Book Uncle and Me, by Uma Krishnaswami

On the corner near Yasmin's apartment, an old man she calls "Book Uncle" runs a free library, offering books to anyone who comes by.  Every day, Yasmin returns a book and gets a new one from him.  She's read over 400 books from him so far.  They are always perfect choices.  When he gives her a book with an ancient Indian fable about a hunter and a group of doves.  She doesn't understand the story, but Book Uncle tells her it will make sense one day.

Then one day, Book Uncle and his cart of books are missing!  He's been ordered to close his library!  Yasmin is bereft and asks around for what she can do about it.  Everyone knows that there is a big mayoral election going on.  Maybe she and her classmates could write letters to try to convince the candidates to support Book Uncle.  They do so and find a sympathetic candidate.  But when the children help to get their pro-Book Uncle candidate elected, they discover that not all is smooth sailing.

A beautiful and short tale about the power of people to shape the world.  Yasmin's efforts to stand up for what is right is particularly inspirational.  Set in urban India, there are plenty of lovely cultural details that will be both alien and yet somehow familiar to readers.

The first of a series.

Warrior Girl Unearthed, by Angeline Boulley

Perry doesn't have much use for school and would rather spend the summer (and most school days) fishing in the lake.  But when she is forced to enroll in the Tribal Council Interns program, she finds herself paired up with the curator of the Tribe's museum.  He takes her to visit an anthropologist at the local state school, where she is shocked to learn about the way that her ancestors (and their sacred effects) are being treated by archeologists.  Boxes of dismembered body parts left in cellars, funereal items auctioned off, and an ineffectual Federal law that is supposed to prevent all of these abuses from occurring and is instead ignored.

Now committed to returning the remains of a young woman that is housed in the college's archives, Perry gets embroiled in an even bigger discovery -- a cache of bodies stolen from local graves.  But effecting the repatriation of these remains brings Perry into an even bigger issue.  Young women are being abducted across their reservation and due to loopholes in Federal and Tribal jurisdictions, help is slow in coming.  What does the one have to do with the other?  That's for the surprising climax of this mystery, thriller, and screed to reveal.

 

I struggled a bit with the complexity of the story -- numerous subplots, characters, and heavy use of Ojibwan phrases makes for a thick soup -- but it also creates a deep and immersive environment.  At least a dozen major characters, each of them have their own particular motivations, leads to a series of plot twists that keep you guessing to the end.  It's a well-crafted story and despite its complexity pays off at the end.  

While I might have enjoyed reading the first book Firekeeper's Daughter before I tackled this one, there really was no need to do so.  The novel stands up well on its own.

Where Do You See Yourself, by Claire Forrest

Effie wishes that the world would see her as the capable young woman that she feels she is.  But as the girl in the wheelchair she finds she has to fight for just about everything that comes easily to others.  From teachers to her parents, no one seems to expect much from her and she finds her wishes written off.  And that includes where she'll go to school.

When she graduates, her parents expect her to go to college somewhere nearby, but Effie has her eye on a mass media program in New York City.  Life in NYC will be challenging for a person in a wheelchair and her parents try to discourage her.  So to prove that she can handle it, she takes some brave steps to stand up for herself at her high school.  And when that goes well, her parents relent.  But when she gets to New York on a school visit, she's disappointed to find that the same old struggles for accommodation await her there.

Effie is a protagonist with an exciting voice and interesting insights on being a teen with a disability.  There's a lot of serious matters discussed here, but Effie approaches them with strength and a sense of humor that makes her a real winner to the reader.  In a time when caring for the needs of others has become so politically charged, having a bit of a grounding here is good for the soul.  And it's a beautiful story about finding out what is important in one's life and becoming the things that you want.

After Life, by Gayle Forman

Amber Crane arrives home on her bike one afternoon to discover that she's been dead for the past seven years. And while she has no memory of being dead and the last seven years have passed without her being aware of it, the world has definitely changed.  Her parents have broken up.  Her little sister and her best friend have grown up.  Her boyfriend has fallen into despair and grief.

No one has any idea why Amber has returned to the living but the fact that she has crystalizes how much damage her death wrought in all their lives.  Her family becomes convinced that they need to restart their lives, even if it means running away from their current ones.  They certainly can't stay.  After all, what would happen if the rest of the world discovered that Amber didn't really die seven years ago?  But there are lots of forces coming together and a complicated web of relationships and interactions that may well make Amber's return moot.

The novel's structure, with current state chapters told from Amber's point of view alternating with flashbacks from a variety of others creates a very dense story that relies on a combination of coincidences to make it come together.  Nothing really makes sense until the end. Yet it works surprisingly well.  The novel's message -- that the "life" of a person after their death is largely dependent upon how those whose survive them behave -- is told in a variety of fascinating ways ranging from parents, children, and even pet owners.  Ultimately, it is a very touching story that lingers with you.

I Am Not Jessica Chen, by Ann Liang

Jenna is an average student, which means she's a failure in comparison to her brilliant, talented, and beautiful cousin Jessica.  Awards and honors come easily to Jessica, while no matter how hard she tries, Jenna just never quite makes it.  When Jessica gets accepted to Harvard and Jenna has to admit to her extended family that she has not been, Jenna has decided she's had enough.  That night, when a shooting star passes by, she makes a wish that she could be Jessica instead of Jenna.

The next morning she wakes up in Jessica's bed and that she has suddenly become so.  Initially basking in the adulation of friends and teachers, Jenna-as-Jessica marvels at how much easier her life is.  But the glow quickly fades as she learns of the intense pressure Jessica is under to maintain her position as a role model and the hollowness of her fame.  Meanwhile, no one seems to know what has happened to Jenna.  And with time, they start forgetting that Jenna ever existed.  It seems that the true cost of becoming her cousin is that her own life will disappear.

While body-swapping is hardly a new idea, the theme is treated deftly by Liang, who uses the artifice to explore self-identity and how intense social pressures lead us to make trade offs.  The inevitable moment when Jenna finally realizes how flawed Jessica is combines with an urgent sense that she is quite literally losing her own self in trying to be her cousin.  A short digression into racism, while itself throwaway, drives home the shallowness of fame.  Another aside about academic dishonesty casts a shadow over Jessica's coveted narrative of success.  While both Jessica and Jenna turn out to be flawed characters, the story avoids demonizing and instead teaches that no one is perfect and that there is no intrinsic value in trying to portray yourself as such.

Marketed as YA, the material is tame and the story skews to a young teen demographic, despite its older protagonists.

Finding Normal, by Jennifer Salvato Doktorski

Gemma and Lucas meet as patients at an inpatient facility for children with eating disorders.  She has anorexia and he has bulimia.  Neither of them really feel like they belong there; they are simply misunderstood.  Gemma wishes that they could just go someplace and be treated as normal.  Why not a place that is normal?  Looking up in an atlas, she finds there are five cities in the United States named Normal and she becomes convinced that visiting them will somehow transform her.

The notion would have just been a whim, but when she shares the idea with Lucas, he's all in for the plan and even knows a way to find a car to get them there.  So they spring themselves from the hospital and start a desperate road trip adventure that will take them far further than they imagined to find normal.  The usual cast of odd characters and side trips to America's weird small towns ensues.

It's a fairly standard teen road trip adventure with an above average story about eating disorders. Most notably, it features a boy with bulimia.  Almost every YA story about eating is about girls so it's nice to highlight the fact that it can happen to boys as well.  But beyond that, the story benefits from applying a light touch, showing them struggling with food but focusing more on the elements of their life that got them to this point.  That in turn brings out the real strength of the road trip genre:  having two characters get to know each other better by baring their souls to each other.  Small, compact, and modest, this short novel punches above its weight. 

The Last Bookstore on Earth, by Lily Braun-Arnold

A year ago, a rain fell across the Earth that was so acidic that it dissolved whatever it came in contact with.  Those who survived the Storm had to find a way to stay alive in an anarchic world where almost all of civilization had come to a halt -- finding food and shelter where they could.  But for Liz, survival came through denial.  Ignoring the death of her family, she simply went back to work at the same  independent bookstore where she had been employed before the Storm.  For the past year, she's traded books for essentials with random people who pass through.  It's a quiet life that allows Liz to imagine that nothing has really changed.  She focuses on clearing out her overstocked books rather than worrying about her dwindling food supply.  Liz even ignores the news that another round of acid rain is on its way.  Her grief paralyzes her.

But when a young women named Maeve shows up, she challenges Liz to face the reality around them.  Maeve pushes Liz to take precautions, trying to make her care about the future, their future together.  But for Liz, who cannot accept what has happened, preparing for a repeat is far too difficult of a task to undertake.

Currently an undergraduate, Braun-Arnold seems an extraordinarily young writer to be able to create such a striking debut.  Her youth gives her a fresh insight on the foibles of her protagonists.  There's not much space here for romance, but the relationship between Liz and Maeve is full of grudges and resentments and feels authentically youthful.  She wisely stays away from writing about anyone older than their teens.

The storytelling is smooth and the action is well-paced, including an extended bloody climax full of suspense and a touch of horror.  A few improbable plot points like a bit of field surgery that goes entirely too well will raise eyebrows, but there is nothing that significantly detracts from this exciting post-apocalyptic adventure.