I'll Give You the Sun, by Jandy Nelson

Jude and Noah were as close as twins could be even through all of their differences.  At fourteen, Jude was the popular normal one, while her brother was always a bit eccentric and an outcast (partly because he was secretly harboring homosexual urges).  Both of them were artistic and they were both applying to art school.  But of the two of them, Noah had the best chance of being accepted. 

Two years later, they no longer even talk to each other.  Noah has given up art, become a jock, and has a devoted girlfriend.  Jude is the only one in art school but is perennially unhappy with her work.  Driven to produce a life-defining work (and to do so in stone), she is directed to a reclusive and bitter sculptor who has his own set of baggage.  Surprisingly, he and his assistant also hold the key to sorting out what destroyed Jude and Noah closeness.

Like all good tragedies, the interesting part is in unraveling the confluence of events that explains what happened.  Nelson weaves a tight story that unwinds slowly with just enough false leads to keep things interesting.  The characters are well-developed and multi-faceted.  It’s well-written and a good read.

I wouldn’t mind jumping on the bandwagon of praise for this book (winner of this year’s Printz award, NYT best seller, etc.) except for one small matter:  it’s not a young adult novel.  Rather, like The Book Thief and Criss Cross (to cite a few other egregious examples), this is an adult book that is being marketed to YA readers simply because the characters are adolescents.  I get that the YA market is lucrative, but there’s a lot more to writing a book for young adults.  For one thing, write a book that addresses the process of growing up or deal with issues that matter to them.  With all the talk about aesthetics and regret (without the usual angst), this has adult sensibility all over it.   Not to say that advanced readers couldn’t handle this book or wouldn’t enjoy it, but that doesn’t make it YA. and giving the preeminent award for teen fiction to a book simply because librarians like it is insulting to the many talented writers that really have an ear for young readers.

Girl Defective, by Simmone Howell

Skylark, her little brother Gully, and their dad live by a second-hand record shop run by their father in the beach town of St. Kilda.  Mom left them to become a famous performance artist in Japan and Skylark passes time posting confrontational messages on her website, while sitting in the store and ogling a hot new co-worker.  Gully obsessively wears a pig snout on his face and communicates through detective "reports" that he regularly issues.  It's an interest he gets to cultivate further when an unknown vandal lobs a brick through their store window.  There are other mysteries, including a drowned girl, a new friend for Skylark at school, the search for the ultimate single, and the role of a sexy singer wearing a fox mask.

Aussie YA always seems a bit weird and generally has never appealed to me.  This particular example is weirder than most and awkward in the way it tries so hard and so self-consciously to be hip.  The story is a mess, following no discernible trajectory.  Without a story I cared about, I found keeping up with the cast of characters to be nearly impossible.  I suspect that simply lost the track altogether because I couldn't figure out what was going on.  All of which may raise to mind the old chestnut that you shouldn't review a book that I don't understand.  But, really, why should reading a book be such a chore?

My Best Friend, Maybe, by Caela Carter

Years ago, Coley and Sadie were best friends, but they grew up and grew apart.  Coley never quite understood why and Sadie never explained.  So, when Sadie invites Coley out of the blue to join her family for a wedding in Greece, Coley doesn’t know what to think.  And Sadie won’t offer any explanation. 

By all rights, Coley should turn her down. Not only is the invitation weird, but Coley already has plans to go on a mission to Costa Rica with her boyfriend.  And her parents will never approve.  But Coley desperately wants to understand what happened to their friendship and she realizes that this may be the only way that she ever finds out the answer.

There are many good books about friendship, and we’ve certainly been to Greece before (with the traveling pants or with the thirteen little blue envelopes), but this is a standout example of the genre.  In its beautiful setting, Carter tackles numerous subjects (most of which I can’t reveal without spoiling the latter part of the book) and does so with great sensitivity.  I’d compare it to Jenny Han’s magnificent books on love and friendship.  And while there is a steamy romantic lead, this is in the end a story about two young women trying to figure out who they are and what they mean to each other.  Touching, beautiful, and achingly honest.

Stray, by Elissa Sussman

Princess Aislynn has always tried to be a good girl and follow the Path faithfully and stay pure.  However, her best intentions seem to be thwarted by accidental discharges of magic.  Magic is destructive and a young woman's duty is to be obedient and learn to control it if she has any hope of being married.  But instead of focusing on learning that self-control, Aislynn has been trying (unsuccessfully) to hide her magic.  After an unfortunate incident at a Ball, she finds herself "redirected" to a career as a caregiver for princesses.  In that new role, she begins to discover a conspiracy that threatens the rules Aislynn has always followed and she finds herself tempted to stray.

A strikingly vivid fantasy with some heavy handed, but ultimately enchanting parallels to real-world adolescence.  The balls, princesses, and dreams of marriage are more traditional fantasy fodder, but Sussman has darker ambitions.  Magic (the "curse" it is called) is a metaphor for female empowerment. And the young women's struggle with containing their passion bring them face to face with the authorities and simultaneously with personal madness.  I like this idea -- imagining what a patriarchy would do when it found that women are the sole owners of a very powerful internal force.  And both how it poisons the relationships between the women as well as the image issues it promotes in the young women themselves.  There's even veiled references to cutting as Aislynn subjects herself to self-abuse when she privately releases the magic inside of her.  It's sort of as if Shannon Hale (and her Princess Academy) met up with Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale.  Powerful stuff!

Still, at the end, Sussman takes a detour into action mode, with the introduction of an underdeveloped animal sidekick, a largely disposable skirmish in the woods, and a hard-to-follow battle of the sorceresses.  This is such a striking break from the more interesting psychological stuff in the rest of the book that I almost felt that I had picked up a few pages from another book altogether.  It is neither effective nor terribly interesting, making the ending messy.  There was also a lot of unfinished stuff at the end, which was largely done (one suspects) to take a book that could well have been self-contained and generate enough room for a sequel or a trilogy.  Up until the last sixty pages or so, however, I was really enjoying the tenor and themes of the book.  Perhaps the sequel will pick that good stuff back up again.

The Opposite of Love, by Sarah Lynn Scheerger

"The opposite of love is not giving a damn," says Rose, and she should know.  Abandoned by her mother and adopted without any say by super strict (and largely clueless) foster parents, sixteen-year-old Rose feels trapped in her life.  They won't listen to her, so she has become mute.  And as she has grown non-communicative, they have shut virtually imprisoned her at home and cut her off from her friends (which makes her angrier and less communicative in a vicious cycle).  When she runs away leaving a goodbye note with her friends Chase and Becca on Christmas Eve, her friends completely freak out and race to track her down.  This precipitates a series of flashbacks in which we learn how Chase has had his own demons to deal with.  And how Chase and Rose have mostly been the blind leading the blind.

For most of the duration of the story, this seemed to be a novel about learning to rise above the hand life dealt and to break free of parental bonds, to learn to accept responsibility for yourself, and to make your life your own.  And while it does actually end up on that track, there's a sudden plot twist in the last forty pages which completely changes the way the story treads.  It drastically increases the stakes and adds all sort of complexities, and it is never foreshadowed.  As the book's message stays unchanged, I'll assert that the twist was unnecessary and distracting.  I won't spoil the ending for others, but it seemed like a sledgehammer delivery for a story that was getting there just fine on its own.  It also seemed like an easy out for a tale that called for subtlety, and replaced it with high stakes drama.

How To Speak Dolphin, by Ginny Rorby

Taking care of her severely autistic half-brother Adam has stretched Lily and her stepfather to their limits.  But getting help has been difficult because no one wants to deal with him.  Caregivers say he should be in a program to learn coping mechanisms, but Lily's stepfather (who is in denial about the scope of Adam's difficulties) resists the idea.  That is, until they discover the concept of Dolphin Assisted Therapy (DAT).  Adam has always loved dolphins and swimming with them makes him happy and seems to help him adapt.  It gives the family hope, but finding a program nearby is challenging.

When a young dolphin is rescued and is brought to a nearby commercial aquarium to recover, it is a rare opportunity.  Lily's stepdad is brought in the consult on the dolphin's care and, in exchange, the aquarium allows them to hold DAT sessions for Adam.  However, as Lily learns the aquarium's ulterior profit motive (and her father's willingness to abet it), she realizes that what might be helping her brother is harming the animal.  They need to end the therapy and let the dolphin go.  But how can she do this if it will hurt her brother?

The combination of a story about autism and about dolphins is busy.  Throw in a blind best friend, dad's complicated emotional response to his son's disability, and a dead mother and it gets more crowded than a Sea World tank!  But it all works.  Middle readers may find the extended depictions of Adam's behavior or the dolphin's activities to be a bit dull at points, but Rorby has done her homework and wants a chance to convey it.  The fact that she makes it all readable and interesting while also education is remarkable.  The end result is a satisfying story about family loyalty, empathy for other (animal and human), and learning to accommodate differences. And it's all wrapped up with a beautiful ending that threatens to make you bring out the Kleenexes but ultimately avoids sentimentality.


[Disclaimer:  I received a solicited copy of the book from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review.  I'll be donating the book to my local public library.]

Falling Into Place, by Amy Zhang

Liz struggles to understand her physics class, but she thinks she may understand the Three Laws of Physics, at least as far as they have been manifested in her own life -- a series of actions and reactions.  That life is just about to end at the beginning of the book, she hopes, as she drives her car into a ravine on purpose.  In her reflection, it’s a miserable life full of cruelties she has committed against her peers and plenty of suffering that has been self-inflicted.  That may seem harsh, but through a series of flashbacks and flashforwards, we slowly come to understand why she wants to die.

It’s a poetic and well-written story, but gruesome and relentless in its depiction of Liz and her friends – lives full of substance abuse, petty rivalries, and thoughtless cruelties.  It isn’t so much overblown (in fact, it all seemed quite realistic) but the truth is that Liz really isn’t a nice person.  And while her peers seem willing to forgive her, the reader is not necessarily going to be ready to do so.  At each point we understand her and start to absolve her, something even more horrible shows up to shock us again.  Overall, the portrait that Zhang provides of these teens is not flattering.  So, while well-written and plotted, it is a depressing and discouraging read.

The Way Home Looks Now, by Wendy Wan-Long Shang

In former days, Peter remembered how his older brother would always spar with their Dad over everything from how to play baseball to standing up for what was right (even if it meant protesting instead of studying).  But when it came to rooting on the home team, the family was united:  whether it was listening to the Pirates play or joining other Taiwanese-American families in Williamsport to root on Chinese Taipei demolish the Americans in the Little League World Series.  Baseball was a way that Peter's family came together.

But after Peter's older brother dies in an accident, the family falls apart.  His mother becomes withdrawn and non-communicative.  His father retreats into stern demands of his surviving son.  And Peter himself rejects baseball itself.  There is plenty to be glum about in the summer of 1972.  Nixon is reaching out to Mainland China to the inevitable disadvantage of Taiwan.  Major League baseball was on strike.  So, Peter hatches a plan to rescue his family and make the difference that his older brother always spoke of.

I'm not a big fan of sports stories, but baseball is always an easy sell.  Combine some reader-friendly sports action with family reconciliation, a tough father who loves his children, and a healthy dose of social consciousness raising, and you get a winning story.  It doesn't hurt that the story was based in part on real events, that the historical details are so pitch perfect and interesting, or that Shang painlessly teaches us a lot about baseball along the way.


[Disclosure:  I received a solicited reviewers copy in exchange for my unbiased review.  After completing this review, I will be donating the book to my local public library.]

A Different Me, by Deborah Blumenthal

For years, Allie has wanted to change her nose.  As she starts to research the process of rhinoplasty (i.e., a nose job), she meets two other girls on-line who are planning on having the same procedure.  Each girl has their own reason.  And as the young women go through their procedures, they respond differently.  And, as they do, Allie begins to question what she is hoping to accomplish.  Input from friends at school and the intervention of a romantic interest play a role as well.

The novel follows a predictable dramatic arc and reaches a conclusion that -- while sweet and poignant -- is basically predictable.  I don't mind having a decent old chestnut (i.e., beauty comes from within) rehashed, but this edition of it is crowded with characters.  Less, in my opinion, is always more and when you need a scorecard to keep track of all the people who come and go, one wonders if the tale would have been simpler with fewer of them.  It certainly would have allowed more space for character development and proving the worth of their inclusion.  As is, the romantic lead is pretty much thrown away.  And some of the cameos (like a brief appearance by a teen-aged author) are bizarre non-sequiturs.

Counting to D, by Kate Scott

Sam is crazy smart when it comes to math and she doesn’t do too badly in her other subjects.  In fact, she’s taking solely AP classes in her sophomore year.  But at the same time, she's hiding a big secret:  she’s dyslexic and completely illiterate.  She gets by through listening to her textbooks on audio recordings (and, the math is easy because it’s all numbers).  It's worked for her for many years.

But when she and her mother relocate to Oregon midway through the year, Sam has to start at a new school.  Her precocious abilities bring her to the attention of the smart clique at school and, in particular, a nerdy (but very hot) senior named Nate.  But what would her new friends think if they found out about her concealed disability?

The book does a great job of explaining dyslexia to reader and I liked the kids.  Scott does a nice job building up her characters and avoids a lot of stereotypes that fill YA books:  In this world, kids don’t always fight with parents, pretty A-listers can be friendly with geeks, and kids don’t always get sick when they are drinking.

But the story itself left me cold.  There was simply no dramatic tension in the story.  There’s all sorts of set-up, but Scott seems unwilling or unable to let things blow up.  There isn’t even a hint of tension between Sam and Nate.  The feared revelation of Sam's dyslexia is a non-event.  Basically, without any drama, there isn’t much of a story.  Scott also has a mission here (teaching us about her own struggle with dyslexia) and the book frequently veers into preachiness, which is always a turn-off for me.