What Waits in the Woods, by Kieran Scott

Four teens go on a multi-day hike in the woods.  The first night, the three experienced hikers decide to scare new girl Callie with ghost stories.  But as things on the trip start to go wrong (they lose their food and get lost) the scary stuff becomes real.  They are being followed and taunted by someone and, even with the help of a stranger they come across, it seems like they may never escape.  That's when the kids start turning up dead.

I'm not a fan of the horror/mystery genre and that probably is preventing me from liking this book, which is otherwise a decent specimen.  But if I step back, it had pretty good pacing and more than enough shocks and screams along the way (although I got a bit tired of having almost every chapter end with a false alarm).  The kids were sufficiently diverse and had a complex set of petty jealousies to put them at each other's necks (even before they started to get broken).  This provided the requisite reasonable doubt and suspicion to keep stuff interesting, and kept me off the scent of the real guilty party.  The key confusion for me was that the book is played like a horror story (teens in the woods getting knocked off by a lone psycho), but turns out in the end to be a simply mystery whodunnit.


[Disclosure:  I received a copy of the book from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review.  I'll be donating this to my local public library where I hope it will find a fan of scary reads.]

Gracefully Grayson, by Ami Polonsky

There have been a number of decent YA books on transgendered teens, but the offerings for younger readers have been a bit thin, which makes this recent arrival for middle readers particularly interesting.

Sixth-grader Grayson has a secret daydream where he's wearing a dress.  I simply visualizes the clothes he's wearing and transforms them in his mind into pretty girls' clothes.  He doesn't really know why he likes doing this, he just knows that it's something he longs for.  He also longs to hang out with the girls as one of them and join them in their pastimes.  But he also knows, of course, that this isn't done.

Being uncomfortable with boys (and generally excluded from the girls' social circles), he's kept to himself.  But on a whim, he decides to try out for the school play (an adaptation of the myth of Persephone).  And at the last minute during the auditions, he announces that he wants to try out for the part of Persephone herself.  An understanding drama teacher not only lets him try out, but goes on to cast him in the role.  At long last, Grayson will have the opportunity to wear a beautiful dress onstage in front of everyone!

Grayson discovers just how polarizing gender identification can be.  Friends and family stake out clear positions and Grayson has to deal with the painful realization that not everyone will accept who he is and what he wants to be.  His mother, in particular, blames the (gay) drama teacher for allowing this to happen. Through it all, Grayson continues to explore his identity, experimenting with clothing, socializing with girls, and even the dreaded topic of which restroom to use.

It's a revolutionary portrayal of a transgender pre-adolescent.  The book stands out both for its intended target audience and for its frank discussion of the issues involved.  Some reviewers have pointed out that no character ever comes out and says that Grayson's feelings are okay, but there is a good mix of supportive responses from adults and peers.  Readers may be surprised at the cruelty of some of the adults (the homophobic bullying won't surprise much, but is thankfully kept to a minimum), but it provides a good dramatic edge.

Another thing I liked about the book was its sensitivity to gender dysphoria.  Grayson, it is clearly laid out, is no flamboyant drag queen.  He wants to explore what it is like to be a normal girl.  And he is torn by his joy at the welcoming he receives from some of the girls at school and his ongoing fear that he is being mocked and patronized by them at the same time.  His longing to simply be accepted as a girl is portrayed with an honesty that will touch open-minded readers. 

And as for the close minded folks (well-represented by Grayson's principal and his own mother), they can start plotting their book banning plans!

Oblivion, by Sasha Dawn

Callie suffers from graphomania (a condition which causes her to experience an irresistible urge to write).  A year ago, around the same time that her father (an abusive fallen priest) and a young woman in the parish went missing, she was found writing "I killed him" endlessly on the walls of an abandoned attic.  While she seemed an unlikely culprit, the authorities did suspect that her condition was brought on by having borne witness to what  happened.  So they have her working with a counselor to try to regain her memories.  That work and the help of a guy at school trigger more episodes that begin linking her writing (while seeming nonsense and gibberish) to solving the mystery.

It's a complicated story and a hard one at first to latch on to.  There's a lot of violence as well as disturbing imagery.  While almost everything gets tied up in the end, it's hard in the first read to see how this will all gel together.  As always, I tend to favor simpler and more direct stories.  Pushed to streamline things, I'd point to the needless conflict between Callie and Lindsay (the daughter of Callie's foster parents) -- it never really came together and didn't have much purpose.  However, this is well-crafted and you may prefer the complexity.

Complicit, by Stephanie Kuehn

The social worker considered it a miracle when she was able to place Jamie and his sister Cate together in the same home, and even more so that the adopting family was a rich couple.  The children’s mother had been murdered and the children themselves were hardly the babies preferred by most adopting parents.  From the start, Jamie was the difficult one (nightmares, painfully shy, etc.) while Cate easily adapted to the new family. But as they grew older, Cate’s behavior became anti-social and violent until the day she confessed to an arson and was sent away to a juvenile facility.  Jamie, meanwhile, grew out of his behavior issues, but was haunted by Cate’s misadventures and her threats.

After years of being bullied by his sister, Jamie was relieved when she was sent away.  The news that she has now been released terrifies him.  And when she starts making threatening phone calls, his own behavior problems begin to reemerge.

A dark psychological thriller.  The plot twist in the story is fairly strongly telegraphed so it is not a major surprise.  However, the ending is definitely a shocker.  In this respect, the story seemed well-plotted.  However, there are a lot of loose end and unanswered questions (What are his adoptive parents up to? What does his therapist actually know?  What’s up with his girlfriend?).  These are not major plot points and it leaves you wondering why they were present at all? Eliminating and tightening up the parts of the story that mattered would have improved my impressions of the novel, yet there’s no denying that the story kept me on the edge of my seat and had a suitably creepy and haunting ending that made it all worthwhile.

The Edge of Falling, by Rebecca Serle

Caggie lives in the lap of New York luxury, in a world where everything is possible and costs don't matter.  But her picture perfect family is shattered when her younger sister dies in a drowning accident.  Caggie blames herself for the accident and it is obvious that her family doesn't entirely disagree.  Her life has become flat and the things that used to matter to her (her boyfriend, her position on the school paper, her friends) no longer do.  Even the attention given to her for saving another girl's life last year (after her sister's accident) feels hollow.

Then she meets Astor, a boy unencumbered by a past and willing to leave hers alone.  He's the only one who doesn't force her to confront her grief, and instead just lets her live in the moment.  However, what is he hiding from?  And is it even more dangerous than what haunts Caggie?

A story ostensibly about grief, but with so little to say about it that it instead relies on other themes to fill its pages.  For the first half, that theme is life in Manhattan as a super rich and famous teenager.  Serle delights in name-dropping places showing us in great detail what it is like to live without a financial worry in the world.  That type of voyeurism never did much for me, but will appeal to the Teen Vogue crowd.  The latter part of the book (and it's quite late!) sees the story shift into a weak psychological thriller.  Astor gets creepy (but not too creepy) and we worry for a bit about Caggie's safety.  There's also some attempt to have her break through her grief, but I didn't really buy it.  Serle does a great job of creating a setting and building the scenery but doesn't do as good work with directing her actors.

The Break-Up Artist, by Philip Siegel

Becca is a cynic about love.  While most of the school swoons over the perfect couple of Steve and Huxley, Becca knows that love is an illusion and nothing ever lasts.  Witness how her older sister got stood up on the altar or the boring love-less union of her parents.  At the same time, there is no denying the destructive impact on friendships caused by these romances or the bitter rivalries that they set off.  Becca has an answer for that:  for $100 she offers clandestinely to break up any couple.  And she's been successful so far.  So, when she is contracted to break up Steve and Huxley, it's just another job, right?

I hated the story and loved the author.  The premise (and Becca's behavior) were a big turn-off.  As becomes apparent pretty quickly, she's got serious underlying motivations for her bitterness, yet doesn't really come clean about them.  The business itself, while intended to be biting satire, is mostly mean spirited (as is weakly brought up in the end).  However, the writing is another matter.  Siegel is, to me, a heroic author: completely busting the stereotype that boys can't write chick-lit.  This isn't just a story where all the major characters are girls, but also a story about girls' relationships first and foremost.  If anything, Siegel could be accused of poorly portraying his male characters (who are creeps at best, and overwhelmingly two dimensional).  I want to read much more from this guy!

No One Needs To Know, by Amanda Grace

Olivia is a rich snooty girl from Point Ruston.  Zoey is the scholarship student from Hilltop with the slutty reputation.  As far as the social circles go at Annie Wright, they couldn't be further apart.  But a shared school project and the fact that Olivia's twin brother Liam has started to date Zoey brings them together. 

When Liam starts getting serious about Zoey, Olivia is startled.  Liam never gets serious about girls!  And when Olivia starts to really look at Zoey, she discovers that she shockingly actually likes her too.  And the two opposites find that they have more in common than they ever could have guessed.  But how will they break the fact that they like each other to Liam?

It's the love triangle that the blurb harps on, but the love triangle isn't even introduced until the last seventy pages.  For me, the real story is about the social chasm between these two girls (and a lot more could have been done with it!).  In fact, the underlying problem with the book is that a lot more could have been done with all of this.  Too many interesting sources of conflict (Zoey's family life, her relationship with Liam, Olivia's best friend Ava, the two girls coming out, Olivia's failing gymnastics career, the absence of Liam/Olivia's parents, etc.) are introduced but neither developed nor exploited for their dramatic potential.  What we get is a great sketch of a story.

Now, even if I found the story a bit too brisk, I have to give a special shout out to the effort put into the setting.  I've spent two years in Tacoma WA and the attention to the local detail in this book is great.  Grace knows her town and she isn't afraid to use accurate local geography to tell her story.  I loved that I could picture the settings and not be distracted by inaccuracies.  Take note authors:  if you're going to place your novel in a real place, be sure to get your facts correct.

Echo, by Pam Munoz Ryan

Years ago, three sisters were abandoned in the woods and cursed by a witch.  The harmonica in which they were entombed would carry them far away, but would itself be a magical instrument that would bring both good luck and misfortune to its owners.  First, to a boy lost in those woods and then on to a young man in Hitlerite Germany, passed to an orphan boy in Pennsylvania, sent to a young Mexican girl in California, and finally into the pocket of a soldier deployed back in Germany.  Through happenstance or destiny, the people who carried the harmonica become bound together in the end.

Depending on how you look at it, the ending is either overly convenient or sweetly poetic, but regardless the story is epic and gripping.  Ryan writes beautiful fairy tale-like novels that I have enjoyed in the past.  I did once make the criticism that she had painted herself into a creative corner of always writing novels that seemed like they were trying to recreate Gabriel Garcia Marquez-style "magical realism" novels -- setting every story in Latin America with earthy half fantasy/half realistic storylines.  Here, she proved me wrong.  The beauty and fun of her story telling remains, but she places the bulk of this story in unfamiliar territory. 

Recommended audience is a different matter.  The majority of the story is fairly grim and perhaps not so appropriate for younger readers, but it's lively and rewarding for older ones.  The book may be thick (587 pages), but the type is large and the lines are spaced wide apart.  It doesn't take very long to read!

We Can Work It Out, by Elizabeth Eulberg

In this sequel to Eulberg's The Lonely Hearts Club, Penny Lane is still heading the club that gave her and her friends a fresh perspective on the importance of friendship over romance, but there's trouble afoot:  mostly, as the girls try to balance their priorities.  It was relatively easy to make a principled stand for girl bonding, but harder when you're also trying to make a relationship work.  And, for Penny, the Club is a far too easy excuse for avoiding her fears about committing herself to another person (even if he is hot!).  Old enemies from the first book (Todd and the principal) make a reappearance and a few new friends pop up, but mostly this is more of the same.

I went back and read my review of the first book (from May 2010!) to see how I received it, and it reminded me of how fresh that first book was.  I enjoyed the strong young women and the liberating message of girls being friends instead of competitors.  Sequels always suffer from the lack of novelty and this one rather more so.  Many of the flaws I noted in the first book (uneven pacing and inconsistent character development) are found her as well.  Constantly plot activity stifles the character development and things get toss in left and right.  Eliminating pointless subplots like Penny Lane's sister's wedding might have provided the space to tighten up a good story.

Eulberg doesn't seem to have much to offer for variety -- as even Penny Lane notes, there are only so many times one can say "sorry!" The pitfalls of Penny Lane and Ryan, in particular seem like an emotional hamster wheel, endlessly cycling over the same landscape of neglect and jealousy until they basically give in to each other -- which feels less like love winning out and more like mutual surrender.

In contrast, there were so many things that could have benefited from further development.  For example, I wish there had been more of two side characters:  Missy (the insecure girl who throws away her self-respect to put herself behind a guy) and Morgan (the only girl with a stable committed relationship in the book).  They each represented important alternative paths and deserved more than the cursory attention they received.

[Disclosure:  I received a solicited reviewer's copy of the book without charge and without any promise beyond providing an unbiased review.  I will donate the book to my local public library.]

Your Constant Star, by Brenda Hasiuk

Three young people search for meaning in their lives.  Faye is the adopted Chinese girl who is dutiful to her parents and lives up to expectations.  Bev is the wild child who doesn't care about anyone or anything, but is forced to deal with reality when she gets pregnant.  Mannie is the father of the child, lost in a drug-induced stupor, yet aware (barely) that something great and meaningful is passing him by, and that he should be a part of it.

Rather than telling the story through alternating chapters, Hasiuk devotes entire sections of the book to each of them.  By far, the most interesting character is Faye and she gets the first third of the book.  As the Good Girl, it is fascinating to watch her flirt with danger and rekindle her friendship with Bev at such a pivotal moment.  Bev's section is a bit harder to stomach, simply because she is such a less appealing person.  As she blithely blows off the people around her and professes not to care about anyone, it's really hard to be sympathetic with her plight.  And Mannie, the stoner, is really a bit of a waste to the story.  I get that Hasiuk wants to show that he has depth, but his anger and self-destructive behavior is a huge turn off.  I just didn't care if he messed up his life or not!  And what a whiner!  Give me a story about Faye (and throw Bev in for some danger and drama), but the rest of it drove me nuts!

That said, a book where the characters drive you this nuts can't really be that bad, can it?

Even in Paradise, by Chelsey Philpot

When Julia Buchanan arrives at St Anne's, a New England boarding school, in her junior year, rumors fly around. Everyone knows the Buchanans -- a powerful Yankee dynasty with both money and political connections. And everyone knows about the tragic death of Julia's older sister.

Charlotte couldn't be any more different -- a scholarship student, who also has considerable artistic talent. Much to Charlotte's surprise, Julia takes a fancy to Charlotte and adopts her into the family. Intoxicated by the family's power and generosity, Charlotte does not realize until it's far too late that there is a dark side to the beautiful world of the Buchanans.

In setting, the story reminded me a lot of E. Lockhart's We Were Liars, with its patrician family and dark family secrets (there must be a thing about Vassar girls writing about rich New Englanders!). But the story itself is quite different. And while it is interesting, it is not so compelling or as shocking as Lockhart's novel. The characters are interesting but the story doesn't have a good flow. The dynamics of Charlotte and Julia's relationship, complicated as they are, are hard to track. The romance between Charlotte and Sebastian is abridged. Everything felt sketchy and superficial, much like the Buchanans themselves.

When My Heart Was Wicked, by Tricia Stirling

The last couple of years, living with her stepmom, have been heaven for sixteen year-old Lacy.  But her mother has come to reclaim her and with her father now dead, Mom holds the legal claim for her.  Being dragged back to Mom's carries special danger.  Mom has always brought out the worst in Lacy and the years that she lived with her mother are fraught with memories of cruelty (to herself and others) and black magic.  Lacy wants to believe that she's healed and that she's stronger now, but within days of being back with her mother, the evil feelings have returned.

A short and deceptively simple story about the fear of one's own ability to commit cruelty, harbored within a story that mixes real concerns like reconciling with estranged parents and interpersonal relations with peers, with darker subjects of magic, curses, and spells.  The book has definite supernatural elements, but anyone looking for a fantasy will be frustrated by Stirling's insistence on contextualizing the magic within the mundania of adolescent life.  For anyone who's ever checked a spell book out of the library in hopes of putting a curse on a bad boyfriend, an evil girl at school, or one's own mother, the feelings that Lacy goes through will resonate particularly strongly.  I found this story utterly fascinating!


[Disclosure:  I solicited and received a free copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of writing an unbiased review.]

The Honest Truth, by Dan Gemeinhart

Dying of cancer, twelve year-old Mark runs away from home with his dog Beau.  Mark is angry and desperate.  What is the point of living, he wonders, if we all die (some sooner than others)?  But before his time comes, he plans to fulfill his grandfather's wish that he climb Mount Rainier.  And while he experiences many set-backs in his quest, he finds that even strangers can be friends and that there is much that makes life worth living.

A simple story and a lightning-fast read, this book focuses on the trip and dwells surprisingly little on Mark's emotional journey.  That isn't exactly Gemeinhart's plan and a number of carefully set-up elements of the story seem to remain undeveloped.  The key wasted element of the story is Mark's best friend Jess, who mostly sits on the sidelines and stresses about her sick friend in alternating chapters that add little to the story.  Sensitive readers are forewarned that the climax features a particularly chilling scene of animal endangerment.



[Disclosure:  I received a solicited reviewer's copy of the book without charge and without any promise beyond providing an unbiased review.  I will donate the book to my local public library.]

Wildlife, by Fiona Wood

An eight week wilderness program allows a high school class, and two young women in particular, to reexamine their lives and friendships.  Sibylla has recently had the fortune to appear in a billboard advertisement.  This covergirl exposure has gotten her noticed by the popular clique at school (and by the handsome Ben Capaldi in particular), but her best friend Holly doesn't seem so friendly anymore.

No one knows what to make of the secretive and enigmatic new girl Louisa.  Her secret is the recent death of her boyfriend, and her inability to cope with it (and the anger she harbors) become challenging in the tight quarters of cabin living.  Surprisingly, it is Sibylla that will help her break through and Lou will return the favor.

The story is a bit hard to follow, not least because the two heroines (Sib and Lou) don't really have distinctive voices.  I found myself fading in and out of interest in the story and the characters.  The setting was a bit odd (and of course the cultural oddities of this Australian story were hard to follow), but mostly I think the characters just didn't gel.  So, when they were doing something, I could focus on the action, but when I was supposed to be gaining insight into their psyches, I drifted and lost focus.  There just wasn't much there to care about!

Snow Apples, by Mary Razzell

In post-WWII British Columbia, Sheila doesn't have a lot of options.  Her mother has pretty much assumed that she'll get married and thus sees no use for the schooling at which Sheila excels.  And the odds certainly do seem stacked against her.  Opportunities do not abound on the islands and anyways women are pretty much second class citizens in this time and place.  Still, Sheila is determined to pursue nursing and make her own decisions about love and marriage, even when things don't quite turn out as she'd like.

Gritty and realistic, Razzell brilliantly captures the sense of time and place.  Rather than tell us about the injustices of the time, she lets them unfold naturally.  It's a tricky business:  to unleash circumstances that offend modern sensibilities without pulling back and editorializing, but Sheila is painted realistically.  She certainly objects to the sexism around her, but she recognizes it as something much bigger than herself.  It is left for the reader to become indignant.  I could have done without the graphic depiction of a miscarriage at the end of the book, but otherwise, I appreciated the realism and attention to detail that is present here.  The story, while modest in scope, opens a portal to another time and place which will fascinate the reader.

Starring Arabelle, by Hillary Hall De Baun

She hopes to make a strong initial impression as she starts ninth grade this year.  Arabelle wishes that she could make a big statement simply by gliding into a room, the way the heroine of her favorite romance novel does.  Unfortunately, her plan of achieving her aims through trying out for the school play get ruined by a jealous upperclassman and her guidance counselor's insistence that she volunteer at a local nursing home.

These set backs are temporary.  She still manages to get involved in the play and the residents of the home where she is volunteering prove to provide her with unanticipated opportunities and benefits.  Quirky characters and several heartwarming subplots explore the topic of romance, which forms the central obsession of Arabelle's life.

It's a book with lots of clever ideas, but stiff writing and wooden characters. For example, Arabelle's obsession with romance is early on established with her love of a particular romance novel, but the plot point never goes anywhere.  The obvious point of intersection would be with the real life romance in the story, but they never quite meet.  As another example, the quirky characters are all colorful and introduced fully, but none of their quirks really contribute to the story.  It's as if the author, by filling the scene with so much color, accepts that the job is done and so it's now back to the story (which really has nothing to do with any of these characters).  A creative work, but ultimately in need of more development and engineering.

How to Meet Boys, by Catherine Clark

Lucy and her friend Mikayla have an exciting summer planned.  In exchange for working for her grandparents, Lucy has been given her a cottage for the summer, which she and Mikayla are going to share.  The place is a bit run down, but the independence that it promises is intoxicating.

The excitement, however, is dampened by the news that Lucy's grandparents have also hired local boy Jackson to help out.  Jackson and Lucy have a history -- nearly three years ago, he completely broke her heart by spurning her advances and publicly humiliating her.  They have not spoken since and Lucy would like to keep it that way, which will be hard to do if they have to work together all summer.  Meanwhile, Mikayla has fallen hard for a guy, only to find out too late that it's the same infamous Jackson.  How will she ever tell Lucy the identity of her crush?  This and many other adventures await the girls in their memorable summer!

In other words, a light and fluffy beach book, full of awkward moments and girl bonding.  It's entertaining and fun, because the two girls (and their other friends) are sympathetic, but a bit on the lighter end of the spectrum for these types of books.

Half of My Facebook Friends Are Ferrets, by J. A. Buckle

In some ways, Josh is a pretty normal sixteen year-old.  He'd like to have a girlfriend, his Mom drives him nuts, and he has an annoying older sister.  But as a metal head with a pet ferret (named Ozzy), he is also a bit unusual and quirky.  As his seventeen birthday approaches, he's made a list of things he'd like to do, including being kissed, learning to play Metallica's "One," seeing Finnish death metal band Children of Bodom in concert, owning a real guitar, getting a piercing, or being as cool as his father was.  But with no luck with girls, a single mother with "financial difficulties," and a father who died when he was little, Josh doesn't hold out much hope for success with any of these goals.

It's a funny and fast paced romp through Junior year for a group of boys in what is a surprisingly sensitive approach for a boy book (obviously, trying to appeal to young female readers as well).  There is the requisite gross-out/fart joke/girl-ogling/penis references, but Josh is a good kid and tends to do the right thing, even as he and his friends also do a large amount of putting their feet in their mouths.  I'm not a huge fan of the sub-genre, but this book was a fast read and enjoyable.  In fact, I was a little surprised that the author (a woman from England) was so effective at writing about life as a boy from New York.

The Book of Love, by Lynn Weingarten

In this sequel to The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers, Lucy is now a full-fledged sister.  Her three friends and her from a "family" and set off on more conquests, including a ruthless heartbreaking of a famous rock star.  However, breaking hearts isn't all it's cracked up to be, and Lucy learns that there is a price to pay.  Realizing she's made a mistake and nostalgic for the simplicity of her pre-sisterhood life, she yearns to undo what has been done.

The result is an even stranger novel that the first one.  This was a hard book for me to track, first off because the plot is so twisted and the book keeps changing directions.  And secondly, because the characters simply are not memorable.  I was glad to see a moral compass introduced towards to end of the story, because the mindless hedonism that predominates this story is really a turn off.  But I think the message that emotional authenticity is more powerful than any magic could have been made a bit more forcefully in the end.

Some Boys, by Patty Blount

After Grace accuses Zac (the star lacrosse player at school) of raping her, she finds the entire community turn against her.  From the boys and girls (including her former BFFs) at school who taunt her with slurs, to the teachers who tolerate the abuse, to even her own father who holds the belief that she brought this on herself, no one will give her a break.  But when she is sentenced alongside Ian (another lacrosse player) to a week of scrubbing out lockers during spring break, she discovers an unlikely ally.  Told in alternating chapters between Grace and Ian, we get to observe an amazing and organic character development, most notable of which is Ian's conversion from being Zac's friend to recognizing that Grace is telling the truth.

Heart wrenching as the topic of rape is, Blount dwells less on Grace's recovery than she does on the terrible treatment of victims by society, and furthermore never allows Grace to be the victim.  By far, Grace is one of the stronger teen heroines we have seen in YA in a long time (I have no doubt she could deck Katniss!).  While publicity for this novel interprets the story as being about a poor girl needing to be rescued by a man, it really isn't.  Grace falters and doesn't always survive the onslaught of hatred and cruelty which is unleashed on her, but she has amazing fortitude throughout.  And Blount does a pretty good job of pointing out that, while friends are helpful, in the end you really only have yourself to rely on, so that's where you need to find your strength.  A solid winner of a book and very very hard to put down!

It's a great cover, too!