The Complex Art of Being Maisie Clark, by Sabrina Kleckner

Maisie, at eighteen, has absorbed everything she can learn about painting portraits from her parents, but she longs to develop a style that is her own.  All of her work looks more or less the same as her father's.  So, she decides to leave New York and study art in London, focusing on every medium except painting in a conscious effort to stretch herself.

The new school year starts off inauspiciously as she nearly gets thrown out of photography class and then accidentally almost maims a fellow student.  But all of these things lead to adventures, some hilarious, some poignant as her term promises new adventures and even a possible romance.

Then an emergency sends her back home to help her parents and she finds that she's grown far more in her time in London than she realized.  And, in fact, her art and her life overall has begun to bloom in its own ways after all.

A lively NA novel whose first half is much better than its second.  The cause of that is that the book is in fact a sequel, albeit an unusual one.  Maisie was first introduced to readers in Kleckner's Art of Running Away in which Maisie is only twelve and dealing with a difficult older brother.  And while the first half of this current novel introduces new characters, the second half leans heavily upon details from the earlier novel from six years earlier.  Without that background, elements of the current story are hard to follow and it fails to stand up on its own.

This Book Might Be About Zinnia, by Brittney Morris

In the present day, Zinnia is working on her admission essay for Harvard but it isn't coming together.  Zinnia's decided to write about being adopted, but it isn't enough and a reader has advised her that it needs something to give it a stronger impact.  Zinnia struggles with what to do until she starts to read the latest book from her favorite author.  In that novel, the protagonist is given up by her mother and has a distinctive heart-shaped birthmark on her forehead.  So does Zinnia.  There are other similarities and Zinnia begins to wonder if the author is also her birth mother.

Eighteen years early, Tuesday was a pregnant teenager who made the agonizing decision to put her baby up for adoption.  During the pregnancy she was largely abandoned by her family and she poured her heart into a journal.  In the aftermath of the adoption, the journal was lost.  In two parallel storylines. the truth about what happened comes to light, impacting far more than Zinnia and her search.

The adoption story is interesting and beautifully told, but there's an awful mess of subplots that distract this story.  Everything from the nature of the author of the novel to Tuesday's family's mysterious connection to the mob.   There's arson at the adoption agency, an accidental drowning, and an implied murder.  Never mind the mess of an ending with an implausible manhunt and a bizarre hallucinatory episode.  The promise of a surprise ending that is never revealed and the introduction of characters in the final pages that play no part in the story left me confused and frustrated.  I want to like this story but it needed an editor with the will to trim this train wreck down!

Top Heavy, by Rhonda DeChambeau

For Esme, the single greatest obstacle in her life is her own body.  She loves to dance, truly coming alive when her body is in motion, but her breasts get in the way.  She can no longer do ballet and when she does interpretative dance, she is always conscious of them.  The other girls in her class make fun of her, so she works extra hard to be an even better dancer to draw attention away.

And it isn't just in dance.  On the street, men leer at her, women look at her like she's a slut.  She crouches over, trying to make herself look small.  She even looked into breast reduction surgery.

But the solution isn't surgical. It is about building self-esteem.  With help from her family and he friends, Esme comes to love herself and to stand up straight and tall. In the face of bullying and a brief sexual assault, she learns to allow herself to be proud and angry.  To use space.  Ultimately, she learns to accept her body and herself.

While this verse novel starts off slow and repeats itself a lot, the pace gradually builds up and as Esme builds self-confidence, the verses become more moving.  Clever typography on some of the better poems captures the dancing movement that brings Esme join adding a delightful dimension to the story.  In the end, an inspirational story for anyone struggling with a body that doesn't look or perform as we wish it did.

A Field Guide to Broken Promises, by Leah Stecher

For years, Evie's family has moved every year or so as her mother got promoted to better and better jobs.  But now, Mom says that she's finally landed the perfect position and with luck they won't ever have to move again.  Entering junior high this year, Evie is excited about making friends that she can hold on to.  Because of the constant relocations, her only real friend is Dara, a girl at Jewish summer camp.  With all the potential in front of her, Evie is excited to start school.

When Evie shows up on the first day, she is surprised to see her friend Dara in the first class!  What are the odds that the school that Evie would move to would be the same one that Dara attends? But to her surprise, Dara isn't happy to see her and immediately starts spreading stories that they barely know each other.  Worse, she says that Evie is a stalker and moved here solely to follow Dara.  Hurt by the rejection and the bullying campaign that Dara organizes, Dara becomes convinced that something bad has happened to Dara and Evie starts digging to find out why her best friend has rejected her.

While the story primarily focuses on Evie's desire to fix everything around her and the bad choices she makes to try to achieve this, there's also some room in here for family separation, siblings, and religion.  The story itself is a gentle fast-paced middle reader intended for "reluctant readers" but it isn't dumbed down.  In fact, it takes a pretty sophisticated take on the way that complicated grown-up relationships mess up children (Evie's Dad and Dara'a Mom are definite pieces of work!).  Unfortunately, the grown ups come in at the end and fix almost everything, so only a little bit of the story is about Dara learning some life lessons.

Nav's Foolproof Guide to Falling In Love, by Jessica Lewis

Nav and Hallie are best friends.  And while Nav is a lesbian and Hallie is bisexual, friends are all that they have ever been.  It's probably just as well because Nav is ARO and Hallie is a hopeless romantic.  But while Nav doesn't want a girlfriend, she can't imagine being apart from Hallie.  When she finds out that Hallie is going to be away this summer attending an academic program, Nav is obsessed with figuring out a way to join her despite her own lack of academic prowess.  

The solution to the problem turns out to be complicated.  Nav finds out that a bright but socially awkward girl named Gia is obsessed with dating Hallie.  Gia will do anything for Nav's help with Hallie. And so a trade is engineered:  Gia (who is attending the same summer program as Hallie) will give Nav her place in the program in exchange for help getting a date with Hallie.  But before that date can happen, Gia needs lots of help.  Nav may not believe in love, but she knows a few things about Hallie.  Through some training and "romance practice" Nav will teach Gia how to woo Hallie.  Everyone wins!

But of course it doesn't work out that way.  The more work that Nav does with Gia, the more they start falling in love with each other.  And in the end, Nav has to admit that she is not as ARO as she thought.  Along the way, all three girls deal with the changes in their lives and personalities, coming to acknowledge that change can be good after all.

The story was fine, but I really disliked the main protagonist.  Nav's irresponsible with absolutely no accountability (as well as no sense of how to charge her phone!).  She treats both her father and Hallie abominably.  She drinks to excess, uses her sexual partners, and skips out on work.  She's judgmental of others while constantly running away from her own faults.  Frankly, Hallie and Gia both deserve better and they probably have some work to do on their own senses of self-esteem.

Nothing Bad Happens Here, by Rachel Ekstrom Courage

After the traumatic death of Lucia's best friend, her mother decides that Lucia needs to get away from Pittsburgh for a while.  Mom's been on-line dating a real estate broker who lives on Nantucket and he's invited the two of them to come out for the summer.  It seems like just the thing:  A quiet peaceful place where nothing bad ever happens.  Lucia could be almost bored.

That plan is swept away when Lucia discovers the body of a dead girl on the shore.  She's an unknown -- no one identifies her, no one knows her, but somehow she ended up dead.  Obsessed with not one but two close encounters with death, Lucia starts to sleuth around.  The uber rich kid Tristan seems suspicious. When Lucia finds clues that the girl had been on Tristan's yacht on the night she died, Lucia knows that Tristan is covering up a secret.  Could he have murdered the girl?

The police have lost interest and everyone tries to encourage Lucia to forget about the whole thing.  Everyone, that is, except for three mysterious beautiful girls that Lucia has befriended.  They seem to have a way with men and a kleptomania habit that somehow falls below everyone else's radars.  Who are they?  And why do they want to help Lucia find out who killed the girl?

A lovely amalgam of beach romance, murder mystery, and a little dash of fantasy.  And, of course, a killer reveal of the killer themself.  You'll guess some of the plot twists that come along, but the final one is a total surprise and well worth waiting for.  Many individual parts of the story were weak (Lucia's traumatic backstory is underdeveloped and underutilized, sparring with Tristan and his girlfriend is surprisingly unrewarding, and so on).  It's a long story but thinly told, and editing the story to raise the pace and the tension would have made for a better read.  But nonetheless I enjoyed this story of summer beach fun with corpses!