One Small Thing, by Erin Watt

Ever since Beth's sister was struck and killed by a reckless teen driver, her family has been locked in grief.  Her mother and father refuse to discuss the matter.  They meticulously maintain the dead sister's room and personal spaces as if she will be coming back.  And Beth herself can't process the event enough to even be sad about the loss.

Perhaps that is because her parents have become suffocatingly protective, watching her every move and obsessed with who she is seeing and where she goes.  To escape, Beth sneaks out at night and goes to parties and engages in risky behavior.  One night at a party, she meets Chase, a dark mysterious bad boy.  And while she acknowledges that it is cliché, she has sex with him -- her first time.  It's only a few days later that they even bother to learn each other's name and are faced with a shocking revelation: Chase was the driver of the car that killed Beth's sister!

From here, the two lovers must grapple with their feelings of love and their guilt over how wrong it is that they have those feelings.  They must also hide the relationship, especially as their classmates and virtually the entire town goes on a rampage to lynch Chase.

A melodramatic and dark, but nonetheless irresistibly page-turning novel.  The bad guys (pretty much everyone except Beth and Chase) are often unbearably mean.  The level of misogyny and violence against women is disturbing -- with most of the male characters being depicted as controlling of women and prone to angry outbursts accompanied by physical violence.  The female characters meanwhile are weak and enabling of the abusers.  Beth's parents in particular are absolutely over-the-top.  All of which makes great drama but leaves a bad aftertaste.  That the only long-term solution is to leave is hardly the sort of redemption a story like this needs.  I enjoyed reading it but I can't say that it left me feeling very good.

Gut Reaction, by Kirby Larson & Quinn Wyatt

Tess loves to bake and her cookies and cakes help her make friends at her new school.  Baking also makes her feel close to her father, who died a few years ago.  He taught her the skills and encouraged her to compete to get better.  Now, her friends and fans want her to go to the Jubilee Flour Junior Baker West Coast competition, but she hesitates because it was at this same competition that her father died. Competing there will bring back all of those memories.

Overshadowing this drama is another issue:  Tess keeps experiencing episodes of extreme gastro-intestinal pain.  Certain foods seem to hit it off and she starts trying to alter her diet to prevent the "porcupine" inside her gut from attacking her.  That works for a while, but the episodes become more frequent and more intense so that she renames it a "knife" instead.  In the end, she lands in the hospital with a diagnosis of Crohn's disease.  And now the question is what sort of chance can she have to have a normal life (let alone continue in competitive baking) with such a debilitating disease?

Crohn's is a particularly embarrassing disease because it deals with a part of our bodies that we don't usually talk about.  And for a middle schooler like Tess it would be particularly awkward.  So, I think it was really important to create a book like this in which a young  reader facing this condition for the rest of their life could find some representation.  

And it's a nicely done book.  Tess has enough of a sense of humor to make the rather serious stuff she's dealing with not overwhelm the reader.  I'm less taken by all the other stuff in this story. The baking story  often distracts, but the book would have been too short without something else for Tess to do.  And having it be food related carries a nice irony.  The dead father seemed less useful as a storyline and never really got developed.  It's also terrible cliché.  Perhaps letting the Dad live would have been better.

Noah Frye Gets Crushed, by Maggie Horne

Twelve year-old Noah returns from summer camp having had an amazing time.  She made a great new friend named Jessa and the girls were so excited to learn that Jess and her Mom were moving to Noah's hometown!  Noah can't wait to introduce Jessa to her two best friends at home.

But when she gets home, she finds out that her friends have a surprise of their own:  Over the summer, they have each gotten a boyfriend.  Now, all they want to do is talk about tips and tricks for managing their crushes.  Noah, afraid that she'll be left behind, lies to her friends and claims that she too has a boy she likes.  To prove it, Noah makes a mad dash to find a good boy who she can pretend to have a crush on and she settles on Archie.  But the harder Noah tries to prove she is infatuated with Archie, the less and less comfortable she is with the  whole idea.  The thing is she sees how her older sister is with her boyfriend and Noah knows that her feelings (or lack thereof) for Archie are not anything like that, no matter how much she tries.  Strangely, the person she does have those feelings for is her new friend Jessa.

A very nicely written book about self-discovery and early sexual identity, that in rather painful detail depicts the confusing world of first crushes and middle school drama.  While kids in my day wouldn't have seen same sex attraction as an option, the overall dynamic of needing to be able to say that you were in a relationship because everyone else was feels painfully familiar.  The obsessive plotting and manipulation to create those relationships also feels pretty authentic. The twist of having Noah come out as gay really doesn't change much (unless you live in Florida, in which case you probably can't read this book!) -- middle school romance is pretty generic.

There's much to like in this book.  While I found Noah more than a little clueless, that's sort of a prerequisite in a romance based on near misses.  Her knack for making lots of mistake and her ability to rebound from them makes her very appealing.  The romance between the girls itself is sweet.  While facing numerous misunderstandings along the way, it does finally achieve a satisfying conclusion.

The Sister Pact, by Stacie Ramey

Allie and Leah made a pact to be together in life and in death.  It was the only way they felt they could survive the battleground that their parents laid out in their home.  So, when Leah commits suicide and Allie fails to follow her, Allie is left with grief and guilt.  At the end, when it mattered most, Allie wasn't there for her sister and now she must pay the price.  Faced on her own with a father (who, in failing to control his one daughter, now seeks to gain mastery over the survivor) and a helpless mother drowning herself in sedatives, Allie has trouble finding allies.  Her boyfriend is unsure how to help and wary of opening up, especially as Allie is also flirting with Max, a player who just wants to use her but provides relief from her pain.  And then an angel appears in the guise of the school's drug dealer, who turns out to know more about Leah than Allie does herself.

A story about secrets in a very toxic family, littered with lots of drug abuse and suicidal ideation.  It's not a cheery tale.  I tolerated its very slow and miserable grind because of the familiarity of the characters and their dynamics.  Still, this might well not be your taste in entertainment and the emotional abuse is quite triggering, making this a book that I frequently had to take breaks from.  The story, of course, hinges on Allie and she's suitably nuanced and complex, defying easy solutions and in the end achieving a level of peace that, while rushed, felt satisfactory and believable.  You're not going to find much sense that her war has been won, but at least these soldiers have survived their battle.

Deep Water, by Jamie Sumner

Right before Tully's mother left them, she promised to help Tully train to swim a twelve-mile marathon across Lake Tahoe.  Now that she's gone, Tully knows how to grab her Mom's attention so that maybe just maybe she can get her Mom to come home.  With the help of her bestfriend, she's going to secretly do it on her own and become the youngest person to successfully complete the swim.  Along the way, she fights cold water and bad weather, but the hardest obstacle of all is her own mind and the thoughts that spring up inside it.

Told in verse, this spare story of a sex-hour swim across the lake becomes much more:  Tully's confrontation with her feelings about her mother's abandonment about how Tully will move on.  It doesn't steer into any particularly novel territory and the verse itself is not particularly adventurous (except for a few clever pieces that take advantage of some fancy typography).  Still, it's a pleasant enough story and a brisk read.

Mascot, by Charles Waters and Traci Sorell

Ms. Williams's eighth grade honors English class gets assigned the topic of debating their school's traditional mascot -- an Indian brave.  But the classroom debate pro and con quickly bursts out into the wider school community as the students find that they and their families have legitimate feelings about whether such a mascot is appropriate at their school.  Told in verse, six children -- representing a variety of racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds -- discuss what the issue means to them and play an active part in a movement to change the mascot.

This is one of those cases where verse works against the story.  There are complicated issues at play here and the verse structure causes the authors to gloss over them.  We get soundbites, but no real depth of understanding.  So, for example, native-American Callie finds lots of research on the psychological damage caused by racist mascots, but we're provided with no details.  We're introduced to Sean's love of tradition and the importance of the mascot as a rallying point for his family's otherwise miserable existence. But again, without detail we are forced to conclude that the family is just poor and ignorant.  

So, I found the book frustrating and unenlightening.  It may raise the awareness of young readers to the importance of the issue, but it won't help them navigate the real world of the political debates and the motivations behind them that surround any attempt to change things.

Always the Almost, by Edward Underhill

Miles is plagued by the thought that he is not enough.  As a trans boy, Miles feels he's not enough of a boy and knows he was not happy as a girl.  He'd like to win back his ex-boyfriend Shane, but Shane isn't interested in guys.  To Miles, this feels more like a rejection of him, and that he is not enough to be worthy of love.  It doesn't help that, on the verge of a new round of piano competitions, Miles' teacher keeps telling him that he needs to figure out who he is and that until he does he will never be a great pianist.  Perhaps, Miles isn't enough of a musician either?

Then Miles meets a boy named Eric who gets his pronouns right and likes Miles however he sees himself.  And while Miles still aches to get back together with Shane, everything is much easier with Eric.  Is Miles going to figure out who he wants to love and who he wants to be? Will he win his piano competition?  Well, you'll just have to read it to find out!

Underhill does a great job with his main character.  Miles starts off annoyingly shallow and insensitive to others, but his understanding of himself is complex and nuanced.  It's not that he doubts that he's a boy so much as he struggles with what that in fact means to him.  And his behavior -- which overwhelmingly reads as feminine (with its socially-sensitive, intuitive, and emotional instincts) -- feels authentic for a newly-transitioned boy.  That's a subtlety that authors rarely capture.  I also enjoyed watching Miles grow as a person, becoming better at negotiating his relationships and losing much of that initial insensitivity.

While the supporting characters are not as interesting as Miles, they do exist in a rather complex dynamic that will feel relatable to teens and painful to adult to reminisce about.  Underhill has a good sense of the insecurities of the adolescent mind.  On the other hand, the lack of any straight characters -- while fashionable in contemporary YA -- feels less authentic.

This is a well written romance that presents a strong and sympathetic trans character in a meaningful and realistic relationship.

The Lake House, by Sarah Beth Durst

Three girls are dropped off at summer camp in a remote part of Maine.  While they don't know one another yet, Claire, Reyva, and Mariana each have unique things to overcome and they are looking forward to attending the camp that their parents all insist is life transforming.  But when they are dropped off, they find that the entire camp has been burned to the ground with no immediate sign of what happened to the staff and the other campers.  Instead, they find a dead body.

Unable to return to the mainland, and with no means to communicate, the girls have to figure out how to survive.  Being suburban girls, they have little to no outdoors experience and working out food, water, and shelter becomes a matter of trial and error -- a terrifying thought when there is a killer is there with them.  And that's before they find that there is a much worse adversary out there!

Needing a distraction from politics, I could have embraced an intellectual classic, but I grabbed for a trashy survival/horror novel instead.  It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be.  Yes, there were plot holes and some really stretched logic in the storyline, but the tension was kept at a high level and the story was full of irresistable cliffhangers.  For anyone who likes clever characters, it was engrossing to watch the girls MacGyver their way out of their problems.  But maybe more to the point, each of the girls were interesting and sympathetic.  They had very distinct personalities, strengths, and weaknesses.  It helped that they didn't snipe at each other but instead worked together to get through it.

The story itself has a wonderful dramatic arc that allows each of the girls to have a moment to grow and be tested.  That I cared about their ability to face those fears was startling to me for a book that I had assumed would be a mindless scream fest.

Chaos Theory, by Nic Stone

A story of two young people with an incredible amount of emotional baggage who fall into an ill-advised relationship.

Shelbi suffers from a bipolar disorder that sends her into extreme bouts of depression.  While medication helps, keeping her head down and out of any relationship is the best course.  But she can't help herself with Andy, who seems nice and sensitive, even if the first time she meets him it is due to him drunk dialing her.

Andy wants to be a good guy and, after Shelbi explains her issues, he promises he can be trustworthy.  However, that's hard to do as he's dealing with the recent death of his baby sister and a somewhat more shocking loss (which is not revealed at first).  His recourse to his problems is to escape into the bottle.  Shelbi recognizes the risks, but she still wants to believe Andy when he promises it is all under control.  It isn't and when Andy falls off the wagon one time too many and hurts Shelbi, things fall entirely apart.

A brisk, fast-moving story that feels authentic and addresses emotional health issues.  The writing, however, lacks clarity at times and Stone has an excessive supply of melodrama to toss in from time to time when the story lags.  The characters are strong and really make the story.  Despite their faults, Andy and Shelbi are both sympathetic protagonists, but one wishes the adults had been a bit faster on their toes in keeping their children on the rails.  A lot of well-meaning denial causes a lot of unnecessary pain (and some learning experiences).

I Kick and I Fly, by Ruchira Gupta

A gripping story of an Indian girl named Heera who lives in a red-light district in Bihar.  Raised with the understanding that when she reaches puberty her father or brother will pimp her out, Heera wants more in life than to be a prostitute.  But faced with bullying at school and the hostility of her father, receiving an education seems like an impossible dream.

Things change when she starts to study kung fu through a local program for endangered girls.  She excels at the sport and gains confidence.  However, the more she becomes determined to break free, the harder the forces arrayed against her try to keep her down.  Several times, her martial arts skills actually save her life.  Featuring unapologetically explicit depictions of child prostitution and international sex trafficking, the compelling story is impossible to forget.

The author, an Emmy winner for her documentary about the same subject, has created a very digestible novel for young adults.  The strength of the story is it veracity.  While names are changed, every hero and villain in the story is based on a real person.  The storytelling leans towards the melodramatic and the events depicted are conveniently coincidental (probably for the purposes of compressing the storyline), but this helps move everything along at a fine pace.  While an upsetting read, the novel balances its grim depictions and its urgent calls for reform with glimmers of hope that provide what is ultimately an inspiring conclusion.