackson has to work through his shock, grief, and anger.  Ellie tries to help him, but it's a lot for a young love to take on.  Never mind that she has her own issues with her family to deal with.

It's a busy story with lots of issues (disability, prejudice, abuse, amongst others) that works surprisingly well and manages to bring up a lot about the experience of being hearing disabled.  It helps that the author is deaf and she draws heavily on her own life to bring in fascinating details (like the mistakes that beginners at ASL tend to make or the need to provide good lighting at parties where deaf people are attending) to fill out the story.  I enjoyed those little bits while appreciating a satisfying romance that, while not straying too far from form, still delivered an above average novel about two young people struggling with some major difficulties and overcoming them.  Eschewing an overly rosy ending, the story's issues and problems are addressed and we are left with a hopeful future for the two protagonists.

Unstuck, by Barbara Dee

Lyla has plans for a major fantasy novel.  The story's so complicated that she has trouble explaining it and it's going to take several books to cover the whole tale.  In other words, it will be truly epic!  At least, the story will be when she can get around to start writing it!  But there is background to research, geography to sort out (maybe she should draft out a map?), and a whole genealogy to draft out; to say nothing about coming up with names for all of the characters and places.  With all those distractions to figure out, it's understandable that she's struggled to put even a single sentence to paper.  And while she has a very supportive creative writing teacher, she really needs to get started!

Back home, her older sister seems to be suffering from a form of writer's block of her own.  She's supposed to be writing her application essays for college but hasn't gotten started.  Mom and Dad are going crazy nagging her and homelife has become unbearably tense.  Lyla wonders if any of the advice her teacher is giving her about writing could help her sister as well?  But Lyla is also confused by her sister's unwillingness to try.

Dee is really one of the best contemporary writers at capturing middle school mindsets.  Lyla has all of the awkward tween-ness of the age -- negotiating new school, new friends, and new avocations.  Rebelling against things she judges to be "babyish" while still struggling to understand the world to come, Lyla bravely experiments.

Dee's description of writer's block and real advice on how to work through it is a clever topic for a book, suitable for all writers, young and old.