The Pretty App, by Katie Sise

Every year, the Public Company has released a must-have app.  This year it's the Pretty App, which will help choose the most physically attractive girl in the United States.  Blake wants to win so bad!  She figures that, given her ability to alienate friends and her lack of academic achievement, her looks are basically all she has left.  But as she rises through the ranks of the contest, she discovers that there's a lot more resting on the results than her own self-esteem.

Ostensibly a sequel to The Boyfriend App, this story reunites some of the characters from that novel and sends them on a new adventure.  The message is largely the same:  building faith in yourself and rejecting exploitative technology.  It's a message with a sledgehammer (even teens won't need it laid on this heavy).

The story is entertaining enough, although the romance didn't really take off (and perhaps that was for the best?).  Blake seems a bit uneven -- starting overly shallow and discovering her virtuous side too quickly.  Not an appealing character in the first book, she is not much of a hook for the second.  So, not much of a character study, but the pace is brisk and there isn't a dull moment.

Forget Tomorrow, by Pintip Dunn

In this innovative dystopian novel (part one of a presumed trilogy), seventeen year olds receive a "future memory" that tells them who they will become.  This then determines the education and opportunities that they will receive for the rest of their lives.  But when Callie receives her memory, it spells out that she will kill her sister.  To prevent her from doing so, she is detained as an "aggressive" and a predicted criminal.  But with the help of a sympathetic guard and a resistance underground, she escapes.  Fate, however, is a tricky thing and the farther she tries to get away from her future, the more she finds herself drawn back to it.

There are lots of fascinating ideas like the "future memories" and some lovely mixing of realistic and science fiction settings, but I found the novel hard to track (and wildly implausible at several points).  Much of the reason for this is because Dunn doesn't make much of an effort to tie all of her ideas together.  There's plenty of action but it doesn't really lead to anything.  And novel concepts - while often fascinating -- aren't actually explored or developed.  One potential explanation is that this installment is merely intended as exposition (with the ideas returned to and developed later). But I still would have preferred a more organic connection of characters and milieus.

Silence, by Deborah Lytton

Stella is focused on pursuing her dream of a professional musical theater career.  Only a sophomore, she's landed the lead in her school's production of West Side Story.  She's also attracted the attention of the male lead.  Stella and her BFF Lily are well on their way to popularity.  But despite it all, she can't help but notice the gentle beauty of shy, stammering Hayden.  He's mocked for his speech impediment (and even she cringes when listening to him), but there's something about him that nonetheless catches her eye.

Then, a tragic accident leaves Stella deaf and unable to sing in the musical.  And in her new found state, everything has changed.  She hopes to eventually regain her hearing with an implant, but in the mean time, her loss gives her time to refocus her priorities, which she does with Hayden's help.  She discovers that, in silence, everything becomes clear.

A sweet romance, which is surprisingly understated for the material it covers.  From the tragedy of Stella's injury to Hayden's dark history, there is plenty of heavy potential here, but Lytton doesn't explore it very thoroughly.  Stella tells us that she's upset, but we don't dwell on it for long.  Hayden has ghosts in his closet but even a potentially charged reunion with his estranged mother is oddly flat. This approach saps much of the dramatic potential of the story and the novel largely runs out of steam, ending with a hundred pages or more of flowery prose as Lytton has less and less to say.  The result sounds like Stella's diary (in an embarrassingly melodramatic adolescent way) and not really in a way that adolescents actually think.  They looooooove each other, but there is not much honest emotion here.  By the end, rather than feeling close, this over-the-top angsting just left me bored.  A great start

Not If I See You First, by Eric Lindstrom

"Not if I see you first!" was what Parker always said to her best friend Scott with when they said goodbye.  Since Parker had been blind for years (the result of a car accident that also took the life of her mother), it was more of a joke between them than a threat.  But after Scott betrayed her, she shut him out of her life, determined to not ever have anything to do with him again.

Parker is a fighter with a fierce set of principles.  It got her through learning to cope with her vision loss.  It gets her through the challenges of practicing long-distance running.  And it's getting her through the more recent loss of her father to an apparent suicide.  But some struggles are impossible to overcome and some forms of blindness affect even the sighted.  When Scott reappears in her life, Parker's attempts to keep everything ordered and together falls apart.

Despite what sounds formulaic, this book surprises.  Just when you think you know the story, Lindstrom takes it someplace else.  I liked being kept on my toes, but there were other things that bothered me.  There is a lot going on in the story.  In addition to her blindness, recent loss of her father, and the reappearance of Scott, there is an aborted relationship with another runner, squabbles with her cousin, and various drams with her friends.  I found that a bit annoying as the story grew hard to track and there were a lot of characters in it. But it was also nice when things happened that seemed more real for avoiding stereotypes.  There's no real resolution in the story either, which will drive some folks batty!

Unidentified Suburban Object, by Mike Jung

Being the only Asian-American in her school draws Chloe Cho a lot of unwanted attention.  And it annoys her to no end that people think she's Chinese or Japanese, or think nothing of spouting cultural stereotypes ("oh, you must be so smart!" etc.) about her.  But more maddening is the way that her parents keep dodging her questions about life back in Korea.  Why won't they answer her questions?

In seventh grade, Chloe's new social studies teacher turns out to actually be Korean as well.  Chloe finally has a way to get answers to her questions!  But what she finds out isn't exactly what she was expecting.  And the revelation about her origins shifts everything that Chloe thought she knew about herself.

An unusual book that, for its first half, plays as a typical celebration-of-diversity/self-discovery story, full of sharp observations of the way that well-meaning people can say terribly thoughtless racist things.  The book could very well have stayed that way and been a darling of librarians seeking to flesh out their middle reader diversity offerings.  Chloe's struggles are quite enlightening and her strong personality makes her appealing in dealing with them. 

But then, at almost exactly the half-way point, the books takes a very abrupt turn.  I don't want to give away any spoilers so I won't reveal what sort of shift takes place, but it pulls the story out of realism and into science fiction.  In doing so, the book stands out as a really unique offering.  But I'm less keen on the result.  Unexpected plot twists need good follow-up and it really seemed like Jung didn't know where to take it.  The result is that the book coasts to the end.  Overall, it's clever but didn't really develop its gimmick.


[I received an Advanced Reviewer's Copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.  The book is scheduled for release on April 26th.]

Everything, Everything, by Nicola Yoon

Eighteen year-old Madeline has spent the vast majority of her life inside her hermetically-sealed house.  She's been diagnosed with a rare disease that makes her immune deficient.  Exposed to the outside world, she would probably die.  Inside and protected, her life is quiet but lonely.  She has forgone hope of having any significant connection with the outside.

But then a new family moves in next door and they have a boy her age.  Seeing him stirs curiosity and feelings that she didn't know where even present to be stirred.  And with some encouragement from her nurse, she reaches out to this stranger.  The results are unexpected and change her life in previously unimaginable ways.

Told in a surprisingly effective and complementary mixture of prose, verse, and artwork, the novel is a unique document.  And yet, it has so much more going for it.  The story is touching.  The characters are moving and enchanting.

The narrative is complex, even as the writing is simple.  Ostensibly, this is a story of a sick girl being coaxed out of her shell and discovering a bit more of the world.  But the story on the surface is only an analogy for the inner journey that Madeline undertakes and it deals with the more complicated feelings of first love, trust, and risk taking.  I was a bit disappointed by the plot twist towards the end that sent the story down to earth.  But I still found the overall experience lyrical and enchanting.  This is truly a gorgeous and special book!

Believarexic, by J. J. Johnson

At age 15, Jennifer convinces her parents that she needs to be committed to an inpatient facility to treat her eating disorder.  And while she has lots of expectations for how the process will go (largely fed by pop culture depictions of anorexia and bulimia), the real experience quickly diverges away from her preconceptions.  What she finds is a mixture of helpful and destructive caregivers and fellow patients who can be good friends or bitter enemies (or both!).  She knows that the key is "sticking to the program" but the challenges to her plan come from many unexpected places.

Based loosely on the author's real-life experience, I appreciated the honesty and the realism of the story.  As well, the way that Johnson has subverted a number of common tropes (in particular, the helpful nurse/doctor) by depicting a ward where nurses and patients are all flawed in their own ways is particularly interesting. 

Johnson makes an unusual decision to veer away from describing much of her heroine's mindset.  There are brief mentions of Jennifer's feelings of being overweight, but her mental state plays a very minor part in the story.  There are also numerous clues about the family, social and even biological reasons for Jennifer's disorder, but nothing is definitively stated about why she struggles with food consumption.  Rather than describe or even explain what having an eating disorder is like, Johnson focuses on the specifics of treatment.

The book also has some unusual literary elements.  It begins in third-person free verse (for its admission and stage 1 sections), which is at times quite awkward, and then switches to first person prose for the remainder of the story.  Type fonts also change throughout the novel.  The author Q &A at the end of the novel never mentions the shifts (they are obviously intended for some sort of purpose, but what?).

In sum, a very readable book which leaves many things unsaid and unexplained.

What We Left Behind, by Robin Talley

In this NA novel, Toni and Gretchen were an inseparable couple in high school.  And, like many other high school sweethearts, they promised each other that they would stay together even when they went off to college.  They even intended to attend schools in the same town (Harvard for Toni and BU for Gretchen), although it didn't quite work out that way.  At the last minute, Gretchen decided to go to NYU instead.  But even with that last minute shift, they agreed that they would still see each other every weekend.

As you can probably guess, even those revised plans fall through.  Course work and social activities make it hard to get together.  The two girls find themselves drifting apart.  Toni finds friends at Harvard that allow her to explore her burgeoning transexualism and her struggles with gender identity.  Gretchen, feeling Toni slip away, tries to hold on tighter by throwing herself at her lover (which only drives Toni farther away).

The story itself is not full of much suspense, but it's all about the journey.  What makes the novel unique is its focus on gender queer relationships.  Or rather, how relationships fare when one of the parties starts to question their gender identity.  Doing so in the context of a young lesbian relationship is a further twist.  The novel explores many different topics, from Toni's obsessive search for pronouns to the ways that both gays and straights discriminate against the gender queer to what it means to have the person you love change their gender.  Not all of these concepts are new, but their treatment here will open your eyes.

While I was impressed by the story, I was less taken with the characters.  Gretchen was too weak and self-sacrificing.  But Toni annoyed me far more.  Toni's endless experimentation with language and her unwillingness to commit (combined with her demands that everyone had to respect her indecision) just came off as precious.  And there's no way around Toni's privileged background (a point that really gets driven home when she has to briefly consider the idea that her parents might pull out her financing and she might not be able to continue her pricey Ivy League education).  It's not that she's spoiled, but simply that she lives a gilded life.  The far more common situations that young transexuals find themselves in (poverty, danger, and insecurity) are only briefly mentioned and don't threaten Toni's exploration.

If You're Lucky, by Yvonne Prinz

People thought of Georgia's brother Lucky as blessed.  Gregarious and loved by almost everyone, he had an amazing talent for cheating death up until when he actually died in a surfing accident.  At the funeral, Georgia meets one of Lucky's buddies named Fin.  Afterwards, while he's never visited before, Fin decides to stay around and settle in.  Soon, he's working Lucky's old job and dating Lucky's girlfriend.  Georgia smells a rat.  And as Georgia digs into Fin's murky history, she uncovers a series of suspicious mysteries in Fin's life.  In the end, she suspects that Lucky's death wasn't an accident after all and that Fin had something to do with it.

But there's a problem:  Georgia suffers from schizophrenia and she has a history of paranoid delusions.  As a result, no one believes her as she starts to express her suspicions.  And even she doesn't know whether to trust her perceptions.

An interesting psychological thriller, following a heroine who becomes a steadily less reliable narrator as the story progresses.  This isn't fine literature and the writing and the characters seemed merely functional, but it's an entertaining story with a brisk plot.

One, by Sarah Crossan

Grace and Tippi are literally as close as two sisters can be.  They're conjoined twins.  And while the doctors never expected them to live past their second year, they're now in their Junior year.  Their lives are full of special challenges, most notably their difficulty at fitting in, but they both have no desire to change.  With the help of two new friends (the wild Yasmeen and her friend Jon), the girls finally have a social life and (for Grace) a chance at something more.  But then tragedy strikes and the twins face a challenge for survival.

Written in free verse, the novel (despite its many pages) is a brisk read.  That verse isn't particularly stand out, but the subject matter is riveting.  It's not really a spoiler to say that it ends in heartbreak (the lives of conjoined twins are rarely happy ones) but Crossan tells their story with dignity and Grace's voice is compelling.  The classic gold standard for a novel for me is whether the book is readable, full of interesting and sympathetic characters, and whether I learn something from it (with bonus points for a weepy and life-affirming ending).  This novel delivers all of the above.

Future Perfect, by Jen Larsen

How far would you go to realize your academic dreams?  And would you reach for them even at the expense of your pride and self-respect?

Every year, Ashley's grandmother gives her a card for her birthday which promises her a fantastic gift in exchange for her losing weight.  One year, it was a trip to Disneyland if she would lose fifty pounds.  Another year, it was a new car for losing eighty pounds.  It's never worked.  Ashley has never accepted the offers because she doesn't see any reason to lose weight -- yes, she's a large person, but she's content in her skin and happy with who she is.

Now, in Ashley's senior year, her grandmother has raised the stakes:  if Ashley gets accepted, her grandmother will pay her tuition at Harvard for four years.  It's a dream as Ashley has the grades to get in but doesn't have the resources to cover the costs.  The catch is that her grandmother's demand this time is that Ashley undergo gastric bypass surgery.

The premise is fascinating but ultimately flawed.  Any protagonist worth reading about will ultimately make the right decision, so it is really a matter of waiting until Ashley does so.  And the plausibility of the grandmother's character, so cruel and insensitive that she feels justified in ruining her granddaughter's self-esteem and endangering her life, is hard to swallow.

The writing suffers from a different problem:  extremely uneven pacing.  For the most part, the story follows a familiar dramatic arc with familiar settings (school, part-time job, home) and a story that traces Ashley's personal growth as she struggles to make her decision.  But we digress from time to time to odd settings where the action slows down like molasses and becomes dreamy (in a way that I can most easily compare with the way that the mind wanders on drugs -- a literary high?).  I don't know quite what to make of these digressions but they ultimately don't add anything to the story (consider, for example, the vignette at the art exhibit in the Tenderloin) so they could have been jettisoned.  Subplots about Ashley's transgendered friend and another friend who runs away are only loosely tied in to the story and seem wasted.

Apple and Rain, by Sarah Crossan

Apple's grandmother is terribly strict and Apple is convinced that her life would be better if only her mother came back to take care of her instead.  But after eleven years, she's pretty much given up hope that her Mum will ever come back, until she in fact does!  At first, it is a dream come true, but as time goes by Apple learns that her mother isn't all that Apple has imagined.  And that family is often a very complicated thing.

Covering fairly familiar ground, including my evergreen favorite (not!) of child abandonment, Crossan still manages to pump some fresh life into this.  Apple's resourceful and pretty good at standing up for herself.  And the other kids are similarly useful, from little sister Rain to their geeky neighbor Del.  And even grandma has some depth on her.  It's less easy to see much in Apple and Rain's mum, but that may be the point -- being so blinded by wishful thinking, they can't see their mother's flaws.

Goodbye Stranger, by Rebecca Stead

Bridge, Tab, and Emily are best friends who never fight, but when Em starts trading photographs of herself with a boy, her friends become worried about her.  Meanwhile, Sherm is struggling with dealing with his grandfather, who has moved out on grandma.  And Sherm and Bridge are toying with starting a relationship of their own.  And Bridge still occasionally has trouble coping with the aftermath of a horrible accident she was in when she was eight.  And through it all, a mysterious older girl is hiding out at a coffee shop, afraid to be seen now that she's been completely humiliated.

This mash-up is basically the story that Stead is telling in her latest novel Goodbye Stranger, which explores concepts of friendship.  It's a difficult story to track and I'm never a fan of that sort of thing.  Individual characters are compelling, but jumping around so often when the relationships between them are less than clear is frustrating.  By the end, I had to sit back and just let the story take me where it wanted to go, but I didn't really follow it and that left me feeling distant from the novel.  In sum, it's pretty, but hard to invest in.  I'm reminded of Lynne Rae Perkins' Criss Cross, a similarly hyped YA novel that I found nearly unreadable (Goodbye Stranger, however, is better written!).

Love, Lucas, by Chantele Sedgwick

After Oakley's brother dies from bone cancer, she and her Mom go to live with her Aunt Jo on the California beach for a few months.  Oakley grieves for her brother and spends her days reading a journal that he left for her.  But she also starts to rebuild her life and meets Carson, a local surfer.  Carson helps her to escape from her grief and naturally enough she falls hard for him.  But is it too soon to be entering a romantic relationship?  And what happens when Oakley and her mother return home?

Decent, but not terribly surprising, romance (with the exception of a big plot twist towards the end that provides the dramatic climax that Sedgwick seemed to be struggling with creating).  The ending is not a complete cheat, but I would have been happier with something less abrupt and more organic to the overall story.  And that pretty much sums up my take on the novel overall: nothing terrible, but nothing really outstanding either.  I didn't find myself sucked into any of the characters or their traumas (and the dead brother's journal is surprisingly ineffective!), but I was content to keep reading and following their travails.

Complete non-sequitur:  I loved the gratuitous mention of both barnacles and (twice!) Phase Ten.

Cut Both Ways, by Carrie Mesrobian

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Dark Shimmer, by Donna Jo Napoli

In this retelling of Snow White, set in medieval Venice, tortured Dolce flees her home after her mother dies and is befriended by little Bianca and Bianca's father Marin.  Dolce, raised by dwarfs, has always seen herself as some sort of giant monster and is astonished to discover that she is actually normal-sized!  For his part, Marin adores Dolce and brings her home.  Living with him and Bianca, Dolce is no longer treated as an oddity.  Marin marries her and Dolce settles.  But she is not at peace. Instead, she becomes obsessed with freeing the dwarfs of Venice, who are kept in servitude for the amusement of the nobility.  To buy their freedom, Dolce creates little mirrors, made of the clearest glass and backed with tin and quicksilver.  That the quicksilver is toxic, she knows, but her obsession to free more people makes her reckless in handling it and leads her into madness.

Another beautifully researched historical novels from Napoli, who does them so well and also does some of the most sophisticated retellings of myths and fables.  That's a potent combination in this novel.  There's all sorts of lovely detail here (from the science of mirror making and glass blowing to the social mores of the Venetians).  And Napoli's re-imagining of the fairy tale and her refusal to fall on to magic in any way (she adeptly provides plausible explanations for everything from the poison apple to the glass coffin to the Prince's rescue) is enchanting.

However, I found this storytelling itself hard going.  The beginning was fairly slow and it's only half-way through that the story of Snow White became recognizable.  This is also the point in the story where our heroine becomes the villain -- a twist which is awkward in its unexpectedness.  Having invested rather heavily in Dolce, it is asking a lot of the reader to accept her transformation.  It makes her more sympathetic, to be certain, but should fairy tales really have sympathetic villains?

Infinite In Between, by Carolyn Mackler

On their first day of high school, five freshmen are put together in the same orientation group.  As an icebreaker activity, they write letters to themselves with a plan to read them together when they graduate in four years.  They then embark on their lives and this novel traces the paths of these kids (and their friends) through high school.

Ambitious and, unfortunately, too much so!  With five characters and their supporting players, there isn't much time to spend on any one of them.  Covering four years, there's quite a lot to keep track of.  The result is a story where each chapter (averaged 3-4 pages!) just starts to get interesting before we're jumping to the next character or month and moving on.  It's thin, superficial, and ultimately not very interesting.  I like Mackler as a YA writer, but this is too much and, even at nearly 500 pages, she can't really deliver a story that gels with so much going on.

Your Voice Is All I Hear, by Leah Scheier

April was obsessed with Jonah before they had even met (she scoped him out before he showed up for his first day at their school).  And, much to her surprise, he's just as taken by her.  Their romance kicks off beautifully, but something isn't quite right.  At first, it's just little quirks that she easily ignores and explains away, but his behavior becomes more and more erratic until he has to be committed to an inpatient psych facility.

He is diagnosed with schizophrenia and, as he struggles with the sickness, April is urged by her parents, friends, and even Jonah himself to let him go.  They are too young and she shouldn't be wasting her life on him, April is told.  But Jonah is the first great thing that has happened to her and she simply cannot abandon him.

Heart wrenching stuff, as one would expect.  I loved April and the way we really got in her head.  She's brutally honest with herself, which wasn't terribly realistic but more fulfilling from a dramatic perspective.  She always knew when she was screwing up, even as she did so.  And I loved Scheier's sensitive and authentic description of Jonah's suffering.  The resulting dynamic between the two of them was captivating and hard to watch at the same time.  As a result, this is a difficult book to get through because you really feel for these kids and the nearly impossible situation they are in.

I was less taken with the narrative, which kept jumping about.  Scheier focused on particular dramatic moments, often without sufficient transition or foreshadowing and I felt like I was being dragged through the story.  It felt like April was telling the story in retrospect years later and just glossing over details -- a realistic approach, perhaps, but not very good storytelling.

Don't Fail Me Now, by Una LaMarche

With their mom in jail again, it falls on Michelle to take care of her younger sister and brother.  But the kids are running out of places to stay and the means to take care of themselves.  Her younger sister is being bullied at school and her younger brother is about to be expelled.  Michelle's job won't pay their bills and she's too young to gain custody anyway.

In the midst of her despair, Leah and her stepbrother show up.  They couldn't be any more different from Michelle and her siblings (wealthy, white, and privileged), but Leah and Michelle share one thing in a common:  they have the same father.  And now their dad is dying and has asked the girls to leave Baltimore and come out to California so he can see them.  This unlikely pair, with their siblings, set off on an illicit cross-country road trip full of widened horizons and adventures.

Ostensibly, a typical road trip-and-getting to know you adventure, Don't Fail Me Now is an outstanding example of the subgenre.  Strong characters who are fun and interesting move this story along.  I'm not a fan of YA that put kids in danger, but LaMarche is gentle with these kids and they mostly muddle through on their limited resources (one might even accuse her of soft-pedaling their hardships!).  A lot more could probably have been done with the underplayed class and racial differences, but that was not the story the author wanted to tell.  In general, it was pretty enjoyable.

All the Rage, by Courtney Summers

Everyone in town knows the Turners.  Power neatly resides with whoever is allied with them.  So, when Romy and her family falls out with the Turners, it's pretty much open season.  The older Turner boy rapes Romy, but rather than elicit sympathy, Romy is accused of fabricating the story and she is subjected to another sexual assault a few weeks later.  The second attack is not so easily written off by the town, because another girl has disappeared at the same time.

None of which matters to Romy.  She has no will to fight the town and she seeks refuge in a job out of town and a boy she meets there.  All she wants is to keep that world separate from the one back home.  But doing so is getting more and more difficult.


A gruesome and unpleasant story that combines a suffering and sympathetic protagonist against some heavy baddies.  It also has a lot of ambitions, building a story on the important subject of rape culture, but it stretches credulity along the way and relies on thinly drawn villains and poorly explained motives.

The blurb for the book claims that the author is trying to show how silence is "inflicted upon young women" but it is not that simple (even in this story where Summers has stacked the deck against Romy).  I have no problems believing that a rape victim would be reluctant to go public and that she would not want to deal with a law enforcement force that is this blatantly corrupt.  But when she is unwilling to talk to anyone at all (including a mother with whom she apparently has a good relationship), one has to acknowledge that some of this silence is self-imposed.  And rather than explore that idea, the story leaves a huge void that leaves us wondering why Romy doesn't speak (and not why others try to silence her).

Furthermore, it all seems terribly exploitative.  Rather than give Romy a chance to gain a voice or to heal, we're just shown again and again how helpless and ineffectual she is.  There is enough injustice in the world and sexual violence is cruel enough in itself to provide ample drama for a decent story.  Inventing a character who does everything she can to hurt herself just seems cruel and mean.  To me, it seemed like Summers just wanted to amp the trauma and drag out the story.  What I learned is that when you're hurting and need help, you should spurn every offer you receive (that is, if you want to make the story "shocking").