The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre, by Robin Talley

Mel lives for the theater and she has the fortitude and the organizational skills to have earned the right to be the youngest stage manager at her school.  But where she is able to keep a hundred things straight and solve others' problems without hesitation, her own life is a mess.  When her last relationship blew up spectacularly during the opening night of Romeo and Juliet, she made a promise to not fall in love with anyone again until after the Spring musical was over.  While her promise was not sworn in blood, it might as well have been!

Legend has it that the theater is cursed and the only way to avoid having a play performed there from falling apart into chaos is to perform a wide variety of "countercurses." So, for example, if an actor whistles or someone utters the name of the Scottish Play, there are ways to undo the damage.  But the most important thing is a special rule that the stage crew come up with each production.  And after the R & J disaster, the crew has decided that Mel's forswearing of love and romance should be the magical key that protects their next production.

Mel doesn't foresee the obvious:  that she won't just fall in love during the production of Le Mis, but that it will be the Love of Her Life.  But what are superstitions anyway?  How could Mel falling for pretty Odile be anything so cataclysmic?  But then the accidents and misfortunes start to beset the production.

Talley got some great advice and details to put in her book, but there's a stiffness to the storytelling that betrays her lack of comfort with the world of high school drama.  Too many details are dropped in for authenticity, rather than importance to the story, so I felt like Talley was trying to earn cred rather than describe kids doing a play.  Mel is too perfect (and too polished) to be believable, her fellow crew members too professional, and the always fascinating tensions between cast and crew too unexplored.  This is high school drama as it likes to describe itself, rather than as it actually is.

At over 400 pages, this is a long novel that doesn't offer enough of a payoff to reward the investment.  For a well-written book with some decent characters, it felt strangely cold for what should have been a heartfelt exploration of letting go.  Mel's blind spot for nurturing her own needs sits like the elephant in the room.  Like Mel, Talley races to bury herself in technical details of drama whenever the emotions start to get interesting.  While Mel has some growth at the end, it isn't really clear even in the epilogue that she's found life-work balance.

Don't Stand So Close to Me, by Eric Walters

It's early March, six weeks away from the eighth grade dance, and Quinn can't believe that Isaac (the class president) isn't taking it seriously!  There's so much to plan for and so many arrangements to make!  But then at an emergency school assembly, the principal announces that spring break has been moved up and is starting tomorrow (and is being extended for an extra two weeks).  It's all to do with this virus that Quinn has been hearing about from her Dad (an ER doctor at the local hospital) and the need for "flattening the curve." 

At first, having a longer break seems like fun, but things are so different and are changing fast!  "Non-essential" businesses are closed and no one is allowed to visit the residents at the local nursing home.  Her father moves down to the basement to distance himself from the family, her mother starts working from home out of their guest bedroom, and Quinn has to attend school through something called Zoom.  When the original date of the return to school is extended out (and eventually cancelled altogether), Quinn begin to wonder if life will ever return to normal.

This short middle grade book, given its topical content and short shelf life, was rushed out in the Fall of 2020.  As such, it's quite rough, with underdeveloped characters and clunky storytelling, but I think it is important that someone attempted to create a middle reader to address all of the changes that went on during the crazy early days of the pandemic.  Years from now, this will make a nice historical novella.  For now, it tells a story to which young readers will personally relate.

You Know I'm No Good, by Jessie Ann Foley

Mia is trouble.  She's never found a drink she wouldn't drink, a drug she wouldn't take, or a guy she wouldn't hook up with.  And when she assaults her stepmother, it's the last and final straw.  Her family has her sent to a rehab facility out in rural Minnesota.  She's furious about her involuntary relocation, but she doesn't really blame them.  After all, all she's been doing for the past couple of years is screwing up.  Her father and stepmother blame her bad choices on the lingering trauma of her mother's death, but Mia herself figures her behavior is just because she's a no good slut.  Tracing how she actually got from her brighter beginnings to this nadir is half of the journey of this novel.  Getting herself back out is the rest.

There are plenty of examples in the troubled-teen-in-rehab genre and while this follows the general model, it breaks from it in notable ways.  As usual, the reader is only slowly brought in on the details and Mia performs the duty of unreliable narrator with aplomb.  She rations out the facts slowly enough that gradual enlightenment substitutes for drama for most of the first 150 pages or so.  Similar to other examples in the genre as well is the colorful cast of misfits that our heroine meets in rehab.  Sympathetic counselor?  Check. Sadistic warden? Check. All per plan.

But these things are simply the furniture that makes the more complex story of Mia herself easier to tell.  She's a much deeper and interesting character for one thing.  She's certainly self-destructive but she's really conscious of her decisions.  The contrast between her anger and rage with her rationality is a shock.  And while she's self-critical, she's never self-pitying.  Mia, in a word, is compelling and wanting to find out what happens to her will keep you turning pages. The ending itself turns out to be is a real surprise (aliens invading Minnesota would have been more expected than what happens here) but is satisfying.  So, while this is a yet another book in a heavily used setting, this novel is a strong contribution.

One Speck of Truth, by Caela Carter

Whenever Alma asks her mother about her father, Mom either gets evasive or angry. Alma knows that he died when she was really young (her Nanny told her that much), she knows his name, and she knows that he was Portuguese -- but that's about it. She can't even get her mother to tell her where he was buried. So, she searches for his grave whenever she can, dragging her best friend Julia around with her, but so far she's had no luck in finding him.

Then, out of the blue, her mother moves them to Portugal.  In the same way that her mother refuses to talk about her father, she is similarly evasive about why they have moved to Lisbon.  But Alma realizes that now she is finally able to meet her father's family and get some sort of truth.

I liked Alma's creativity and energy, but her family really drove me nuts.  The adults in this story are really horrible human beings, gaslighting Alma, outright lying to her, and refusing to answer her questions -- all because of some inflated idea that she isn't old enough to know some version of the truth.  What a load of pretentious crap!  I found the mother particularly self-absorbed and detestable.  Early on, the story intimates that she might be suffering some sort of psychic break from a recent divorce, but really she just seemed selfish. Predictably, Alma emulates her mother and struggles with being honest with the people she loves as well (she at least recognizes the problem and works on it). Still, the rampant abuse in this story really left a sour taste for me.

The Gilded Girl, by Alyssa Colman

Emma Harris has lived a life of privilege for her first twelve years. Like other girls of her status, her father has now enrolled her in Miss Posterity's Academy of Practice Magic, the best school mastering her "kindling." Emma may be rich, but unable to conceptualize poverty or class, she is open hearted to everyone and clueless of the social norms she is violating.  She doesn't recognize that her fellow students (with the exception of one shy girl) are simply exploiting her for her wealth.  And when she tries to befriend the servant girl Izzy, it is misinterpreted as ridicule.

While Emma and her classmates have a bright future before them, Izzy is condemned to a life of misery.  It's 1905 and, although there is talk in progressive circles about helping the poor, only the rich are allowed to kindle.  The poor are not considered worthy and are required to "snuff" out their magic when it develops in adolescence.  Without the ability to kindle, the poor will then stay poor as the best jobs require magic.

Emma's fortune changes suddenly when her father is killed in the San Francisco Earthquake.  Not only orphaned but destitute, the headmistress forces Emma into servitude to pay off her debt.  Her peers reject her now that she has been reduced to a servant (much to her innocent surprise).  While Emma is forced to work alongside Izzy, the servant girl distrusts her.  But through hard work and a true heart, Emma wins over Izzy and hatches a plan to attempt to kindle by themselves, flying in the face of convention and the law.  To succeed, she has to enlist a variety of allies ranging from a friendly newsie to the "house dragon."

Derived from the classic A Little Princess, the addition of magic is a nice touch, but Colman takes the story much further, adding a stronger theme of socioeconomic equity that draw on the Progressive Movement and the real historical currents of the Gilded Age.  It's a loving tribute to the sentimentality of the period (complete with an over-the-top rosy conclusion) and also a fun magical romp.

Girl, Serpent, Thorn, by Melissa Bashardoust

Soraya has lived her life to date as a prisoner in her own home.  Cursed at birth as a result of her mother's rash decision, Soraya is unable to touch anyone without killing them.  As a result, she has to wear gloves to protect others and is secluded in her family's palace as a secret to prevent the shame of her curse from becoming public knowledge.

On the occasion of her twin brother's ascent to the throne and marriage, she is offered the opportunity to break the curse, but it will require her to betray her family.  Despite some misgivings, she does so with the help of a young warrior named Azad,.  But breaking the curse has huge ramifications and it becomes clear that she has only understood part of the story of her origin.

A lush fantasy based on Persian myth and Zoroastrian beliefs.  Soraya is a fascinating combination of anxiety, anger, and long -- very much the paragon of adolescent angst -- and thus familiar and sympathetic in the eyes of young readers.  Her voyage from reclusive outcast to brave leader is a satisfying journey -- part physical and part emotional.  Overall, the result is a sophisticated and enjoyable read, but I found her romantic outings (and implied bisexuality) distracting and forced and the ending exhaustingly heavy with symbolism.

Read the Book, Lemmings! by Ame Dyckman (ill by Zachariah OHora)

I don't often review picture books, but that doesn't mean that I don't read them!  And when a really good one comes along, I want to give it a little publicity, as in this case.

First Mate Foxy and Captain PB of the SS Cliff wish that the lemmings would just read the book.  It's plain and clear:  Despite what people think, lemmings don't jump off cliffs!  But try to tell that to the lemmings!  Time and time again, the lemmings jump overboard and Foxy has to go rescue them.  Why won't they just read the book?!

From the team that brought you the delightful Wolfie the Bunny, this hilarious and clever book is well suited to dramatic reading.  Grownups (especially those working in documentation and end-user training), who have wondered why their own lemmings wouldn't just read the instructions will identify strongly with Foxy.

Unscripted, by Nicole Kronzer

Zelda is dreaming of breaking into the Big Time in comedy, landing a job at Second City before getting plucked up by Saturday Night Live.  She's completely excited about the summer she is about to spend at improv camp.  If she can only land a spot on the camp's varsity team, she'll be able to perform for the famous alums who come back to watch the end-of-camp show!

Winning a spot turns out to be the least of her challenges.  Her fellow teammates are sexist jerks, who try to sabotage her performances and make her look bad.  Ben, the team's sexy coach, is the worst of the bunch.  Confusingly for Zelda, he's nice when they are out of practice.  He seems to be taking a special interest in her.  A wallflower, Zelda is flattered by the attention and Ben's blatant grooming, but things still feel off and fellow campers and Zelda's brother try to warn her off.  When Ben becomes possessive and violent, Zelda doesn't know how to cope.

This is a book that I had a hard time getting through.  Reading it was fine.  It was well written, the pace was brisk, and the story quite compelling.  However, Ben was repulsive and exaggerated to the point of caricature and Zelda was simply too wobbly and weak.  I understand the author's intention to show the importance of fighting back against sexism and violence, but when the villain is this transparent, there really is no justification for Zelda's perpetual stupidity while her friends and family spend most of the book giving her good reasons to get smart.  With so many reasons for Zelda to end this, the only reason that Zelda didn't stand up for herself seemed to be so the story would run a few more pages (oh! how I longed for us to reach whatever the page minimum for the contract was!).

All this dumbing down basically teaches young women is that bad men are pretty easy to identify and you'd have to be a moron to keep hanging on to them. I could find zero reasonable motivation for Zelda to not turn Ben in to the authorities, but that isn't realistic. In the real world, abusers are far less easy to identify and the forces that keep women from turning them in far more difficult to overcome.  Zelda has a group of supportive friends, a brother backing her, and even several grownups ready to come to her aid.  Few abused women have that much.  I too believe that #MeToo stories need to be told, but I want them to be mildly realistic so young readers understand the challenge.

These Vengeful Hearts, by Katherine Laurin

Ever since her older sister was permanently crippled during a high school prank run amok, Ember has wanted to wreak vengeance against the secret society that was responsible for the injury.  The Red Court is an anonymous group of girls at her school who have the ability to grant anyone's wishes and the power to enforce their will through blackmail and extortion.  Once you've engaged the Red Court, you can be sure of two things: what you ask for will happen and you'll then be permanently in their debt.

Ember is determined to take them down and gets herself invited to become a member with the intention of destroying the organization from within.  Her plan is to work her way up the ranks from a lowly initiate to the inner circle, where she'll expose the "Queen of Hearts" who leads the group.  But despite her intention to avoid causing harm along the way, she finds that hard to do as a member.  Instead, as she gets sucked into the string of lies and deceit that the group relies upon, she finds that  she is losing her bearings, her moral compass, and her friends.  

The characters are not well drawn and are developed unevenly (Ember's sense of horror in discovering that she enjoys extortion is more stated than shown, her aversion to committing her assignments cursory and shallow, and the on-off relationships with her allies confusing). With few to no sympathetic characters, the book falls back heavily on the plot, which is all over the place! Possibly (just possibly) a younger teen reader might find this story plausible, but most readers will recognize how silly the set up and the entire plot is. The author is at extreme pains to explain how this amazingly fragile arrangement could work, frequently revealing in the exposition why it really would not.  There's also this annoying repeated attempt to debate the morality of the group, but it falls on the same silly arguments (the people who ask for the favors are as guilty as the Red Court members) that grows weaker and weaker each time it is brought up.

Still, readers might enjoy this simply for the campy fun of watching mean girls exercise power.  After all, this is breezy read!  But we've seen much better versions of this story before.

The Truth Project, by Dante Medema

Cordelia is feeling pretty smug about her senior year.  She's going to ace her senior project, basically by copying her older sister's one:  using the results of a genealogy test to create a poem about who she is.  But when she gets the results back, she's in for a big shock:  her sister is actually only her half-sister.  Her father is not her biological father.  Her parents have lied to her!

Feeling betrayed, Cordelia seeks solace from childhood playmate  and occasional heartthrob Kodiak.  Last year, he had a rough time where he dropped out and got his girlfriend pregnant.  Now that he's putting his life together, he can appreciate the difficulties that she is having coping with the lies.  While her mother discourages her, Cordelia reaches out to her biological father and immediately feels a strong bond.  In her mind, he's the missing link and suddenly all the times she felt like an outsider make sense.  But he's also surprisingly reluctant to meet her  in person and the harder she pushes for direct contact, the more he pulls away.

A story about the meaning of family and identity (spoiler: it's more than DNA) told in a mixture of verse, snippets of IMs, and emails.  The format is thin and the many half-blank pages make this book a really quick read.  There's plenty of drama but not much depth and Kodiak's story, while interesting, is not always a good fit and becomes distracting.  Occasionally, it provides useful contrasts (e.g., when comparing the circumstances of Cordelia's inception and Kodiak's previous year misadventures).  Still, it feels like a weak link in the story.

Placed in Alaska, where there ought to be lots of potential for scenery and local color, the setting is underexploited.

Blood Moon, by Lucy Cuthew

When Frankie and Benjamin start liking each other, things follow their natural progression, except that when they hook up for the first time in what what otherwise have been an amazingly romantic and sexy experience, Frankie gets her period.  She's mortified, even as Benjamin assures her that it's not a big deal to him, but the whole matter seems like something that they can just put aside.  Then someone posts a hideous meme about the incident and suddenly not only the whole school, but the whole world knows about the time that Frankie fooled around while she was having her period.

Who would have done such a thing?  Benjamin denies it was him and the only other likely suspect is Frankie's former BFF Harriet, who has recently grown really mean.  But even she wouldn't be that cruel, would she?  Not that it really matters who did this as the public humiliation is ruining Frankie's life, until she decides to take matters into her own hands.

The novel is awfully thin, written in sparse verse that makes for a very fast read (it took me just over two hours to read the entire thing).  It's not very memorable verse either. While the book is pitched as a feminist paean to body positivity, the incident involving Frankie and Benjamin does not even occur until 140 pages into the book.  The story is really about bullying and the way that social media amplifies and distorts jealousy and petty acts of vengeance.  The themes of sex positivity are clearly reinforced (by both the teens and the adults), but it didn't really sum up to much.

Who I Was With Her, by Nita Tyndall

When Maggie dies in a car accident, her girlfriend Corinne has no one to turn to.  Publicly, Corinne and Maggie aren't even friends.  Corinne, as far as all of her friends know, is straight.  The only person who knows is Maggie's brother who in turn introduces Corinne to Elissa, who dated Maggie before Corinne came along (a fact that comes as a shock to Corinne).

At home, Corinne can't seek solace from her parents.  Her mother refuses to come out of the bottle.  Her father is obsessed with only one thing: seeing Corinne get an athletic scholarship so she can go to college and get away.  Neither one of them would be ready to deal with a bisexual daughter.  And Corinne, who was never willing to have her relationship come out in the open, doesn't want to risk what little family she has.  Instead, she struggles to maintain the status quo, even as it becomes more and more untenable.

The story suffers from poor pacing.  It starts off very slowly and covers pretty well-trodden material with little to add to the grieving-a-secret-lover rubric.  However, towards the end the novel grows more interesting as, through flashbacks, it becomes clear that Corinne's memories of the relationship are flawed and she has some difficult truths to face about herself.  None of that redeems the poor integration of the stories of the parents, which end up as peripheral to the story.  That seems a wasted opportunity as it ought to be possible to connect the dots between her unhappy family situation and her other difficulties.

Grasping Mysteries: Girls Who Loved Math, by Jeannine Atkins

Continuing a model Atkins used successfully in Finding Wonders, this book explores the lives of seven women who made a difference through math:  Caroline Herschel, Florence Nightingale, Hertha Marks Ayrton, Marie Tharp, Katherine Johnson, Edna Lee Paisano, and Vera Rubin.  Though the book's primary intent is to encourage girls to study math through the inspirational stories, Atkins focus on their childhood and the early challenges each remarkable woman faced make each story a pleasure to read.

Written entirely in verse, the stories could easily have been trite, but in most cases the opposite is the case.  Verse allows Atkins to focus on specific formative anecdotes without having to tie them all together, relying on the reader to connect the dots.  Subtle cross referencing between the stories intimates the way that science itself (and the growing role of women in science) builds off of the efforts of those that came before.

Each story, while calling out each woman' accomplishments, also notes external obstacles (which range from family commitments to institutional sexism) as well as personal challenges (failing grades, research setbacks) making it clear that success did not come without effort.   And in each story, a personal connection is found, whether it be a favorite dress, a marriage proposal, or a first child, showing that these women's lives were more than just professional accomplishments.  The overall theme is that girls may have to struggle harder to realize their dreams, but those dreams are still attainable.

Love in English, by Maria E. Andreu

Ana has always had a way with words in her old home in Argentina, but when she and her mother emigrate to New Jersey to join her father, she realizes that years of studying English in school and of watching TV shows has not prepared her for living in the United States.  Everywhere she goes, she is confused by cultural differences and the language barrier.  At first, every other word is #### and #### and we share her frustration while she tries to figure out what is going on.  But she makes friends and slowly develops the tools she needs to express herself as she wishes.

Life brings other challenges for Ana as she grows close to two boys:  Harrison (the sharp looking American boy who is everything she has ever imagined having an American boyfriend would be like) and Neo ( the Greek boy in her ESL class, who shares her challenges and truly understands what it is like to adapt to life in a new country).  Unlike English, there is no class for learning to juggle the feelings with which  Ana is dealing.

Sweet and humorous, this is good YA romance fare, but with the delightful twist of Ana's astute observations on the surprises of American life and the devious complexities and contradictions of English.

Every Single Lie, by Rachel Vincent

Things have been tough since Beckett's father died from an overdose of the OxyContin he was taking to numb his battle injuries.  In the aftermath, Mom spends too much time down at the station focusing on her job as a police detective.  Beckett's little sister Landry obsesses over cooking healthy meals and her older brother Penn is getting pumped up for her West Point application. Beckett herself has grown tired of the looks and the rumors at school.  Her boyfriend is hiding things from her and she's had enough of all the deception and secrets.

All of this pales in comparison to what happens when Beckett discovers a dead baby in the girls' locker room.  Within hours people are claiming it was hers!  There is no way it could be, but in her small town, there is nothing people like more than a juicy rumor and Beckett's family is already in the crosshairs of the town's gossips.

The rumors don't just stay local.  Thanks to the attention drawn to the dead baby by an anonymous Twitter account, the story goes viral and the crazies start coming out, threatening Beckett's life.  There's little she can do to change the things that people want to believe, but she's left wondering whose baby it actually was, especially since all the evidence does actually point her direction.

A suspenseful page turner that explores the way people like to talk and make up stuff.  Sometimes brutally, Vincent puts her heroine through the paces of being a small town pariah.  It will make you mad and sad to read about, yet it felt very realistically portrayed.  Some of the twists of the plot (and especially the ending) stretched credulity, but none of that diminishes a well-written story.  It's not deep and it won't teach you new things about addiction, teen pregnancy, or the corrosive impact of secrets and gossip, but it tells a good story well.

Aftershocks, by Marisa Reichardt

Ruby can't deal with her mother starting to date her water polo coach.  She can't deal with her best friend Mila, whose life is going off the rails and into the bottle.  Even her boyfriend Leo is too much for her these days.  How much worse can it get?

Her answer comes at the laundromat, where she's in the process of getting a cute guy to go next door and buy her beer when the the walls start to shake and the world around her collapses.  It's an earthquake  (not so unusual in SoCal) and it's unlike anything Ruby's ever seen before.  With the foresight to shelter under a table as the building collapses, Ruby survives but finds herself trapped under the rubble.  Charlie, the guy she with whom was just talking, is similarly pinned down nearby.  Suddenly none of her problems seem that big of a deal.  Now she needs to stay alive.

Reichardt's story of survival after the Big One paints a fairly realistic portrayal of the disaster and its accompanying chaos.  As a story of Ruby's struggle for survival and reunion with her family and friends, it makes for an entertaining adventure.  It does less well at trying to address Ruby's life reprioritizations and how the trauma of living through the earthquake changes her life.  That it changes Ruby is very clear in the end, but Reichardt struggles with how to show that evolution and ends up simply making it so.  It is the process of that evolution that is so important to the success of the story and quite a cheat to simply skip ahead to the result.  There's some attempt through flashback to show the precedents for her growth, but without the growth itself, these segments seem wasted and distracting.  Similarly wasted is Ruby's boyfriend Leo, of whom she spends far less attention than she does over Charlie.

The Year of the Witching, by Alexis Henderson

Thanks to Hulu, the true political subtlety of Margaret Attwood's Handmaid's Tale was long ago lost to the spectacle of exaggerated misogyny.  On its face, Henderson's debut novel seems to want to travel down that same blunt force approach to politics by creating a religious dystopia where women suffer for no other reason than because men can get away with making them do so.  With the blurbs on the back of the book, that's certainly the way the publisher is marketing this novel.  But Attwood's condemnation of Reagan's neoconservatism and reborn American exceptionalism was always more than a dystopian fantasy novel and Henderson's subtle and engrossing book is similarly more than the sum of its parts.  They are similar works, but not for the reasons that are immediately apparent.

In Bethel, the Prophet's interpretation of the Father's Will and the Holy Scriptures is law.  Along with his trusted Apostles, these men rule over the people, keeping order and surrounding them with fear of the outside and of the encroaching Darkwood forest.  No one dares to enter the forest, which is still teeming with the witches that Bethel's founder beat into submission ages ago.  Certainly, shepherdess Immanuelle would never venture there on her own free will.  But one day, chasing after a runaway ram, she is forced to enter it and is accosted by two witches who hand her a gift -- a journal belonging to her mother Miriam (who died in childbirth).  The book is full of forbidden writings and Immanuelle devours the book for glimpses of her mother's life.  Miriam, who had enjoyed the trust and love of the Prophet fell from grace due to infidelity.  For her actions, Miriam was persecuted, but not before setting up a terrible retribution of four plagues that now Immanuelle has unwittingly unleashed.

The plagues though are really the natural consequence of the betrayals, jealousies, fears, and hatreds that underpin the dangerous and ultimately unsustainable status quo.  As Bethel itself unravels, Immanuelle becomes the only one who can make it right, but doing so will require knowledge that she doesn't have, the assistance of people who refused to help, and mercy from people unaccustomed to granting it.  Can she succeed where no one else wants her to?

Dark and complex, there's a lot to chew on in this book.  I found it too gory and bloody for my tastes, so I wouldn't recommend it if copious descriptions of bodily fluids are not your thing, but it is a compelling story.  There is a complex back story that supports the twisted and overlapping contemporary alliances that drive the story and make it interesting (and difficult to fairly summarize).  This isn't a great book for developing sympathetic characters, but it is definitely good for creating really detestable villains.  Immanuelle herself becomes ultimately a dark anti-hero, but in the more ambiguous background of Trumpian politics, this works surprisingly well.

What We Found in the Corn Maze and How It Saved a Dragon, by Henry Best

Ever since the DavyTron (which can convert tomato juice into any delicious vegetable you want) came out, the family farm stands of the world have been going out of business.  Cal's family is one of those threatened with foreclosure if they can't make enough money on their corn maze (although some of their troubles date back to Cal's unfortunate accident with the family's Fireball 50 harvester that left it a charred wreck).  Cal could really use a miracle or at least a bit of magic.

And magic is what literally rolls by his astonished eyes when he and his friend Drew witness spare change rolling uphill on the ground in front of them.  They follow the errant coins to their neighbor Modesty, who has learned how to cast a spell that retrieves lost change.  It's one of many spells in a notebook that Modesty discovered in her locker, none of which seem terribly useful.  The spells can only be cast at certain times of day and have limited functions like opening a stuck jar lid or picking something up without having to bend over.  

Be that what it may, soon enough the three children find themselves on an adventure to a parallel world called Congroo, which is full of magic.  All is not well there.  A strange force is draining Congroo of magic, leading to global cooling, and it all points back to an evil magician named Oöm Lout.  The DavyTrons back in our world are part of this plan and the kids set out to save Congroo and coincidentally save the family farm by shutting down the DavyTrons.

A wild rollicking adventure that touches on themes of bullying and climate change, but it ultimately just good plain lighthearted romp with magic and dragons.  The story is full of puns and inside jokes for all ages.  So when you've had enough dystopian stories about abused children and just want to have a smart funny adventure, pick this one off the new releases shelf!

He Must Like You, by Danielle Younge-Ullman

Perry Ackerman is a known pest.  All of the waitresses at The Goat know that he'll try to get his hands all over them given the opportunity.  So, Libby knows what she's up against when she has to wait his table.  But he's a good tipper and Libby can usually handle him.  However, things haven't really been normal for her.  Her college fund has disappeared and her parents are going to unceremoniously eject her from the house so they can rent her bedroom out for an Airbnb.  So, she needs the job and she needs the tip, but not enough to put up with the creep's pawing.  When he goes too far, she shocks everyone by dumping his drink over his head.  The repercussions of her action have even more surprising consequences.

Like the middle grade book Maybe He Just Likes You, this novel explores the social intricacies of sexual harassment.  Aimed at teenagers, the approach is far more complex and the author brings up a wide range of issues from family violence to workplace harassment (especially in the service sector) to racial violence.  As it turns out, Perry Ackerman is hardly the first male with whom Libby has had to negotiate matters of consent and the novel serves as a useful primer on a wide variety of issues revolving around consent in general.  Libby's toxic family and the story around them seems initially unrelated and distracting, but gets neatly tied into the story by the time we reach a gratifying conclusion.  It's a lightning fast and entertaining read about a serious subject and all ages can benefit from it.

Across the Pond, by Joy McCullough

By an unusual chain of events, Callie's family find themselves heirs to a castle in Scotland.  While renovating it will present quite a few challenges, the family decides to leave San Diego and move in.  For Callie, this is far more than a change of scenery, it's chance for a restart.  Her friends have abandoned her and no one will talk to her, ever since she got blamed for getting them all in trouble.  There's nothing she'll miss when she goes and everything to gain by going someplace where no one knows her or her past.

While living in a castle sounds very exotic and exciting, it's really just a dilapidated and very drafty old building.  And not terribly comfortable to boot!  Also, while she hopes that being an exotic American will give her special cachet, she realizes quickly that kids are basically the same and that nothing will fix her fear of going through the same trauma all over again. Her parents, concerned that she's not making friends, deliver an ultimatum that she needs to join a club.  She doesn't play sports or a musical instrument and the idea of being around strangers terrifies her.  In desperation, she tries the local birdwatchers club, but the sexism of the group's leader drives her away.  Still, when she learns that Lady Philippa (the old woman who lived in the castle before them) was an avid birder all of her life, Callie is inspired to follow in her footsteps.  Along with the granddaughter of her groundskeeper and a helpful local librarian, they compete in a Big Day contest against the established club.

There are lots of great ideas in this book, but it's terribly busy.  Is the book about Callie confronting her fears of standing up for what is right ever again?  Is it about the ways that her life mirrors the life of the Lady Philippa (whose story is told in the pages of a diary that Callie finds)?  Is it about helping the gardener's granddaughter come out of her shell?  Is it about girls taking charge and defeating the boys in the contest?  And that's not even covering the inclusion of some trauma involving a cat or the dangerous and forbidden castle keep -- both of which are underutilized as plot devices.  There is, in sum, plenty to talk about here but a plethora of ideas doesn't make a story.  Charming but rudderless.

Poisoned, by Jennifer Donnelly

Sophie is a good princess, but she won't make a good queen, so says her stepmother and anyone else who dares to speak of the matter aloud.  She's none too bright and far too timid and soft to be a leader.  She lacks the will to make difficult decisions and punish the people who could hurt her.  Proving her stepmother's point, Sophie is led by her huntsman into the woods and he cuts out her heart.  And so she dies.

"Mirror mirror on the wall!  Who will be the source of my downfall?" the Queen commands.  But despite the fact that Sophie has been disposed of, the mirror insists that it is the princess who is to be the cause of the Queen's demise.  But how can this be?

You'll have to read the novel to find out.

Donnelly's Stepsister was a clever, witty, and ultimately poignant reinterpretation of Cinderella. Here, she takes on Snow White.  But while the formula is intoxicating, the result is less impressive this time out.  Part of the reason for this failure is that the point of the story is a mixture of messages (the importance of confronting fear, the strength of kindness, and the value of ignoring naysayers) that never really gels.  Nor is the revelation that a Grimms tale can be told this way all that revelatory.  Sophie is nice, but she makes an uncompelling heroine.  She goes through a number of transformations, but is a slow learner.  Her most common response is the wail that her friends are dead (people die often and repeatedly in this story).  And having set up a very convoluted plot with at least two enemies to vanquish, Connelly has to rush the ending to accomplish it all.  The last fifty pages are mere sketches of a story.

The Sea in Winter, by Christine Day

Maisie's plans of becoming a ballerina are sidetracked when she sustains a knee injury in class.  While there is some optimistic news from her physical therapist that she still might be able to practice again, Maisie struggles with depression.  All of her friends were in ballet class and now that she can't participate, they seem to have deserted her.  By no small irony. the girl who talked her into trying the dangerous pose that injured her is now headed off to New York for a summer program.  She will realize her dreams, while Maisie is stuck in Tacoma.  When a later tragic setback cements the fact that Maisie's career is probably finished, she falls back on a counselor, her family, and her rich Indigenous American traditions for support.

A promising book full of fine ingredients but that fails to deliver.  The story of dealing with injury and the struggle for a comeback is great dramatic material but is undeveloped and unexplored.  The injury happened, but without any sort of special note.  The fact that her friends have moved on and that Maisie is having trouble dealing is noted, but not used in the story in any particular way.  And while she mopes a little when it seems her career is over, the author simply skips over her counseling.  She simply doesn't find the story worth telling.

Moreover, Maisie seems largely secondary to the story.  There are long digressions about the mother's life story and various elements of recent Native American history.  All of which is actually fascinating, but is never tied in to the story.  It's as of the author really wanted to write a story about the mother or a non-fiction book about the Makah tribe in the Olympic Peninsula, which makes you wonder why she chose this half-hearted attempt at a story about recovery.

Goodbye from Nowhere, by Sara Zarr

Kyle has has an idealized notion of his family as a perfect gathering of different people united by love, best illustrated by the noisy messy gatherings of his extended tribe at his grandparents' farmhouse.  It's such a warm place and Kyle proudly shows it off to his girlfriend (as well as proudly showing her off to them) at Thanksgiving.

But then his father drops a bombshell on him; his mother is having an affair with another man.  Kyle responds by cutting off his friends,  ghosting his girlfriend, and quitting baseball.  Unable to tell anyone or confide in his friends, he turns to his cousin and eventually his siblings.  While his parents try to keep the affair a secret and fail miserably to keep their marriage together, the whole thing tears Kyle apart.  To put the icing on Kyle's miserable cake, his grandparents have decided to sell the farm.  And so now the whole family -- some in the know but most not -- are converging for a final family gathering.

An emotionally complicated story of family with some impressive nods to Russian literature.  The overall message is not so much a Tolstoyan tale of unhappy families, as it is about how families are really webs of imperfect people behaving imperfectly.  Kyle's idealism may take a hit, but in the end he comes out with a healthier understanding of what is reasonable and unreasonable to expect from family.  At the same time, the novel really does have a Russian feel to it -- an enormous cast of diverse characters who each deal with each other in unique ways.  I always have trouble keeping up with large casts, but in this case, it's really the dynamic of that large family that is the point.  Zarr does a superior job making the whole thing work.

Amelia Unabridged, by Ashley Schumacher

Amelia and Jenna are obsessed with N. E. Endsley's Orman Chronicles.  For Amelia, the books are a source of comfort since her father left and her mother withdrew.  For Jenna, who has the loving parents and wealth that Amelia lacks, the books are simply something to bond them together.  She enjoys bossing Amelia around and Amelia, happy to be pleasing, does what her friend tells her to do.

When it is announced that Endsley will be appearing at a local book festival, the girls have to go.  Jenna's parents get them VIP passes so their be able to meet the author and get their books signed.  But things at the festival don't go well.  Endsley cancels and Jenna betrays Ashley in a way that leaves them broken apart.  And then, before they can mend their relationship, Jenna is killed in a car accident.  Reeling from the tragedy, Amelia withdraws.  Despite Jenna's parents' attempt to draw Amelia out, eh loses her interest in reading or pretty much anything else.  

A mysterious package arrives for Amelia with something in it that should not exist.  Following clues left on the package, Amelia impulsively travels to a bookstore across the country.  There, she finds out what happened for real at that ill-fated book festival and a lot more.  By the end of a week-long stay, she comes to an important crossroads where she'll have to decide whose life she wants to live.

A creative and complex romance and coming of age story.  The writing is beautiful, the characters deep, and the story well-developed and fresh.  But I still found myself unmoved.  I enjoyed reading the book, but the subject matter didn't engage me.  I love reading, but I don't swoon over bookstores or book authors and Schumacher presumes that her readers will.  The book's epilogue, with its hypothetical suggestions of what is to come, nicely encapsulates the gauzy vision that the author seems to like.  It's a pretty style but it doesn't make commitments.

Four Days of You and Me, by Miranda Kenneally

Lulu and Alex have a way of coming together and breaking apart, but whenever they are apart, they ache to get back together.  In a story that traverses four years of high school, but which focuses on four class trips, we track the ebbs and flows of that relationship.  The class trips start modest (local science museum and amusement part) and grow increasingly elaborate (New York City and London).  The relationship grows correspondingly complex.

Lulu and Alex try to manage their fleeting interests in others and the competing claims of their career aspirations (he wants to play baseball and she wants to become an author of graphic novels).  If their career goals seem unrealistic, their relationship seems even more so.  Mostly, they don't seem to be able to keep their hands off of each other (which has an embarrassing habit of making them late for all of their class outings) but they are too emotionally immature to really mean the earnest commitments they make to each other.  Thankfully, the story ends before they do anything stupid.

It's a brisk and easy read, but the lack of an honest spark between Lulu and Alex and the sheer annoying quality of their self-centered personalities makes this a hard romance to swoon over.  The story's timeline ebbs and flows backways and forwards.  Sometimes that works, other times it gets distracting.  Kenneally packs in lots of amusing anecdotes which she has collected, but they feel exactly like that (i.e., anecdotes stuffed in to fill out the story and provide some amusement).  The  moments don't really fit in the story.  Some elements (like the student group from Italy) seem largely thrown away.  In sum, a readable but largely disposable romance.

The Poetry of Secrets, by Cambria Gordon

Isabel loves literature and runs risks sneaking out to listen to poetry recitals.  But for her family, recently converted to Christianity to protect themselves from anti-Semitism, life is far too dangerous to run risks.  For while life for the Jews is hard, the conversos are distrusted  even more and subject to much of the same violence.

Isabel has been betrothed to a lawman, who will be powerful enough to protect her, but she doesn't love him.  Instead, her heart belongs in secret to the son of the tax collector.  If that betrayal should ever become known, her fiancé could easily destroy her family -- all the more so when the Grand Inquisitor shows up in their town.

The second historical novel set in 15th century Spain at the time of the expulsion of the Jews that I have read this month. Unfortunately, that makes it hard not to draw comparisons between this one and Larson's (reviewed on April 25th).  Larson's book, while it had a number of anachronisms, makes more of an attempt to recount history and is mor of a survival story.  Here, the focus is on the romance between Isabel and her forbidden love and less on family.  This adds some heat to Gordon's story, but I think I prefer the suspense of Larson's novel.  Either book will give you a good feel for the basics of the historical context, so it's really a matter of your preference for romance or adventure.

Sparrow, by Mary Cecilia Jackson

Sparrow is a gifted dancer about to achieve her dream of starring in Swan Lake.  And she's caught the eye of rich and handsome Tristan King, who's become her first boyfriend.  But within a few months, things are going to hell.  Tristan treats her badly and when she tries to break up with him, he brutalizes her and leaves her for dead in the woods.  Her dance partner Lucas, wracked with guilt for not intervening forcefully enough before the assault, throws his own career into a tailspin by trying to administer vigilante justice.  Both of them hit rock bottom and have to learn how to put together their own lives, instead of trying to fix others.

In short, a grueling and ultimately unfulfilling story about rebirth and rebuilding.  Jackson knows how to stage out a traumatic scene and create characters that are deeply hurt, but she doesn't know how to tell the story about how they got there.  Rather than show the descent into hell or the healing to recovery, she simply jumps ahead (a few days, weeks, or months) until we are at the desired result.  Thus, we go from Sparrow and Tristan's first kiss directly to him smacking her around, with no transition and no explanation for why Sparrow stuck around.  The recovery is just as abrupt.  I don't mind reading traumatic stories, but that's because I want to see the process of recovery.  Simply being recovered at the end of the novel is not enough.

The other issue are the characters.  Both Sparrow and Lucas ought to be sympathetic protagonists, given the amount of suffering that they have endured, but they really are not.  Lucas, in particular, has an uncontrolled temper that goes way beyond a fleeting rush of anger.  He's downright pathological (and scary).  Sparrow's grief eventually gets explained, but it's frustrating and hardly as heroic as all the other characters profess it to be.  Perhaps this is realistic, but it's not inspirational.  In order to have a story about horrible things happening to nice people they have to be nice in the first place.

Deepfake, by Sarah Darer Littman

At Greenpoint High, nobody knows more about who is doing whom or who got in trouble than the anonymous poster of Rumor Has It.  For years, the blog has been posting the juiciest gossip.  And while no one wants to be a subject of the blog, everyone likes to read it.  All the more so when the gossip involves the two smartest seniors in the school.

Dara and Will have been neck and neck for the valedictorian spot and, for at least the past couple of months, they have also been secretly dating.  When their secret is blown by Rumor Has It, no one is more surprised (and hurt) than Will's best friend MJ.  She can't believe that Will wouldn't confide in her.  Coupled with her recent rejection by her first choice school, life really seems to be going downhill fast for MJ!

But even MJ's issue pale in comparison to the trouble caused when Rumor Has It posts a video that shows Dara accusing Will of cheating on his SATs.  Will's spectacularly improved SAT scores come under scrutiny and he finds his own college chances now in jeopardy as he struggles to clear his name.  Given that she's his girlfriend, why would Dara even make such an accusation? She claims she never said the words, even though everyone can see from the video that she did.

A clever story that takes the controversy around deepfake technology and places it in a high school milieu.  Some elements of the story are a bit of a stretch, but Littman has crafted a fun mystery that starts off with a bang.  The middle drags, but the story picks up again at the end as the blogger behind Rumor Has It falls into their sights.  This isn't classical literature and it will age very poorly, but it is an entertaining quick read and a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

A Ceiling Made of Eggshells, by Gail Carson Levine

Loma loves little children.  Living in a big family, Loma has plenty of younger siblings and nieces and nephews to take care of.  While she is young, she dreams of getting married and having many of her own.  When she asks Belo, her grandfather, he always demurs.  She's his favorite granddaughter and an indispensable traveling companion on his trips. She takes care of him during their travels and he refuses to let her leave him.  And he, in turn, has become an essential player in protecting the Jews of Spain, which makes her just as indispensible.

It's the fifteenth century and Jews live uneasily alongside the gentiles on the Iberian Peninsula, but that is about to change.  For little Loma, there is her longing to keep her family together and one day start one of her own, but the bigger existential concerns are overtaking such fragile dreams.

An exciting historical novel that is more entertainment than history.  It gives readers a sense of the key features of the period (the ever-present fear of anti-Semitic violence, the role of social status, and some elements of everyday life), but Levine isn't terribly attached to the need to achieve painstaking accuracy.  She has a story to tell with a strong and independent heroine who is quick on her feet and sharp witted.  With a large cast of characters and a timeline that lurches forward in service of keeping up the pace, Levine doesn't put much into any one of them.  Even Loma and her grandfather, who are the central players, never really develop their relationship.  Loma is devoted to Belo and while she occasionally expresses resentment, those feelings are not explored.  That keeps the pace going, but makes the book unremarkable.

When You Know What I Know, by Sonja K. Solter

After Tori's uncle touches her in a bad way, she wants to be a good girl and tell an adult, but she has trouble getting the words out.  Her mother initially doubts her story and her grandmother steadfastly refuses to believe that Uncle Andy would ever do something like that! Surely, she has misunderstood!

Thankfully, Tori's mother does see the truth and does the right things in the end, but none of it really addresses the mixture of pain, guilt, and anger that Tori feels.  Telling is hard and more so since Tori doesn't feel that anyone is really listening.  Even her best friend misinterprets Tori's withdrawal as an attack.  And when her father reaches out and offers to take her away, she realizes that he is only using the incident as an excuse to try to regain custody and hurt her mother.

Heartbreaking and poignant, the story is insightful and grasps many of the nuances of childhood sexual abuse.  However, it suffers from the author's decision to tell the story in verse.  As I never tire of mentioning, verse novels can be very powerful but they face a steep challenge in trying to convey complexity in sparse exposition.  The text is pretty, but that isn't really the message that is needed here.  We struggle to really get inside the heads of the characters who wax poetic but never really get the opportunity to bare their souls.

It's Kind of a Cheesy Love Story, by Lauren Morrill

Beck has spent the first sixteen years of her life trying to live down her notoriety as the girl who was born in the bathroom of the local pizza joint.  Sure, being the "Hot n' Crusty Baby" earned her free pizza for life, but it's not exactly something she wants to be known for.  She's trying to fit in and play down the embarrassing facts about her life and this hardly helps!  But she needs work and, in addition to the free pizzas, the boss of the restaurant promised her a job when she turned sixteen.  So, here she is answering phones and greeting customers at the site of her birth!

Afraid of what her cooler friends will think, she tries to hide the fact that she's working at Hot n' Crusty.  That gets hard as her long hours interfere with her ability to hang out and as she finds that she likes her co-workers (and the dark and distant delivery driver Tristan in particular).  She has fun at work and with her new friends, but she remains worried about what each group will think of the other and so she holds the two worlds apart.

Inevitably, she finds that she can't really separate them and, faced with losing both sets of friends, she has to stand up for who she is and stop trying to be what others think she should be.  The shocking realization that she was the only one who really cared about her image is an eye opener and everything ends up just fine.

It's sweet and entertaining, but light on substance.  The characters are largely stock and the situations recycled from other teen romances.  It is striking that everyone's pretty nice to each other.  You won't find any mean girls in this book! That makes for gentle reading but also very little drama.  Harmless, but also pointless.

When Life Gives You Mangos, by Kereen Getten

Ever since the last hurricane hit, Clara has had trouble remembering what happened last summer, but she senses it must be a bad thing because of the way other people in the village look at her.  Even her best friend Gaynah doesn't seem to want to be her best friend anymore.  About the only person getting as many sidewise looks as she is getting is her uncle, who lives alone up the hill and who Pastor Brown calls "the devil."

Her coastal village in Jamaica is a quiet and boring place.  The tourists who come to surf it consider it exotic, but nothing ever happens here.  So, when a new girl shows up from America, Clara is excited to show off the sights to her.  She just hopes that she can do so before Gaynah interferes and wins over the girl for herself.

Packed full of culture and local flavor, this debut novel creates a vivid image of life in a poor Jamaican coastal community.  The story it tells is terribly complicated however, involving historical animosities and suppressed regrets, and it compounds it all with a major twist towards the end that reframes most of the story.  That complexity makes this short book worthy of a re-reading or two to get full enjoyment and appreciation.  I did not find it compelling enough to return to, but I did enjoy the insight into Jamaican life.

American as Paneer Pie, by Supriya Kelkar

Being the only South Asian in her school has always been difficult.  Lekha has managed it by keeping a low profile -- ignore the teasing, smile when someone asks an offensive question, and play down the differences.  So what if the other kids don't understand the importance of Diwali?  Or if they make fun of the food you eat?  But even though Lekha thinks she manages pretty well to fit in, it's hard to say that she's happy, but she consoles herself with the idea that it's a decent way to get by.

When a new Indian girl named Avantika moves in nearby and she turns out to be Indian herself, Lekha is excited to no longer be alone.  And she is determined to help Avantika keep a low profile as well and help her fit in.  But to her surprise the girl has totally different ideas.  She isn't afraid to stand up for herself and confronts their classmates' prejudices head on.  With a bravado that Lekha has never been able to manage, Avantika puts her appeasement to shame.  Hurt and embarrassed, Lekha betrays the girl.

Then a series of racially-motivated attacks (one involving family friends far away and the other incident very close to home) open Lekha's eyes to the importance of standing up for yourself and not allowing people to shame you into pretending to be someone that you are not.  Lekha feels compelled to act and finds her voice.

While at times preachy, Kelkar's story of a young woman's search for identity and for self-confidence is a natural heart-warmer.  One hopes that its descriptions of a nativist race-baiting politician will become dated, but the overall story about being proud of who you are and the importance of standing up for yourself will never grow old.  You don't have to be a South Asian kid to relate to the story:  Anyone who has ever been reluctant to defend yourself for fear of "offending" others knows very well the pain that Lekha goes through and how difficult it is to overcome that fear.

How to Be a Girl in the World, by Caela Carter

It may be hot outside, but the only way that Lydia is going to be comfortable is by covering every inch of exposed skin.  She's roasting, of course, but ever since boys started teasing her about her body in sixth grade, she's been unable to be in the presence of boys or men without being wrapped up like a mummy.  Her cousin Emma (who lives with them) and her Mom keep demanding an explanation, but Lydia can't actually say what she is feeling out loud.  Whether it's the boys and their jokes or the way that grown men look at her on the subway, she feels overwhelmingly self-conscious.  Worst of all is Mom's boyfriend Jeremy, whose hugs last too long and who always seems to find an excuse to touch her.  Lydia would say something, but Mom likes him a lot and he's good to the family, so Lydia doesn't want to do anything that would make her Mom angry.

That same summer, Mom surprises Emma and Lydia by buying a fixer-upper.  While the house is badly neglected, Mom assures the girl that it can be rehabilitated.  But first of all, the house needs to be cleaned out.  The former tenants left it full of abandoned possessions and the three of them work hard over the summer to clean it out.  While cleaning, Lydia finds a secret room full of vials and dried herbs.  A leather-bound book left behind claims to explain how to use them to cast spells for love, fortune, and (most important of all) protection.  Convinced that the only way that she will be able to ever go outside uncovered and looking like a normal person is to enlist some supernatural help, Lydia tries to concoct a magical talisman.  In the end, she finds that the way to protect yourself is much more straightforward.

An extremely fast 300-page read (I had intended to only start it this afternoon, but ended up finishing it instead).  Lydia's inability to speak up throughout most of the book drove me nuts, but given the sensitive nature of the subject, I can accept it.  And, in showing us how even a shy girl can find the strength to say what needs to be said to protect herself, Carter is providing a roadmap for young readers who may feel themselves in a similar situation.  It's no easy journey as Lydia discovers that not every grownup is going to help her or that she will always be understood even when she finds her voice.  But in the end, the right people do the right things.

The story gently and age-appropriately clearly conveys the message that only you get to decide how your body will be touched.  I can't think of a more important message. While there are actually a fair number of good books for middle school readers about privacy, body positivity, and the importance of boundaries, sadly there really cannot ever be too many.

How to Disappear Completely, by Ali Standish

Life could always be lonely for Emma, so she cherished the time she spent with her grandmother.  Gram filled Emma's world with stories of fairies, gnomes, and forest spirits.  They even had a special place in the forest that they would visit -- the Spinney -- where Gram's stories took place.  And they shared Gram's favorite children's book, the R. M. Wildsmith's The World at the End of the Tunnel.  So when Gram dies, Emma is devastated.  All the magic she once felt all around her has vanished and she is inconsolably lonely.

Without friends of her own, starting seventh grade would be hard enough.  But it is made more difficult when Emma discovers white patches developing on her dark skin.  She is developing vitiligo, an autoimmune disorder that causes a loss of pigmentation in the skin.  Self-conscious about how the blotches on her skin makes her look to others, Emma wishes now more than ever that Gram was still around.  She would know how to deal with this!  But working with what she has left (a supportive family and some classmates who want to be friends regardless of what she looks like), Emma learns how to make her own magic.  Along the way, she also makes an important discovery about her family history which helps her come to terms with her grandmother's passing.

A subtle, slowly paced, but ultimately immensely satisfying book about the bonds of family, the rewards of trusting others, the importance of kindness, and the healing magic of a creative mind.  It is a hard book to start (I nearly tossed it during the first hundred pages because I found it dull), but I had a sense that the book would reward me in the end and it did!  It's hard to pin that success on any one factor.  Emma is a sweet and clever protagonist with a kind heart.  The story introduces important lessons about friendships (both good and toxic).  Emma's ability to resist the desire to strike back, while setting limits for what she will accept is great modeling for young readers navigating their own relationships.  Emma also has a similarly keen ability to sort out the fascinating mystery that unfolds.  But in the end, what makes this book enjoyable is the overall positive message that everyone has problems with which they are dealing and that the best approach is always sympathy.

The Life and (Medieval) Times of Kit Sweetly, by Jamie Pacton

Kit's loves her job at the Castle as a serving wench.  She loves the excitement and adventure at this medieval-themed dinner theater (heavily based upon Schaumberg's Medieval Times), but she hates the sexism of the routine.  The idea that woman did nothing more useful than serve food in the Middle Ages is a stinking pile of horse manure!  She wants to be a knight and ride out and fight the other knights!  She's been training herself for years and learned a lot from her brother who is the troupe's Red Knight.  But corporate policy states that only men can be knights (and incidentally make the better-paying salaries associated with the job).

In response, Kit starts a campaign to force the restaurant to let her become a knight and rallies her girlfriends to the cause by training them to fight with her.  She creates a social media campaign and publicly confronts the company over their policy.  But at the end of it all, does she have all of the skill necessary to truly bring about justice and carry the day?

A bit corny, but it's a romantic comedy with its heart in the right place.  Treat the book as a rollicking adventure, with Kit front and center suffering through an endless series of amusing misfortunes.  The characters are not terribly deep and the story itself is poorly researched, but Pacton can keep the pace up and creates a lively story that gives Kit a chance not only to exercise prowess on the field but also demonstrate the skills of humility, wisdom, and charity that make one a true Peer of the Realm.

Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf, by Hayley Krischer

My wife never asks me why I read children's books, but she does ask me why I read the depressing and distressing ones.  Complete with a book title that sounds like an After School Special, Hayley Krischer's novel covers some extremely intense subjects (rape, sexual exploitation, and drug abuse) in explicit detail, but it does so with great sensitivity and insight.

Ali has a serious crush on Sean.  She's been obsessively scrapbooking about him. While she'd be too shy to act on her feelings, she's over the moon when he invites her to a party.  At the party, when he invites her upstairs and plies her with alcohol, she apprehensive but eager to please.  When he goes too far and brutally rapes her, she is devastated, but afraid to say anything.  Everyone saw her go upstairs willingly.  Sean is a known player.  There were plenty of drugs and alcohol around.  What did she expect?  But even Sean knows that things did not quite go down right (the blood may have been a clue!) and he tearfully  turns to his friend Blythe to help him.  Will she befriend Ali and talk her out of getting him in trouble?  Blythe, desperately in love with Sean herself, will do anything to please him and doesn't hesitate to seek out Ali's friendship.  As one of the "Core Four," Blythe can offer Ali social status and a better life at High School.  All Ali needs to do is forgive Sean or just let the matter quietly go.  What poor wallflower (like Ali) wouldn't jump at the opportunity?

But Blythe's plans start to go seriously off the rails from the start.  The two girls share a common background of maternal abandonment, a similarity that Blythe attempts to exploit, but Blythe finds herself more dependent on Ari than vice versa.  Blythe may be one of the Queen Bees but she got there through a brutal (sexual) initiation she and the other Core Four went through three years ago.  The trauma of that experience and the expectation that she is soon expected to perpetuate it herself has left Blythe more fragile than she expected in the face of Ari's recent experience.  While Blythe thought she was the strong one, it would seem that Ari is actually more together than Blythe.  Ari decides to stand up for herself and ignore Blythe's attempts to get her to forgive Sean, Blythe lashes out ferociously.

While rape culture plays a key role as a catalyst, the story is about how young women respond to that culture as both resisters and participants. My synopsis makes the book sounds exploitative, but it really is not.  Instead of tracking a police investigation and court case, the novel dives in to the psyche of Ari and Blythe -- what makes one girl endure her trauma and come out on top while another who seemingly copes well succumbs in the end?  Neither girl really plays her part. While Ari is the obvious heroine to this story, she is hardly a strong one.  She makes ample mistakes and sometimes simply stumbles.  Blythe is the girl you want to hate for the pure evil of her plot to seduce Ari with a promise of popularity, but in the end her love for Ari is undeniable and the cause of her downfall.  If one doesn't see something to redeem in Blythe, at least there is a lot to pity.  In sum, these are complicated characters with a fascinating codependency.

If it makes any difference to you, the story ends on an optimistic note, but if you don't have the stomach for real dark character studies, this is not a book for you!

Dress Coded, by Carrie Firestone

As if middle school, with all of its emotional drama and body changes, were not stressful enough, Molly is tired of the way the school's dress code.  Everyone knows that the rules are only applied to the girls (and the ones that are more developed at that!).  This is hardly a minor annoyance.  Beyond the emotional trauma of having attention drawn to their bodies by (male) adults, the girls who are called out miss classes (and even exams) that they are not allowed to make up.

Molly and her friends are near graduation, but when Molly's friend Olivia is humiliated by the principal for trying to cover up an embarrassing stain and then blamed for the cancellation of an end-of-school camping trip, Molly decides to take action.  She starts a series of podcasts interviewing other students who have been victimized by the policy and discovers that the impact of the code is further ranging than even she imagined.  Eventually, the podcasts trigger a social protest that draws notice from the community.

A great topic for a middle grade read.  It's handled a bit clumsily here in two ways:  First, by making the school administrators particularly incompetent, which makes defeating them far too easy.  This makes the story satisfying, but doesn't really give fair time to other points of view that could have made this topic more interesting.  For example, a fleeting reference to school uniforms would have made a powerful counterpoint that Molly and her friends could have addressed.  The second weakness of the story is the plethora of sub-plots.  Middle school is a busy time so naturally Molly and her friends have plenty of other things on their mind.  That's fine, but I'm not sure what particular value the struggles of Molly's older brother with addiction added to the story?  I kept waiting for that to get tied in, but it was basically a separate story altogether.

The book is a fast entertaining read about an important and relevant topic, but it could have been better with more exploration of dress codes and their pros and cons, and fewer distractions.

Watch Over Me, by Nina Lacour

When Mila ages out of foster care, she is offered the opportunity to be an intern at a remote farm on the coast that takes in foster kids.  It's a way to give back and also a supportive place for young people who share an understanding of what it is like to be left behind.  There she bonds with a young boy named Lee who shares her background and the two of them confront the ghosts in their past.  Complicating matters, the farm is actually haunted and the kids and the counselors interact with these ghosts as well.

A strange and peculiar novel that I couldn't connect with.  The narrative structure is complicated and the story itself is short.  I'd find myself just starting to understand something and then get thrown into another alien situation.  The figurative and the "real" ghosts interact in peculair ways and the timeline is split as Mila shifts between present and past (often unsure herself of where she is)  I think that Lacour tied everything up at the end, but I'd be hard pressed to explain how it was done or what it meant.  I know some people enjoy working a bit harder to understand what they are reading, but I don't feel the need to be challenged when I'm relaxing.  By far, this is Lacour's most challenging and ambitious book to date and my least favorite as well.