Three Sisters, by David Macinnis Gill

Three girls and their father climb a dormant volcano in the Cascades to release the ashes of their mother.  The girls are bickering and fighting, and their father, wracked by grief, is struggling to keep himself together.  The family is a wreck and that's before the mountain they are climbing starts becoming seismically active.  As strange smells, dying animals, and tremors start to appear -- all clues that something is seriously amiss -- the children and their Dad remain locked in their familial drama.  By the time they realize that they are in serious trouble, it is almost too late.

While the snarking between the girls had a realistic quality to it, it was overdone and carried on for too long.  When the girls are refusing to talk to each as volcanic ask is falling on them and their father is bleeding out, one just started to wonder how they ever became so bratty?  Quarrels can be cute but here it became distracting and annoying.

Far more enjoyable was how resourceful the girls are.  The youngest is a first aid whiz, which comes in awfully handy when the injuries start to happen.  Another is able to lead, even when the father basically shuts down inside his surprisingly immature mind.  And the third is a scientific wunderkind, able to carefully narrate what is happening around them with a surreal knowledge of all things geologic.  It wasn't terribly realistic either, but dramatically satisfying and necessary for such a complex situation to have someone be able to explain what was happening and what could happen next.

The pace is fast and unrelenting as one disaster after another befalls the girls and their father.  That keeps the pages turning and allowed me to blow past the annoying bits, resulting in a surprisingly rewarding read in the end.

One Word, Six Letters, by Adib Khorram

Dared by a friend to shout an offensive word at the school assembly, Dylan finds himself in a heap of trouble after he does so.  At first, he doesn't understand why.  It's was just a funny thing to do and didn't hurt anyone.  It's not like he's a homophobe.  But when the school's reaction is severe and Dylan starts losing friends because of his actions, he begins to consider the harm of words.

Farshid lives in fear of people thinking he's gay.  He's not, is he?  He likes some girls, but he also can't help but admire the toned bodies of some of the guys with whom he works out.  To compensate, Farshid exercises several times a day and watches his diet to maximize muscle gain.  If he can be strong enough, no one will question his masculinity.

Two young men with image issues, learning to take less for granted and focus on being better people.  For Dylan, it's about separating himself from his prejudiced friends.  For Farshid, it's about accepting who he is.  Both have a journey to take.

While the setup is original (gay-curious Persian kid meets clueless boy with homophobic friends), there isn't much going on in this story.  The characters struggle with their egos and their need to prove themselves, but they don't really branch out.  I didn't feel much interest in or empathy for them.

The Secret Astronomers, by Jessica Walker

Two young people meet through messages that they leave each other in their school library's oldest circulating book -- an archaic nineteenth century astronomy textbook.  One of them was sent to the book by a note left by their late mother.  The other one is actually trying to use the book for their studies and is flummoxed to find that the book is being rapidly defaced through doodles.  What starts as an angry conversation about vandalizing school property morphs into a friendship between misfits, two outcasts stuck in their rural West Virginian school.  A search to solve a number of clues left by the dead mother points them to an unsolved mystery from the past.

The design of the book is truly remarkable.  Every page is a collage of original drawings and post-it notes, laid over and frequently inspired by the original text of an ancient science book.  It feels like a graphic novel, but is far more immersive. And it represents an amazing effort -- well planned and plotted -- and a unique reading experience.  The presentation doesn't just bring us into the story, it essentially makes the reading part of the narrative.

It's hard not to admire the design and originality, so I feel bad about noting that I didn't find the story itself all that engrossing and the design element makes this a slow read.  Still, for a taste of something truly different, this takes the cake!

Dust, by Alison Stine

Transported to a drought-ravaged Colorado by her prepper parents, Thea yearns for school, friends, and someone to understand her.  Hard of hearing, she struggles to communicate in the best of circumstances.  Now stuck miles away from the closest town with a father who is paranoid about any contact with the outside word, Thea is isolated and alone. Her own family blames her for her issues and refuse to get her help. Thea herself doesn't see any future, just a premonition of doom.

But financial difficulties mean that Thea needs to earn money and that brings her into town, where she meets a boy who is half-deaf like her and knows how to sign.  It opens up a path -- one that her family will do everything to block.  But as the homestead fails and the family's plans crumble in the face of drought, locusts, and dust storms, something has to give.

A timely update to Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath that takes global warming and the expansion of agribusiness into account, this novel has a timeless quality to it that promises that it will become part of many required reading lists in the near future.  Strong characters, a unique setting, and some brilliant universe building creates a compelling story. I was disappointed at the ending which aims to wrap everything up neatly, which seemed overly ambitious, but overwise wowed by this book.

Jane Stays Dreaming, by Britnee Meiser

To enliven a life that she finds dull and meaningless, Jane secretly maintains a blog in which she portrays herself as a beautiful and glamorous girl named Anastasia who has popularity, a cute boyfriend, and endless trips to New York City.  In her netzine, she posts photos, gossip, and advice to thousands of followers.  

No one in her real life knows about her online activity and Jane wants to keep things that way.  But when a new girl moves to town and reveals that she's a follower of Anastasia's writings, Jane is put in an awkward position.  The girl confesses online that she has an interest in Jane's best friend Leo.  While Leo and Jane are only friends, the outside threat makes Jane realize that her feelings for Leo are stronger than she's ready to accept.

On the face of it, this novel doesn't offer much that is really new.  It has all the tropes -- the false crush, the mean girl competitor, the inevitable unveiling of Jane's secret life, and soulmates-in-denial -- and doesn't attempt any surprises.  So, why did I enjoy it?  I suppose because who doesn't like two lovers finding each other in the end (after all, it worked fine for Shakespeare on multiple occasions)?  But really it's the characters that make this novel.  Jane and the others are articulate but still very much adolescent.  Their jealousies and insecurities are worn on their sleeves for the reader to clearly see and we don't waste much time with miscommunications.  That allows for some pretty quick resolutions, but it's a relief not having to drown in lots of invented drama.  These kids can pretty much invent enough on their own!

So, while the story is formulaic, this novel gets a boost by crafting relatable characters from whom readers can learn some lessons without being preached to.  And for those who already know the curriculum, there is the delight in a well-written account.

All Better Now, by Neal Shusterman

A new virus has begun to spread around the world called Crown Royale.  It carries a 4% mortality rate and for the survivors the after-effects are particularly striking:  recoverees find themselves free of all worldly cares.  Unhappy people find happiness.  Rich people give away their money.  Fighters become peacemakers.  The virus is transformative.

For people with problems, there is something appealing about the changes that the virus triggers.  But for others, particularly with things to lose, the virus is dangerous.  With no cares, greed is eradicated and along with it capitalism.  With fear erased and war ended, power structures that rely on them are threatened.  While many recoverees come to embrace the changed world and promote the spread of the virus, a shrinking group works hard to find a vaccine that will curb the infection.

Three young people with an important role to play form the crux of the story.  Ron, the son of one of the richest men in the world.  Mariel, penniless, but ultimately one of the most powerful people on the planet.  And finally Morgan, ruthless enough to make the decisions that could change the course of humanity.  

Given the time that has passed since the COVID pandemic, the themes of the book feel less vital and vibrant, but Shusterman's exploration of the spread of greed and fear, a countervailing movement of empathy, and the struggle between them feels quite relevant in the present day.  Making the contemporary clash of social movements that currently wrack havoc in our world into viral pandemics may lack subtlety but it provides biting commentary in a highly digestible form. 

In the end, I enjoyed this action adventure with some moral heft. The storytelling itself is lively and page-turning and most of the time Shusterman keeps the philosophical debates to a minimum (not that those are not interesting, but it can become burdensome and negatively impact the pacing).  The balance between action and social commentary that he achieves left me feeling entertained but also full of thought-provoking questions (like whether infecting the world with kindness would make us truly better off or whether people should have the right to make wrong decisions).

16 For Ever, by Lance Rubin

When Carter wakes up on the morning of his sixteenth birthday, he's psyched and ready to give his little brother hell.  But he finds his little brother is now older than him, as in fact is the rest of the world.  To him, it may seem like he was fifteen years old yesterday, but six years have gone by since then.  For unknown reasons, Carter is stuck in a loop.  Every year, instead of turning seventeen, he turns sixteen all over again.  And with no memory of the past year, he's forced to relearn everything, aware that time has passed for everyone else and his friends have gotten older.

This is especially hard for Maggie, his girlfriend for most of the past year, whom he no longer even remembers and who is now a year older than him.  If Carter is going to loop every year, what chance does their relationship have?  At first, Maggie tries to keep the fact that they even dated a secret, but that doesn't last long.  And since this is a YA novel, they are pretty much fated to come back together.

All of which leads to the pressing question of why Carter is stuck in his loop in the first place. At first, Carter thinks that there was a mistake that he made somewhere before his seventeenth birthday that triggered this.  But as he and his friends and family dig into the matter, it seems much more complicated.

I liked the premise of the story, but it's a hard idea to pull off.  Not only fantastical, the concept of getting older without growing up raises all sorts of logistical issues (some of the funnier of which, like a high school junior being legally old enough to buy booze, are explored).  Rubin goes down a few rabbit holes trying to logic these out, but the story suffers the harder he tries to explain it.  It works best if we just take the aging thing on faith and run with it.  The rest of the story is fairly average -- entertaining and enjoyable summer reading -- but without much to help it stand out.

Messy Perfect, by Tanya Boteju

Years ago, Cassie and her best friend Ben got caught dressing up in each other's clothes.  It wasn't so bad for Cassie to be seen in Ben's trousers, but Ben wearing her skirt took some more effort.  But rather than explain the truth when the rumors began to fly, Cassie abandoned Ben to bullying homophobia.  A few weeks later, Ben left the school.

Now, he's back. Wracked by guilt for her childhood cowardice, Cassie is determined to make things right and she alights on the idea of setting up a Gay Straight Alliance in her very conservative Catholic school.  Allying with an existing GSA at a nearby public school, Cassie starts a secret campaign of "pop ups" to make her school more gay friendly (and thus easier for Ben).  But as the project consumes more and more of her time, Cassie's grades start to suffer and her relationships with her friends and family begin to fray.

As for her goal to fix the mistakes of her past, it doesn't quite work out as she planned.  Ben is amused, but strangely non-committal to the project and Cassie begins to realize that making her school more accepting to queer students may be more important to her personally than she's comfortable admitting.

Cassie is a perfectionist who makes plenty of messy mistakes along the way in this story but does a decent job of knowing how to fix those errors and come back better -- a mash-up that gives the book its title.  While the novel can be boringly repetitive and overly preachy about the importance of safe spaces, Cassie's journey into self-discovery is compelling.  I liked her and also the many supporting characters as well -- a colorful cast of peers who represent an exuberant form of teen queerdom that has fallen out of fashion in YA lit shockingly quickly in the wake of terrorized libraries.  Far more so, I appreciated a strong presence of adults in this story, ranging from the keen librarian to the surprisingly sympathetic principal to a mother who was confident enough to know when to crack down and when to let up.

The Winter of the Dollhouse, by Laura Anne Schlitz

Tiph struggles to be seen by her family and at odds with her stepmother.  Tiph loves dolls and everything about dolls, but her stepmother doesn't understand why she wants to spend all of her money on doll house accessories.  But one day, outside of the local toy store, Tiph meets an old Hungarian woman who does understand her.  Tiph is fantasizing about owning an antique German doll of Gretel when the woman collapses on the street.  Tiph ends up helping the woman gets home and is entranced to find that she owns a fabulous old doll house.

The old woman needs help around the help and they develop a plan whereby Tiph will do chores and earn money to purchase dolls.  meanwhile, the woman invites Tiph to play with hers.  Tiph, however, has a problem with kleptomancy that is getting her into trouble and when one of the lady's dolls disappears, suspicion falls in Tiph.

Gretel the doll is in a panic.  She wants to be Tiph's as much as Tiph wants her and if the mystery of the missing doll is not solved, this will never happen.  So, the toys work away at a plan to fix everything.  And in the process of doing so, they discover an ancient doll that reveals secrets about the old lady.

Meanwhile, there is a school production of The Wizard of Oz that Tiph is in.  Disappointed with her part as a munchkin, she is encouraged by the old lady to volunteer to understudy for the Wicked Witch (which is the part she really wants).  When the actress playing the witch falls ill, Tiph gets her opportunity.

Along the way, Tiph works out her issues with her stepmother and learns that adults have very complex lives.  All in all, it is a very busy story!  While much of this is well-written and the individual threads make great stories, it is terribly unfocused.  Was this a story about Tiph learning to stand up for herself and/or understanding the importance of honesty?  Was this a story of the old woman coming to terms with her lost childhood?  Or of a mother and daughter coming to mutual understanding?  Or of the dolls getting the humans to sort out their problems so they would be played with?  Likely, it is all of those things, but it left me with distractions, being thrown from one thread to another when, even at the very end, nothing seemed to come together.

Orris and Timble: The Beginning, by Kate DiCamillo

The first in a trilogy of early reader books about the unlikely friendship of Orris the rat and Timble the owl. When Timble gets caught in an abandoned mouse trap, Orris struggles with whether to help free him or not.  Remembering the tale of the Lion and the Mouse, Orris reasons with himself that helping Timble will mean that Timble will owe him a debt of gratitude.  When Timble simply flies away, Orris is upset that he didn't even get a thank you.  But a much greater gift awaits.

Quirky and sweet in the way that all of DiCamillo's works tend to be.  The deeper meaning of the story is probably not going to sink in to the target audience's minds, but this easy-to-read book is engaging enough to lead the reader to the rest of the series.

The Danger of Small Things, by Caryl Lewis

In the near future, the bees have died off.  And along with them, the various species of plants that rely on bees to be pollinated.  And along with those, the animals that feed on those plants.  In sum, the death of pollinating insects has caused a global food collapse.  Panic, wars, and the downfall of civilization follow shortly thereafter.  So far, so interesting.

In the aftermath, young girls are sent to concentration camps where they are worked to the bone using brushes to pollinate the fruit and nut trees by hand in hopes of raising a crop that can in turn be sold to support the totalitarian regime under which they live.  This is only until they reach puberty, when they are "married" off to young soldiers to make children for the regime.

Jess is one of those girls.  She was sent to the camp when she and her brother were caught trying to cross the border and escape.  Initially distrusted by most of the other girls and targeted by the camp's queen bee, Jess becomes the leader of a quiet rebellion in the camp.  To foment an uprising, she creates secret works of art to agitate the masses.

From a fascinating premise, the novel falls back on so many familiar dystopian tropes -- from the beginning (lifted from Handmaid's Tale) to the pro-natalist plotline (Divergent).  An evil priest and a bullying queen bee offer little new to a story that can't seem to decide whether military regimes or high school cliques are worst.  It's tired material and a story that adds little to the genre.  It also makes very little sense -- the fruitless effort to hand pollinate on the industrial scale that modern apiculture attempts, the strange waste of resources using hand-made brushes, the mystery of what the little boys are up to, and so on.  Disappointing exposition on an original and thought-provoking idea.

Bad Badger: A Love Story, by Maryrose Wood (ill. by Giulia Ghigini)

Septimus loves to watch sunsets from his porch as he listens to opera and sips chamomile tea.  All of which makes him a bad badger.  He doesn't even look like one!  Instead of the stripes that all badgers are supposed to have, he has spots.  Perhaps he isn't even a badger at all?  He might have a better time sorting out his conundrum if he knew any other badgers.

For while Septimus enjoys his quiet life, he longs for a friend.  And when he is visited by a friendly gull, Septimus does everything he can to make Gully feel at home.  In subsequent visits, the two of them explore their shared interests and their differences (Gully loves the ocean, for example, but Septimus hates to get sand in his fur!).  The visits become so regular that Septimus comes to take Gully and her company for granted.  But then one day Gully doesn't show up on the porch.  Days pass and still no Gully!  Septimus goes in search of his friend and learns some powerful lessons about friendship along the way.

A delightful and quirky book.  Charmingly insecure, Septimus (a badger "within acceptable parameters") frets and worries in a funny way that will delight children and adults.  While there is a story for children here, it really is an adult story -- full of meditations about the compromises that one makes in friendships and the way in which friendships enhance our lives.  The ultimate lesson about acceptance ties the story's sweet and timeless message with a bow.  

The first of a series intent on exploring relationship building.

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.  

Take A Sad Song, by Ona Gritz

When the police come to apprehend Jane at a party, she demands to speak with her mother, only to find that it is her mother that called the police in the first place.  Declared incorrigible by her Mom and the courts, Jane is sent to Spofford and then to a year at the New York State Training School for girls in Hudson.  In 1970, your parents or just about any adult could get a child locked up and sentenced to servitude.  

On the inside, Jane suffers through abuse, bullying, and solitary confinements.  To cope, she becomes part of a pseudo family that the girls call "The Racket" whose members look out for each other and lend each other emotional support.

Told in brisk verse, this engaging story is far too short.  What's on offer is teasingly brief.  It's sufficient to tell the story and whet the appetite, but there's a meatier novel yet to write with this material.  Indeed, it could have benefitted from more fleshing out of the girls' backgrounds and the relationships they have with each other.