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.

The City of Lost Cats, by Tanya Lloyd Kyi

Left with a neglectful aunt who would rather rush off every evening to work at Municipal Hall, twelve year-old Fiona wants to do something more exciting this summer than the dance class she's been signed up for.  And when she stumbles across an abandoned old mansion full of feral cats, she thinks she's found it.  The mansion, referred to as 'The City" by its feline inhabitants has provided a community for strays and abandoned cats.  Fiona, abandoned by the adults around her is sympathetic to their plight and helps care for them.  

When she discovers that a dastardly developer (who also happens to be her aunt's boyfriend) has tricked Municipal Hall into giving him the permits to tear down the mansion and put up luxury apartments, Fiona and the cats leap into action to save the city of last cats. And while it would seem a child and a bunch of abandoned cats would not have the resources, they manage to save the day with the help of their local library and some sympathetic city workers.

An amusing light-hearted adventure of brave girls, adventuresome kitties, helpful librarians, a pair of workmen who love to demolish things, and two lost parakeets that speak in verse.  All of them come together in a ridiculously overlapping series of coincidences that lead to everything turning out perfectly in the end. While lacking much seriousness, the story does celebrate community activism in an easy going way that will appeal to cat-loving middle school readers.

All the Stars Align, by Gretchen Schreiber

Within Piper's family, the women have always known their true love at first sight.  This quasi-magical trait, referred to as the Blessing, is a tradition that has ensured many happily-ever-afters for Piper's aunts and grandmother. So, it's something of a scandal that Piper's parents have divorced.  Is the Blessing's power fading?  The aunts and Piper are determined to keep the tradition alive.  This comes in two ways:  trying to get her parents to reconcile and also to make sure that she only falls for the right boy.

To most people, that would be Leo, Piper's best friend.  They've been together since they were little.  But Piper has never really felt any strong feeling for Leo.  Certainly not in the way that the Blessing should make her feel.  And instead, Piper discovers that another boy -- Forrest -- is the one.  She can literally feel it viscerally, the telltale symptoms of the Blessing.  But somehow, it doesn't quite feel right.  So, instead of happily ever after, Piper finds that fate is overrated and that even when true love is right in front of you, it may not be what you really need.

While an interesting premise, the novel was disappointing.  For a romance, the story and the characters are surprisingly lackluster.  Neither Leo nor Forrest really had much of a spark.  We get very little background on Leo, which is surprising as they allegedly have all of this history together.  And Forrest is something of a wimp.  You know it's a bad sign when the almost-kisses are more compelling than the kisses.  This is romance without passion and it all seemed bothersome.  Furthermore, Leo's attempts to sabotage Piper and Forrest came off as creepy and possessive, really turning me off to him.

In general, the storytelling is muddy, with the point of certain scenes (like the weekend at the camp) lost amidst the details.  Or the way that seemingly interesting details are introduced (e.g., Piper's disability, her father's culinary skills, Diana's costuming skills, etc.), but never fill any meaningful purpose in the story.  The details are lovely an flesh things out, but still need to come together to some meaningful effect.

Adventures of Mary Jane, by Hope Jahren

Based on a briefly mentioned character in Huckleberry Finn, Jahren has crafted the story of Mary Jane, who bravely travels down the Mississippi Rover in adventures worthy of Mark Twain's protagonist.  The story begins when Mary Jane, living with her Ma and her grandfather in fur-trapping country up north, gets summoned to help her aunt and uncle down river.  When she arrives, she finds her uncle incapacitated and the family starving.  And when the aunt and uncle die from fever, she ends up caring for her two cousins.  They are sent yet deeper south, where she encounters the sin of slavery first hand and has to use her wits to protect herself and her cousins.  All of this serves as background that fleshes out the mysterious girl that stole Huck's heart.

While stuffed to the gills with historical details that make the book feel a bit like a history lesson (and definitely like book report material), the adventures are rousing enough to make this 400-page novel an enticing read.  Some of the details at the end get confusing, but the story is enjoyable and Mary Jane is an adventuresome good-hearted heroine.

Birds on the Brain, by Uma Krishnaswami

In this charming sequel to Book Uncle and Me, Yasmin's best friend Reeni is setting out on a campaign of her own:  to get the people of her town to participate in Bird Count India.  It's not just about her town.  The bird count is world wide!  But people don't seem to care and worse, some of them don't even like birds!

While Reeni is trying to stir up interest in birds, she learns that in matters concerning the environment there can be competing priorities:  a neighborhood ironing woman who is losing her livelihood because her coal-powered iron has being outlawed, a bird's nesting site that is threatened by plans to put solar panels on the roofs.  And even between friends, Reeni and Yasmin find that their respective causes (birds and literacy) are in seeming conflict.  But as they did before, the children summon some inner courage and enlist their parents, neighbors, and teachers to take the cause to the government and make their city a better place.

Still very full of cultural and political details that show a snippet of everyday life and local politics from an Indian perspective, Krishnaswami's books show children how, wherever they live, that they can make a difference.  The sequel follows pretty close to the formula devised in the first book and so lacks the originality that made the story so remarkable, but it is no less delightful to read.