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.

The Wonderful Wishes of B, by Katherin Nolte

Ten year-old Bea has experienced a lot of pain lately and she has five wishes connected with those losses. She wishes her grandmother had not died, that her best friend had not moved away, that her Mom could keep her business afloat, that her Dad would visit, and that her grandma's old doll would come alive and become her little sister.  And, if nothing else, she wishes she could become like Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and lose her heart so it would stop aching.

A new boy moves to town and convinces her that his own grandmother is a witch and can perform magic.  For the price of doing some things for the witch that Bea grows to regret, the woman is willing to grant Bea's wishes.  And while grandmother can't manage to grant all of the wishes, Bea's father does reappear with promises of his own to grant Bea's remaining wishes.  But in the end, Bea discovers that there is no magic fix for the losses we feel and that a heart is made for feeling the bad and the good.

A folksy middle reader featuring small bits of magic, adorable kitties, and plenty of friendly and quirky side characters.  While a few bad things happen, this is a light and safe story that manages to reach a predictable conclusion with a few  unexpected surprises along the way!

Emmett, by L C Rosen

Emmett is popular -- a fact that he attributes immodestly to how nice he is.  He's always thinking of other people's needs.  He's even taken it upon himself to help all of his friends find partners and he's overjoyed with planning ways in which his single friends can find each other.

He has no interest in finding a guy for himself.  He doesn't mind hooking up for sex, but getting into a committed relationship will inevitably lead to heartache and Emmett has no intention of getting hurt!  The human brain doesn't physically stop growing until you're twenty-five and so that's the earliest he'll be ready to find his life partner.

It's all very neat, but Emmett's perfect world is starting to come apart.  A string of matchmaking failures make Emmett question his skills.  And when he hurts some of his friends in the process, he doubts whether he is really as nice as he likes to to think he is.  But most grievous of all is the nagging doubt in his mind that maybe (just maybe) he would like to have a romance of his own.

I'm not sure that we need yet another adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma for the YA market (even if this version is the most flaming gay boy version to date), but my primary complaint is that I found it hard to really engage with the story.  Perhaps, because the characters really didn't seem like high schoolers, but rather more like college students.  You don't really get the feeling that Emmett and his friends live at home with their parents.  Their lives seem to mostly center around parties and flirting.  That's very Jane Austen, but it's not very American high school.  There's a fair amount of emortional drama, but not really any emotional depth and the result is more satire than romance.

Hunger, by Donna Jo Napoli

Life in the Irish countryside has alwatys been a bit precarious.  Lorraine and her family lease land from an English lord and subsist on the potatoes they grow, selling their grain harvest for income.  But when the crop fails in 1846, things start to look dire.  And in the year that follows, mass starvation leads to societal collapse.  

In the midst of the suffering, Lorraine befriends the naive but kind-hearted daughter of their lord named Susanna.  Miss Susannais a complicated character: arrogant, ignorant, and rude, but she nonetheless performs important acts oif charity that ultimately keep Lorraine alive.

Based entirely on historical fact, this is a story that won't exactly qualify as a pleasure read.  So while Napoli writes excellent historical fiction, but it's hard to imagine too many young people who would pick this book to read on the beach.  That's a shame as the book doesn't just serve as a historical account, but raises significant questions about how racism and ignorance affect the topic of immigration and of charity.

The Color of Sound, by Emily Barth Isler

Feeling burdened by her mother's expectations, violin prodigy Rosie declares that she's "on strike" for the forseeable future and not going to play.  Her furious mother punishes her by taking away her internet privileges but still holds out hope that Rosie will return to practicing.  Steaming at each other over the impasse, mother and daughter are forced have to cohabit as they visit Rosie's dying grandmother.

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.

Break To You, by Neil Shusterman, Debra Young, and Michelle Knowlden

A series of bad choices in friends hands Adriana a seven month stretch in the Compass juvenile detention facility.  Allegedly based on novel approaches to rehabilitate young adults and avoid recidivism, Compass is really a morass of selfish and embittered adults who manipulate the children under their control for their own ends.  So much for the social critique element of this team-written novel.

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.

The No-Girlfriend Rule, by Christen Randall

In the six years that Hollis and Chris have been dating, Hollis has been shut out of Chris's Friday night Secrets and Sorcery games.  That's because his group has a strict "no girlfriends allowed" rule -- a rule that Hollis is determined to chip away at.  It's not that Hollis particularly likes the misogynistic and homophobic group that Chris plays with, but she wants to be in Chris's life.  So, Hollis has been studying how to play and she's found a group of her own to play with to get better.

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.