Holding Up the Universe, by Jennifer Niven

Every once in a while, a novel is placed in a town or place that I know well, but rarely does it cross paths with where I currently am, so it was something of a surprise when the protagonists of Niven’s innovative new romance ended up in Richmond, Indiana!

After years of homeschooling and hiding from her peers on account of some unwanted notoriety, Libby is returning to mainstream schooling.  Her high profile comes from being identified as “America’s Fattest Teen” when she was rescued from her own house – a process that involved cutting through the walls to widen the doorway enough for her to be evacuated.

Jack's issues are more congenital.  He can’t recognize faces, suffering from a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia or “face blindness.” His greatest concern is not his condition per se, but what he believes would happen if it became public knowledge.  He fears the ridicule of his peers, so instead he's learned to hide the condition behind swagger and brashness.

When a prank gone awry ends Libby and Jack in detention together, they discover a bond that brings them together.  To their mutual surprise, they find themselves confessing their deepest secrets to each other.   An unlikely romance develops, which leads in turn to each of them taking steps to overcome their fears.

While largely predictable, this novel stands out for at least two reasons:  the unusual conditions and challenges of its protagonists and the greater message about kindness and standing up to peer pressure.  There are so many ways Niven could have gone for easy sappiness, but the ending here is complicated and just as fulfilling.  And the story is full of vivid and powerful scenes like Libby standing in her bikini in front of her peers or Jack getting in trouble for confusing his younger brother with another boy.  And even tired old tropes like the requisite drunken teen party scene were treated in surprisingly original ways that gave them a bit more life.

Libby and Jack's trip to Richmond takes them to Clara's Pizza King which turns out to be a real restaurant and pretty much as described in the book.  With this story fresh in my had, I decided to check it out and found it fun, quirky, and memorable -- so special thanks to Niven for the dining suggestion!

A Girl Like That, by Tanaz Bhathena

Zarin Wadia is the type of girl that adults warn other girls to avoid:  a bad example, always seen hanging out with boys, smoking cigarettes, and disobeying authority.  But living in Jeddah as a foreigner (half-Parsi) with an alien religion (Zoroastrian), Zarin knows that having some additional notoriety could hardly make much of a difference.  And while being a rebel is an unimaginable risk in such a conservative country, Zarin feels drawn to risky behavior anyway.  There is a thrill involved in clandestine trips to the Corniche with boys that helps to satisfy her need to live a real life.  With a boy named Porus (fully Parsi, but also an outsider) who ironically is not her lover, she shares those dreams and hopes.

And then there is Mishal, who while more obedient to her elders, lives a secret life collecting gossip for her blog and living vicariously through that gossip and through watching her rather more libertine brother Abdullah and his friends.  Unlike Zarin, she accepts that a girl cannot live like a boy, but her acceptance does little to improve the eventual outcome.

In case anyone was under the impression that being female (let alone a teenage girl) in Saudi Arabia was easy, this scathing portrayal of the hypocrisy of Saudi society and mores will open some eyes.  For those of us already familiar with the misogyny of the culture, this novel is a somewhat tedious reinforcement of our biases.  Still, Bathena’s portrayal transcends all of that through its detail and through its sympathy for its characters.  While the environment is probably unfathomable to a North American teen, there is a universal humanity that young readers will recognize.  And in this portrayal, an attempt to show how survival is possible, even if the costs will seem extreme.  This is not the Saudi-bashing novel it deserves to be (Bhathena is much more subtle and maybe even kind).    

Zarin herself is probably the most fascinating of the bunch as she doesn’t neatly fall into the carefree rebel mold into which we might like to place her.  She pays a terrible price for her actions and she feels remorse and questions herself frequently through the story.  Yet her bravery comes from a desire to live and break free of expectations – in a way that is instantly recognizable, yet fraught with unfamiliar risks.  More problematic is the story itself which opens with the death of Zarin and Porus in a car crash -- the sort of story twist from which there is no recovery.  Stranger, the death is largely inconsequential to the story and serves more as a distraction in the end.  It is Zarin's life that we really care about.  Fascinating and chilling at the same time.

Girl Made of Stars, by Ashley Herring Blake

Lying on the roof with her twin brother Owen and watching the heavens, Mara found it easy to believe his fairy tales about being children of the stars.  But she's harshly pulled down to earth when Owen is accused of raping her friend Hannah.  Initially torn by competing loyalties, Mara’s feelings turn to horror when she realizes that Hannah isn’t lying and, worse, no one believes her and Mara. 

 

But the story is more complicated, because Hannah’s ordeal dredges back up an equally traumatic assault that Mara experienced a few years earlier and has been struggling to suppress in the meantime.  Faced with the suffering of her friend and her family’s indifference to Hannah (and transferring it to the indifference she faced herself), Mara finally finds an ally and revisits the pain of her own experience.

With sharp and timely insights about date rape, victim shaming, and sexual consent, this is a powerful story that is well told.  It’s heart wrenching reading, as one would expect, but not exploitative.   Rather, it gets its power through honesty and emotional rawness.  There’s hardly a single wrong note here as Blake deftly handles the often conflicting and irrational feelings of guilt, anguish, panic, powerlessness, and anger that make up the experience of having one’s bodily integrity violated.

The writing is exquisite and adolescent characters well-developed (the adults get short shrift).  Mara’s strengths are empowering, even when she takes inevitable steps backward.  And her relationship with her brother is nuanced and well-balanced – it would have been very easy to make Owen evil or innocent and Blake struggles with that through the end of the novel (I’m not 100% happy with where we end up, but I respect the author’s choices).  It is a complicated situation, made more so by the interference of friends and family in a way that is as disturbing as it realistic.

A truly remarkable and memorable novel.  My current pick for best book of the year.

Impostors, by Scott Westerfeld

In the introductory novel of a new series set in the world Westerfeld created for Uglies, Shreve is the most powerful empire in the world now.  And the heir to the throne, Rafi is protected by a unique bodyguard -- her twin sister Frey.  While Rafi is seen often in public, a figure of grace and beauty, Frey hides in the shadows, strictly and brutally trained in martial arts, and used as a body double.

When their father decides to conquer the people of Victoria, he sends Frey as a decoy, using her to convince the Victorians that he won't hurt them.  But since Frey isn't his "real" daughter, he thinks nothing of betraying them all.  What he doesn't count on is Frey's willingness to fight back.  While the Victorian city is destroyed, Frey and Col (the prince of Victoria) escape and plot revenge and rebellion.  And, while there is plenty of fast-paced action to keep the story going, there is also time for Frey and Col to fall in love.

There's plenty of room at the end for subsequent installments and Westerfeld promises three more books after this.  Being familiar with Uglies will obviously get more out of this novel, but it isn't necessary (and in fact I haven't read the predecessor). While very much by-the-numbers YA dystopian, Westerfeld's crisp writing and brisk pace keep this familiar story humming along with excitement.  There is not much character development here (Frey's hurt at being used by her family is dragged out repeatedly and there's some exploration of the difficulty that Frey has developing a personality of her own) but the focus is on the action.

The story is certainly not very subtle.  The neglected younger sibling coming to rescue her older twin will resonate with the target age group.  As one of the characters actually points out, it's also rather trite that the is a basically a revolution based around a teenage daughter trying to take out her Dad.  And despite the constant threat of violence and danger, the fact that the two young people find some awkward romance time (and Frey gets to wear a pretty dress or two and put on makeup) is Westerfeld's attempt to keep the priorities straight here.  But snarkiness aside, this is a story I couldn't put down, so I certainly was sucked in.


[Disclosure:  I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review.  The book is scheduled for release on September 11, 2018.]

The Darkest Corners, by Kara Thomas

When they were children, Callie and Tessa were the key witnesses in a trial that put away the alleged mass murderer of a string of prostitutes in their area in rural Pennsylvania.  After the trial, Tessa's family life fell apart and she was sent to live with her grandmother in Florida.  On the occasion of her father's death, she returns to her old town.  When she arrives, she learns that she has just missed her mother and older sister (neither of whom she has seen since she was sent away).  Trying to track them down, she starts to make a series of shocking discoveries.

Coincidentally, a judge has recently granted a hearing to the convicted man to present new evidence.  The idea that the man they helped put away may get released terrifies both girls.  While Callie remains convinced that they did the right thing, Tessa has grown to doubt the accuracy of her own testimony in the intervening years. Moreover, Tessa's search for her family keeps crossing paths with the convicted man and those murders from long ago. And when a new murder occurs that bears a striking resemblance to the others, it really does seem that Tessa and Callie helped to convict the wrong man.  And worse, that Tessa's family is messed up in the whole thing.

A brisk crime thriller with lots of twists and turns.  Unfortunately, by the end, the story has grown so convoluted that Thomas has to cram the resolution into a brisk recount.  That's a frustrating way to end a tale which is so well-paced up to the last thirty pages. With such a busy story, there isn't much time to do thorough character development, but Thomas excels at color and depicting an environment and characters who are just threatening enough to keep the tension going.  While Thomas keeps us a bit off-balance about where exactly the story takes place, you can feel the rural northern PA vibe to the story vividly.

The Ugly One, by Leanne Statland Ellis

In this historical novel set in the Incan empire (pre-conquest), Micay’s deep facial scar has marked her as ugly and detestable in her village. Tormented by a boy her age named Ocho and avoided by most of the village, she is terribly lonely.  But when a stranger comes to town and gives her a baby macaw to take care of, her world begins to change.  She is drawn to the local shaman and begins to learn his ways and then is invited to go to the sacred city of Machu Picchu.

With limited information on the Inca, Ellis has made the most of the documentary evidence, delighting in recalling the diet and manners, and then elaborating on it with a certain amount of idealism (blithely informing us that while the Inca may have practiced human sacrifice, the victims went willingly and joyfully).  More important in her Rousseauian idyll, the people lived one with nature and were gentle users of the planet.

As a story, Micay’s journey is satisfying, showing her growth from timid and afraid to gaining the confidence she needs to serve her leadership calling.  Some key story elements (like the reason for Micay’s facial scarring) are held back too long, but provides a better dramatic arc.

Stick & Stones, by Abby Cooper

Elyse has an extremely rare condition:  when people call her names, the words appear on her skin like tattoos and stay there for a few days, fading away slowly and being replaced by new words.  She’s had the condition since birth but when she was young, the words were mostly nice ones.  Now in sixth grade, the words that appear on her skin are more likely to be nasty.  And the symptoms have grown more severe:  now she can make words appear by thinking them on her own.

With the help of anonymous notes from someone at school, she discovers that she can control the way her body responds to the words, by developing self-confidence and telling herself that she has many positive traits to counter the nasty words.  The opportunity to run for class office, while frightening at first, provides her a chance to prove that the words that describe her are overwhelmingly positive.

The story is not subtle, but Cooper’s self-positive message is great for middle readers.  Elyse’s struggles and eventual triumph, in the face of doubts from even her own family, are inspirational.  And the story isn't only about self-actualization.  Along the way, Elyse also has some adventures sorting out friendship issues and even explores the scary world of middle school romance.  The overall message that we need to wear the words that people use about us with pride (instead of fear) is positive and affirming.