Sunday, October 13, 2024
Hunger, by Donna Jo Napoli
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
The Color of Sound, by Emily Barth Isler
To get away from her family Rosie explores the property and runs across a peculiar girl her age. Through some time travel magic, the girl turns out to be Rosie's own mother. While Rosie frets a bit about impacting the future by interacting with her past-Mom, she is able to use the experience to learn why her mother is so controlling. At a pivotal moment, she is also able to repair their relationship by solving a crisis in her young Mom's life.
A touching story of family regrets and legacies that is laser focused on being a Mother-Daughter Bookclub read (there are even discussion questions at the end of the book!). I found myself getting annoyed by the way that mom's anxiety is portrayed and excused. I also bristled at the or the heavy handed discussion about social interactions between children of different ages. It felt like a kind of story that someone let Rosie's overbearing mother edit for appropriate content. That made things safe, but not necessarily fun.
Those objections aside, I loved the magical time travel angle and the device of daughter teaching mother in the past (which of course was more famously done in Back to the Future). I also enjoyed the fact that both Rosie and her mother have synthesia and hear music as color, an idea that has been explored in nother middle readers.
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Break To You, by Neil Shusterman, Debra Young, and Michelle Knowlden
The meat of the story though is an unusual romance. Strictly segregated, boys and girls don't interact. But when Adriana accidentally leaves her journal at the jail library, it is discovered by Jon, who reads and writes in it before leaving it for her. The two develop a correspondance, clandestinely writing entries and leaving the book hidden on the shelves for the other to find later. Soon, simply writing to each other is not enough and Adriana and Jon hatch a plan to find a way to meet face to face. Doing so sets in motion a series of events with tragic consequences.
The story is gripping and briskly paced. The characters are well developed and diverse, illustrating a variety of different incarceration experiences. The adults are far less interesting, but do a good job of moving things forward. The end, while unexpected, is satisfyingly open-ended. I enjoyed the book, but I doubt it will do much more than entertain. The authors bring up a number of flaws in the justice and corrections systems, but it is unlikely readers will make much of a connection between these one-dimensional baddies and the real world issues that exist.
Tuesday, September 03, 2024
The No-Girlfriend Rule, by Christen Randall
The new group is made up solely of young women, racially diverse, and representative of a variety of gender and sexual identities. The woman who runs the group is all about building a supportive and safe environment. In a nutshell, it's everything Chris's group is not. And when Hollis finds that she not only likes them better but also, for the first time in her life feels she has real friends, it causes her to question why she cares so much for Chris. And while breaking up seems unthinkable, there's no denying that she is discovering that there's so much more to life than being some guy's girlfriend.
I was initially going to write this off as a fluffy romance set amidst table-top gamers, but it has a surprising amount of substance. Dungeons and Dragons (and gamer culture as a whole) is notoriously misogynistic. Randall takes some pretty easy shots at that at the start, but then she imagines what a campaign would be like if it wasn't and Hollis's group is a wonderful exploration of how one could play the game without succumbing to toxic masculinity. I'm sure the discussion has been had in the gamersphere but I've never seen it in fiction before and it's eye-opening.
Beyond that is a really strong story of Hollis's growth from an anxious and dependent girlfriend, unable to see her own self-worth, to a young woman with contributions to make and a right to be loved. It's hardly smooth sailing and she has a lot of very relatable struggles with doubt and insecurity, but the honesty of the portrayal makes the payoff at the end so much more moving. She also has a very authentic struggle with her sexual identity when her heart leads her towards a girl in the group -- a search which is never fully resolved and feels very satisfactory being left as such.
Throw in a couple other topics like body images, clinical anxiety, and abusive relationships, and you get a lot of value for a story about girls and gaming.
Friday, August 30, 2024
Such Charming Liars, by Karen M. McManus
Sunday, August 25, 2024
Leila and the Blue Fox, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (ill by Tom de Freston)
Mom is tracking an Arctic Blue Fox, who they have named Miso to learn more about the impact of climate change. Searching for a new home, Miso is undertaking an epic migration of her own, traveling what will eventually be a 2700 mile trek from Norway to Canada.
Beautifully illustrated, this short and quick read deftly merges two very different stories (the reconciliation of mother and daughter and Miso's instinctive fight for survival) into a seemless story about the travels we take and what we hold on to.