Eliza, from Scratch, by Sophia Lee

When a scheduling mishap in her senior year lands Eliza in a Culinary Arts class instead of AP Physics, she worries that her stellar GPA and her shot at being the class salutatorian is endangered.  She needs that AP class and the weight it carries to keep her at the top.  But far worse is that she knows nothing at all about cooking and the likelihood of bombing it is high in her mind.

In class, that proves to be the case.  Worst of all is Wesley, the class's best cook.  With a chip on his shoulder for the times that smart kids like Eliza have looked down on him, he mocks her lack of skills, setting off a battle of wills between them.  While Wesley is most likely to win the end-of-class cooking contest, Eliza is determined to unseat him and prove that she can be brilliant in any subject.  Sure of their talent and success, both of them refuse to cede to each other and predictably fall in love.

But more than a love story, Eliza's search to find a culinary edge sends her to her mother and a rediscovery of her grandmother's cuisine.  Cooking with her mother heals a rift in the family and builds an appreciation in heritage.

Largely formulaic and sparse on surprises, the novel delivers what it promises.  What it may lack in originality, it makes up for with character development -- in particular, the strong chemistry between Eliza and Wesley.  This is the rare case of a really fun and sexy romance, with strong build up and some pretty hot writing.  There's some attempt to bring in bigger themes of classism and cultural elitism, but largely this is a story about two young people learning that there are many ways to succeed in this world.

What Comes After, by Katie Bayerl

When Mari dies, she finds herself in Paradise Gate, a way station where one decides if your next stop will be the Afterlife or the Eternal Abyss of 3am.  She has ninety days to redeem herself, earning points by focusing on positive emotions, practicing "youga," and eating lots of kale.  But it's a hard path.  Her mother, who died a few days before her and thus has little time remaining, is in danger of flunking her exams and ending up in the Abyss.  Mari could soon follow.

As Mari struggles to sort her life out (beginning with a big question of why she died), she comes to understand that something is wrong at Paradise Gate.  People do not necessary pass on and Mari discovers evidence that the leaders are corrupt and the system is crumbling.  When she steps forward and joins a plot to expose the corruption, surprising things happen.

Billed as a farce, the story does start off as strong satire.  Life after death, it seems, is basically set up like a high school with meaningless classes, social cliques, exam pressure, and lots of sneaking about.  Once the gimmicks of this world are defined however, Bayerl gets lost.  The novel is stuck in a literary dead end.  To dig out, we get the strange drama of a conspiracy, an underground, and a revolution.  But the revolution doesn't really work either, so the ending becomes a jumpy montage of third party accounts which avoid the need to really tell Mari's story anymore.  Every thing wraps up nicely in the end, but the story withers away.  Cute concept, but never really reached its potential.

The Uncertainty Principle, by Joshua Davis and Kal Kini-Davis

Mia, her little brother, and her parents are adrift on an old boat in the Caribbean and it is all Mia's fault.  When she had a breakdown at school, throwing food against the walls of the cafeteria, they decided it was time for a change of scene.  But Mia is not the only problem here.  Her mother is a germophobe and won't let them socialize with others so they stick to sparsely populated islands.  Mia spends her days perfecting a homegrown solar cell to power her equally homegrown satellite transmitter.  One day, she hopes to use it to call her best friend back at school to explain why she flew off the rails.

The uneasy status quo in Mia's family gets disrupted when they meet two unusual families, each of whom have a child about Mia's age who force her to make decisions that will change her life.

A quirky novel with an unusual father-and-son writing team.  From the acknowledgements, it would seem that the story is mostly from Kal (the son) while his father supervised and edited.  Regardless of who wrote what, I was suitably impressed by the depth that they gave Mia -- a young woman with a believable mix of insight and immaturity to make her truly interesting.  The supporting characters never get to do much but I didn't mind that as everything is really about Mia and her growth. 

Old School, by Gordon Korman

For the past six years, Dexter has been raised by his grandmother and the other residents of The Pines, a retirement community.  Being the youngest permanent resident, he's been doted over by the old people.  School?  He is getting all the schooling he needs from the various talents residing here.  But when a truant officer shows up, Dexter is told that he'll have to go to a real school, with kids his own age.

He hasn't socialized with anyone like that in ages and his first days of middle school are rough. He is singled out and bullied for his old-people clothes and his old-fashioned way of speaking.  But slowly he reveals his own particular contributions and makes friends.  Then, an unfortunate incident leads to his suspension and suddenly he and his classmates realize just how much Dexter actually does belong in school.

A cute story that suffers from the author's peculiar perception that the residents of The Pines are a lot older than would be normally plausible.  He hasn't populated it with a twelve year-old's grandparents but with the author's own grandparents.  Sorry, but old people don't listen to Benny Goodman and talk about the Great War anymore.  They listen to Jefferson Airplane and talk about Vietnam.  They are not the Greatest Generation, they are Baby Boomers.  It's cute having the old people teaching the kids to play bingo and shuffleboard, but its a dated stereotype.

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.