When You're Brave Enough, by Rebecca Bendheim

Growing up, Lacey and Grace have always stuck together, but the thing about being friends with extroverted Grace is that it's hard to be noticed by anyone else from the shadows.  So, when Lacey and her family move away, Lacey takes advantage of the opportunity to try to figure herself out and shine on her own.  At her new school, she goes out for the school play and gets selected for the lead part.  She finds herself accepted into the popular clique.  Things are starting to look up.

However, there is a catch.  The school's unofficial tradition is that on the final night of the show that the two leads will kiss for real.  Lacey has never kissed anyone before and she isn't sure that she wants her first kiss to be so public in front of all her friends and family.  And she isn't sure she wants the kiss to be with someone she doesn't like in the right way.

Outside of the play, she is preparing for her Bat Mitzvah and struggling nearly as much with the speech she will give during the ceremony.  But in the end, she finds that her search for the right decision in the play and her search for the right things to say in front of her congregation are part of the same struggle:  finding the strength to make the right decision despite the difficulty.

A fairly chaste middle school story about making the decisions that are right for you.  Supported by her family, her faith, and ultimately her friends, Lacie's worries and the choices she makes will be relatable to other fourteen year-olds.  The story hits all of the right notes, albeit in awfully predictable ways (for example, by invoking Anne Frank).

However, I found the pacing and exposition very uneven and difficult to follow.  So many really important scenes (the climactic kissing scene or Lacey's D'var Torah, for example) are underplayed and even buried in the story.  And other themes (like Lacey and Grace's relationship) are revealed late and in strange ways.  I understand wanting to do something original, but the story was often difficult to followat key points.  This is usually where I feel another round of drafts and stronger editing would have helped.

The Secret to Belonging, by Megan E Freeman

Living in the shadow of her drug-addicted brother, our unnamed protagonist is largely neglected by her parents.  Her brother acts up and all attention and resources are directed to "helping" him.  Time and time again, he breaks their hearts by relapsing and Mom and Dad forgive him again.  It's time to get away.  But when her college fund is stolen to pay for another round of rehab, it seems that any chance of getting away has disappeared.

Then her best friend suggests a study abroad program for high schoolers through Rotary.  With dreams of spending a year in Rome, she applies and is accepted.  But rather than getting to go to Italy as she requested, she is offered Norway.  And not just Norway, but far far in the north.  She doesn't even know where Norway is located but now she is about to live above the Arctic Circle.

It's remote and alien, but the change is transformative.  Freed from the destructive cycles of her family and presented with an alternative, she thrives and blooms.

Told in brisk verse, the story is both heartbreaking and empowering.  She is both terribly unlucky for the family she comes from and blessed by the family she moves to -- a beautiful fantasy of escape from hell. I laughed a lot, cried a little, and in the end was jealous as hell at how wonderful things turn out.  Who hasn't wanted to escape their lives to become someone else?

Chasing After Knight, by Heather Buchta

Alexa Brooks, valedictorian, track star, and general overachiever has a lot going for her.  But for the past four years, she's carried the weight of the one who got away and the boy whose heart she broke -- Carson Knight.  She wants to make amends but the problem is that he's now Cayden McKnight, an A-list movie heartthrob and Hollywood's best known bad boy.  The reputation doesn't suit him and Alexa knows in her heart that she bears some responsibility for him turning out that way.

Encouraged by her best friend, the girls hatch a plan to meet up with McKnight again and simultaneously to plot out a campaign to blow his cover and expose what a sweet guy he really is.  But Alexa has at least as many things wrong about Cayden as she has right and the further she pursues him, the more her own life falls into chaos.  She risks losing everything she's built up to pursue this one great obsession.

I really liked Buchta's first novel, Beyond the Break and picked up this one on that basis.  But they're very different books and while the heroine of the first novel had a very solid moral core, Alexa's priorities here seem more than a little off.  The discipline that gave her all of her accolades (athletic prowess, academic excellence, and leadership skills) are nowhere to be found when she's blowing her life savings on secret plane tickets to Los Angeles and sneaking into clubs.  And while I suppose there's something romantic about throwing away your life for the love of your life, it all seemed very very unnecessary and cringeworthy.

As with the first novel, it's all well written and easy to get through, but Alexa is a train wreck and it wasn't pleasant to sit on the sidelines and watch her screw up her life.  That there is a last minute deus ex machina moment that rescues her is nice, but hardly redeems a life poorly lived.

The Lions' Run by Sara Pennypacker

The other boys at the orphanage tease Lucas for being un petit eclair -- a soft pastry, a coward -- but Lucas isn't afraid to stand up to defend the weak against the strong.  And when he rescues a bag of kittens that have been tossed into the river to drown, the act sets of a chain of events.

The Second World War is entering its final days and in occupied France, little acts of bravery will get you the bad sort of notice.  Any one who wants to survive lays low.  But Lucas has a hard time doing that.  Searching for a safe place to stash the kittens, he stumbles over a young English girl who is trying to smuggle her horse out of France.  And they reluctantly agree to keep each other's secrets.

Lucas is not yet done doing his good deeds.  He smuggles goodies to his fellow orphans.  He slips extra rations to a family that has a suspiciously large number of mouths to feed.  His everyday acts of kindness bring him into contact with the Resistance, which allows him to become a courier.  And a rash act of loyalty to a young mother brings him into dangerous conflict with the Nazis. It might all very dangerous but what else can one do?   And he is far from alone:  everywhere there are people helping each other and resisting the occupiers.

Like her Pax books, Pennypacker has created another formidable allegory masquerading as a children's book.  As in those books, the material is definitely on the intense side: animal cruelty, genocide, eugenics, child abduction, and concentration camps, amongst other topics.  Her overall theme about our obligation as humans to choose, in the face of fascism, to either commit small acts of resistance or to acquiesce to collaboration is strong tea.  There is no way for a single lone orphan to topple an evil regime, but if no one tries then there is no hope.  That's an important message in a time when resistance seems to carry such a high cost.

It's intelligently written, entertaining, and thought-provoking story.  If one is going to ban books, these are the type of books a government should fear.

Some Mistakes Were Made, by Kristin Dwyer

When Ellis's family began to fall apart, she found herself spending more and more time at her friend Easton's house.  An old friend of Ellis's father, Easton's mother Sandry virtually adopted Ellis; feeding her and giving her a place to stay.  Ellis even had her own room in the house, but she preferred to crawl into Easton's bed every night for platonic spooning.

But then a tragic series of events occurred, where members of Ellis's family betrayed Easton's family and Ellis was sent to live far away with a distant aunt.  Now, a year later, Ellis has been invited back to help celebrate Sandry's birthday.  While reluctant, Ellis decides to come and face the memories of her young years and re-visit the hurt she felt when she was sent away.  The complex dynamics of Ellis and Easton's relationship are dredged up and just about everyone has pain to share.

This is one of these YA stories that I can see teens loving for the pathos and the pain, but a grownup reader is just going to cringe.  The problems start with the extremely toxic nature of Ellis and Easton's relationship -- full of blame and anger, but completely unable to truly accept personal responsibility.  It's a natural outgrowth of the unhealthy codependency they built up.  And the fault quickly spreads to their families -- not only Ellis's neglectful and selfish parents but also Easton's family.  What parent would allow unrelated adolescents to sleep together in their house for years?  To the extent that there is any development of the adult characters, it seems that they are basically checked out on their parenting duties.

It isn't that just some mistakes were made.  It's that a lot of mistakes were made and compounded again and again.  And that these characters can dredge up their grudges and their bitter memories repeatedly doesn't make for uplifting reading.  So, yes, there's plenty of pain here, but you just wish that they would all just walk away from each other.   With the volume of past bad decisions, the characters' inability to forgive, and everyone's tendency to repeat and recycle the same stuff again and again, this is plain exhausting.  I kept hoping for a breakthrough, but it just never comes.  

So, young readers, pay attention:  this novel may have "all the feels" but it is a textbook for what bad relationships, child neglect, and a general inability to grow look like.  It is well enough written, but the overwhelmingly unhealthy nature of the relationships depicted was a huge turn off.

Kestrel Takes Flight, by Joy McCullough

Kestrels are small, but fierce raptors that are capable of finding homes in a wide variety of places -- a point that sixth-grader Kestrel notes with pride.  One night Kestrel gets her own opportunity to prove it.  Her mother spirits her out of the house that they share with Kestrel's grandfather.  They end up at a unique center where Karelians, a special type of dog bred for interacting with bears, are trained to help keep humans and bears separated.  It's fascinating work and for a good cause but Kestrel is terrified of dogs and immediately misses her grandfather.

With time, Kestrel settles in her new home and becomes more comfortable with the dogs, learning their nuances and how to interact with them.  At the same time, she grows to understand that her grandfather was actually abusing them and that she is better off in her new home.

Told in prose verse, this story about overcoming emotional abuse and finding a new family plays all the appropriate emotional notes in an age-appropriate way.  The verse itself is disappointing.  It lacks any particularly memorable passages, being more of a sketch draft of the story where short sentences replace storytelling.  It leaves gaps in storytelling and covers a multitude of narrative flaws, but feels superficial and unfinished.

K-Jane, by Lydia Kang

Living in white-bread Nebraska, there are not a lot of Koreans around and Jane has always been more into the Huskers and American food than anything to do with Korea. Her white friends are actually far more interested than she is in all things Korean (K-pop, K-dramas, and K-beauty).  But with the impending birth of her baby brother, Jane suddenly feels that she and her incipient sibling have been deprived of their heritage and she becomes committed to rectifying that.

Her solution is to research aspects of Korean culture and create videos about them.  She knows better than to post them to a general audience and simply shares them with her cousins.  But what starts as a small little hobby becomes so all-consuming that soon it is impacting Jane's school work and affecting her friendships.  And when her parents find out, they are none too pleased -- and that is become the videos accidentally get released to the world and go viral!

Looking at the cover, I feared that the book would be heavy with pop references and light on character development and almost didn't check it out.  But I actually found that it was actually the reverse and enjoyed it a good deal. There's plenty Korean stuff in the book, but the message in the end is that one isn't obligated to know one's background or like things just because they are considered cultural treasures.  In sum, a light and fun read with a classic YA message about finding one's place within one's culture.