The Unexpected Lives of Ordinary Girls, by J. Anderson Coats

In 1910, in a mining town in Colorado, Stanislava doesn't have a lot of options.  The daughter of Slovenian immigrants, she is expected to marry and have lots of children.  Her family is dirt poor. The boys work with their father at the smelter and meanwhile the girls take care of the babies and the housework.  But until now, Stanislava has been able to go to school and read books.  This has stirred big ideas in her head.  She dreams of actually going to college.  She dreams of renaming herself Sylvia and no longer being looked down upon as a "Bohunk."

But when her older sister runs away and elopes with a Protestant man, Stanislava is pulled out of school and set to work helping her mother get all of the chores done. No longer allowed to go to school or read books, she can feel her dreams slip away.  So, she decides to run away herself to the big city of Denver.  There, she stumbles across the public library and eventually finds a home there.

An entertaining and fast paced adventure of survival against the odds for a young girl trying to eke by a living and running up against sexism, racism, and tradition.  There are a fair share of anachronisms and a fair share of improbably good fortune, but it doesn't detract from the thrill of the story.  Stanislava/Sylvia is intelligent and clever and full of lots of great ideas -- the hallmark of a children's heroine.

Books on the immigrant experience of Eastern European immigrants are few and far between.  While this is hardly an educational book, there is enough period detail here to send a curious reader to the non-fiction shelves.

Butterfly Heart, by Moa Backe Astot

Vilda, a half-Swedish half-Sami teen, has been grown curious about her ethnicity.  Her mother doesn't know Sami and Vilda never got to attend a Sami-speaking school, so Vilda's never learned how the language.  Her grandfather though has been teaching her a few words and she's hungry to learn more.  She also wants to get a gabdde (a traditional ethnic outfit) so she can wear it at festivals and show off her heritage.  But then her grandfather suddenly dies.

Wracked by grief and a realization that learning how to be Sami has just grown all the more harder, she stumbles through the summer trying to piece her plans back together again.  There's a cute older boy who speaks Sami, who she pins her hopes on, but he rejects her as being a child.  She unsuccessfully tries to explain her feelings about not knowing her heritage and losing her grandfather to her bewildered friends.  To top it all of, she's just gotten her first period.

A spare story of grief and search for identity through the eyes of a thirteen year-old.  American audiences won't know much about the Sami -- an indigenous people who live in northern Scandinavia -- but the search for one's heritage and where one fits in should be meaningful to anyone.  Vilda can be pretty mean at times and definitely selfish (and her use of language will trigger some parental readers) but her coarse edges and big feelings struck a realistic note.

17 & Gone, by Nova Ren Suma

Seventeen year-old Lauren sees missing girls.  Girls who ran away, girls who stepped out for a minute, girls who got into the wrong car.  All of them seventeen like her and now gone.  It started when she found an old missing person flyer, but quickly became an obsession as she hunts down more examples and finds out how many of them there are.  How easy it is to become "gone" where you're young and female.  

The girls talk to her, telling her their stories and how to find them.  They tell her the things they wish they could tell their families.  Lauren has become a conduit for them. And in doing so, she loses touch with herself.

A graceful story of a descent into schizophrenia -- a common enough trope in YA.  What makes this one stand out is its theme:  the danger of being female and seventeen.  A lot of seventeen year-old women  disappear. They are hard to find and frequently disappear under circumstances that leave them abandoned and forgotten.  A young woman runs away from home.  Does she disappear because she doesn't want to be found or because she has been abducted?  Or perhaps initially the first and then the latter?  And for those safe at home, how easy is it to become overwhelmed by all the dangers that are out there?  All of the reasons and ways in which a girl can become gone?  And how seemingly little concern there is that so many of them are missing?  The novel, as compelling as it is in its storytelling, is equally unsettling in its message.

A Scar Like A River, by Lisa Graff

Fallon is keeping three secrets inside of her.  One of them is the truth about how she got a deep jagged scar across her face.  The other two are so horrible she can't even think of approaching them.  But when her uncle dies, she realizes that she wants to start talking about these secrets.  To her horror, when she tries to tell someone, she finds that she doesn't know how to do so.

Told in three parts, this story about sexual abuse becomes most compelling in its final section.  There's no real surprise about what  actually happened to Fallon, which creates some drawn out and tedious reading in the first two parts -- one of which addresses her realization that she has to start talking and the other her struggle to actually do so.  It's only in the final section, when speaking out creates complications in her relationships with her family, that the novel becomes suddenly engrossing and original. That's a long battle with little pay-off.  It also does not help that the book is stuffed with fluff (her facial injury, Fallon's mother's illness, a protest at school against the school musical, a classmate who can't pay for her lunches, etc.) that doesn't relate or contribute to the story.

Lies We Tell About the Stars, by Susie Nadler

After the Big One hits San Francisco, Celeste can't find her best friend Nicky.  The library, where he likely was at the time of the quake, has been reduced to rubble.  So when Nicky fails to materialize, people suspect the worst and he is eventually pronounced dead.  However, Celeste knows something:  right before the quake, Nicky was talking about going away, disappearing for a while.  Convinced that her friend is in hiding and not dead, she starts looking for him and finds tantalizing clues that he might still be alive.

Before all of this, they were both obsessed with space and the upcoming missing to Mars.  And as Celeste's search continues, she becomes obsessed with the notion that Nicky may have headed to Cape Canaveral, to be at the launch.  So, Celeste uses her savings to go to Florida in a desperate last effort to find Nicky.  There, she finds something far more impactful.  An epilogue, of sorts, either caps off the story or ruins it -- if you're worried by such things, you can skip it without suffering too much!

This is a languid novel that never really figures out where it is heading.  Despite that lack of direction, the story still makes plenty of mistakes. The quake, Celeste and Nicky's friendship (in flashback), and an aborted romance with another boy all feel like wrong turns.  Even Celeste's health problems, which is screaming out to be a pivotal plot point somewhere in the story, are never utilized as much of anything except a periodic insubstantial annoyance.  There are many fine ideas here, but I was left wondering what for?

The Walls Around Us, by Nova Ren Suma

Violet, about to graduate and start dance school in New York, has everything before her.  Amber, incarcerated in a maximum security juvenile detention facility, has nothing.  But they are tied together by a third girl, Orianna, who was arrested for murder.  

Told through the author's hazy mix of unreliable narration, magic and hallucinations, and liberal use of flashback and foretelling, who did what to whom is both instantly known and a mystery until the final page. 

Like her other novels, it's beautifully written prose but full of grotesque and horrifying imagery.  Calling this a ghost story is technically correct but oversimplifies a novel that is as much about adolescent insecurity as it is about justice from the grave.

As in the other novels I have read, I enjoy the complex structure and the sparseness of the exposition, but was found myself frustrated by the repetition and the oblique storytelling.  Nova Ren Suma does this style quite well, but having now read three novels of hers in this genre and this format, I yearn for a change and something different from her.

Room to Breathe, by Kasie West

FBI agents ransacking the house one morning is how Indy discovers that her father has been accused of committing fraud.  But while the accusation and the subsequent investigation puts great strain on her and her family, Indy isn't allowed to tell any of her friends.  Suffering in enforced silence, her academics and her social relationships suffer.  She isolates herself, cuts off her friends, and ends up hanging out with a loser skateboarder who only adds to her troubles.

Then, through a twist of fate, she finds herself locked in the faculty bathroom with her former best friend Beau.  Stuck together for the next twenty hours or so, they have no choice but to dredge up recent events, confront each other, and work through their problems.  Told in alternating "then" and "now" chapters, their shared captivity leads to an easy-to-anticipate romantic breakthrough.

Cute and surprisingly breezy romance, in which the heavier material about family disintegration and Indy's acting out stands in awkward juxtaposition.  There's some pretty heavy stuff going on in this story for a story that obviously mostly wants to be about Indy and Beau finding each other.  There certainly would have been easier ways for that to have been pulled off.