Pax, by Sara Pennypacker

War is coming and Peter is being sent to stay with his grandfather for safety.  Peter's pet fox Pax, however, cannot come and so Peter is forced to abandon him (in the heart-wrenching first chapter).  Peter immediately regrets doing so and heads off on a quest to find and rescue Pax.  Along the way, Peter befriends an embittered veteran who teaches him valuable lessons about war and helps him on his way.  And, in alternating chapters, Pax meets other foxes and learns more about his own nature and the ways of humans.

Pennypacker, who I know better for her charming Clementine series, has created a unique and haunting book.  Initially, it's a straightforward adventure, but more of an allegory about war in the end.  I felt that the story was a bit dark for children and not entirely appropriate for the middle readers it is targeted towards (in much the same way that Watership Down got mischaracterized as a children's book).  I enjoyed it, especially the chapters about Pax (who ultimately proves a more appealing protagonist than the boy) and the anti-war message is soft-pedaled but well-presented.

The Secret Language of Sisters, by Luanne Rice

An auto accident leaves Tilly's older sister Roo paralyzed and in a coma, unable to communicate.  People doubt that she will ever recover and some believe she might even be brain dead.  But Tilly maintains the hope that Roo is "there" and she is able to show that Roo is suffering from "Locked In Syndrome." An ambitious young doctor is brought in who has had experience working with such patients and he develops devices that allow Roo to speak and even to manipulate objects around her.  But jealousy between the sisters threatens to divide them just as they should be coming together.

I rarely find that successful adult literature writers are able to cross over into YA.  Unfortunately, Rice proves the rule here.  She writes a good story but doesn't really have the tone right.   The two sisters sounded more like they were in their twenties than in their teens. It wasn't simply that they were mature and well-spoken, but that their tastes are too complex and their way of relating to each other too grown up.  The girls' bond seemed wise beyond its years and the jealousies lacked the angst, doubt, and awkwardness that would make it authentically adolescent.

The Way I Used To Be, by Amber Smith

Books about sexual violence and rape walk dangerously close to exploitative fiction, but when done well they can be as stunning.  Take, for example, Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak and Sarah Dessen's Dreamland which both hold spaces in my list of top ten favorite YA novels.  I'm not ready to add The Way I Used to Be to such exalted company, but it is certainly a superior specimen.  This novel delivers.  As a survivor myself, I'll admit to having a soft spot for stories which appreciate the nuances and complexities of the experience (although I fully understand folks who shy away from books on these topics altogether on principle).

The assault that the story centers around takes place right in the beginning of the novel when Eden is fourteen and, while the story will revisit the events surrounding the attack at later points in flashback, the bulk of the nearly 400 pages that follow trace Eden's fall from grace over the next three years.  Her lack of ability to cope leads to self-destructive behavior that teeters between pitiful and distasteful.  Smith wants to drag her heroine into the gutter to show how destroyed she is but at some point even the reader starts to lose faith (grownups are warned that the book's depiction of illicit drugs, underaged drinking, and risky sex will definitely encourage grey hairs!).  That there is some redemption in the end makes the book worth reading to the end.

And that basically underscores my issue with the story.  Smith wants to show the corrosive impact of rape on the psyche and she does this so thoroughly that there isn't much room for escape.  It takes a little deus ex machina in the end to break the stalemate.  And even then, Eden is so tightly wound and so hardcoded into her destructive trajectory that it's a bit of a close call.  The issue with that is that Eden ends up being an unsympathetic character (a brutal thing to say and we can debate it, but when you look at how horrible she is to the people around her, you do start to lose faith).  That is part of the point and I wouldn't change a thing about her depiction but it creates one heck of a quandary for the author!  I really felt for Eden, but I didn't really like her.

I Woke Up Dead At the Mall, by Judy Sheehan

Sixteen and dead at her father's wedding, Sarah finds herself in a state of limbo -- which turns out to be an extra floor at the Mall of America.  It's been specially constructed for deceased teenagers who can't move on because they feel they have unfinished business.  There are other kids there:  angry Lacey, vain and dim Declan, the very adorable Nick, and others.  And there's plenty of rules about what the kids need to do in order to move on (and the things that could cause them to get stuck forever).  And then there's the Boy ("boss of you") -- the being that makes (and sometimes capriciously breaks) the rules.

It's an extremely quirky story about the afterlife, righting some wrongs, clairvoyance, evil stepmothers, bad songwriting, Oprah, and living in New York City.  It's clever and funny.  It will amuse you.

But it's not much of a story.  Sheehan likes to make a funny scene out of an absurdity, but she doesn't really seem to know what to do with it.  There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, but not much point to the novel.  It's a bit too much of a downer to be a comedy (Gabrielle Zevin's Elsewhere is an obvious precursor), it's too flippant to say much about faith, the righting-of-wrongs stuff moves the story along but gets mired in a lot of silliness about "angels" -- it is a narrative mess.  The most endearing characters are the silly ones (Declan, Bertha, the Boy).  Sarah and Nick and just plain boring.  The novel will still amuse you, in spite of all that.

See No Color, by Shannon Gibney

At the age of sixteen, Alex is struggling with the growing dissonance between what she is trying to be and who she thinks she is.  She's a black girl adopted into a white family -- neither black nor white.  She's trying to live up to her father's dream of her becoming an excellent baseball player, even as her developing body betrays her.  And she's discovering that her changing body yields surprising strengths along with disappointments.

An interesting and often uncomfortable book about identity.  I squirmed through passages in this novel where Alex pondered how the "black mind" differed from the white one, but I understood her struggle.  Like her adoptive family, I'd like to maintain the position that race is irrelevant, but Gibney gives no quarter on this and points out (I believe correctly) to the damage that silencing difference brings.  Told through both gentle episodes (like one in which Alex gets her hair properly handled for the first time) and more striking ones (as when Alex tries to prevent her black boyfriend from meeting her white family). Gibney explores all sorts of elements of transracial adoption.  Not content to simply focus on the racial issues, sexuality and gender differences are also invoked. The novel, in sum, pushes all sorts of buttons and is ripe for discussion and explorations.  I found it fascinating.

Orbiting Jupiter, by Gary D. Schmidt

When Joseph Brooks comes to Jack's family to be fostered, he's only thirteen years old, but he's deeply troubled and has already spent time at a juvenile facility.  He's also fathered a child.

Quiet, stubborn, and fearful of physical contact with others, it takes some time for Jack and his parents to break the ice, but gradually Joseph lets them into his world.  Jack learns that Joseph is much more complicated, mature, and intelligent than people have given him credit.  And once admitted in Joseph's confidence, Jack becomes obsessed with Joseph's struggles and (despite numerous warnings from adults) allows himself to be swept away by Joseph's influence.  Jack promises to look out for Joseph and "have his back" which becomes challenging when Joseph sets out to be reunited with his child.

Another well-crafted story by Schmidt, who has developed a strong track record for crafting sensitive books about boys and young men in trouble (a bit of a departure for me).  This is Jack's story of course, but both boys are well-developed.  Strikingly, the rest of the characters are not.  Adults and other children largely come off as flat and disposable.  Still, the story moves at a good clip and ends memorably with some suitable pathos.

Whisper to Me, by Nick Lake

During a summer, Cassie is diagnosed with a psychotic disorder.  As she quickly discovers, it colors people's perceptions of her.  Trying to avoid the stigma, she resists the diagnosis and refuses to acknowledge it to others.  Cassie's healing process is aided and complicated by her father (who suffers from PTSD) and a young man who likes her but to whom Cassie is not ready to open up.  Seemingly unrelated, her Jersey Shore community is struggling with a series of unexplained murders involving young women.

Billed as a romance, this extremely long story (544 pages!) is really more of a drama about mental illness.  The romantic thread plays only a minor part and actually seemed peripheral to the story.  This is an overall issue with this bloated novel.  Major threads (the missing girls and the father's own mental illness chief among them) are inconsequential and unresolved.

Another fault I found was that Cassie herself is a frustrating heroine.  Making mistakes and being imperfect is a typical characteristic in a YA protagonist.  But she develops so poorly, repeating mistakes again and again that you never get much sense of personal growth until suddenly at the end when she is -- poof! -- magically mature!  Without any development on display, we are basically  cheated of the most interesting part of the story and left with a largely unsympathetic main character for the bulk of the story.

Ruby on the Outside, by Nora Raleigh Baskin

Ruby's mother is serving a twenty-five year sentence as an accomplice to murder.  To Ruby, it's almost normal that she can only see her Mom during supervised visits, that their phone calls are monitored, or that she has to live with her aunt.  Almost being the key word.

Ruby is stigmatized and too embarrassed even to tell her best friend about where Mom is.  But a new girl next door gives Ruby the courage to start writing about her feelings.  Through some literary therapy, she finds the voice to express her frustrations, fear, and anger.

This is a fascinating book that introduces the corrosive impact of the correctional system on families.  Readers (of any age) probably give little thought to the hardships that incarcerated mothers go through or the damage that is committed on their children.  Baskin deals with the subject sensitively and in an age-appropriate fashion, letting Ruby tells us what it means to her in a way that younger readers will find sympathetic (and that older readers will find heartbreaking!). It plays to Baskin's strength at creating very intimate books about children coping with trauma.  This one tugs on the heartstrings and educates.

The Summer I Became A Nerd, by Leah Rae Miller

Ever since Maddie learned how uncool comic books and fantasy/science fiction stories are, she's hid her love for them.  Instead, she has carefully crafted a public persona (cheerleading, having a popular boyfriend, wearing trendy clothes) that has established her at the top of the social ladder.  But her secret is in danger of being exposed when she falls in love with the adorable (but certifiably geeky) clerk at the local comic shop.  As she succumbs to his charms and discovers the joy of expressing her passions openly, it becomes harder to keep her two lives separate.

My biggest problem with this fun (but pretty silly) book was buying in on the idea that Maddie actually had a second life.  She did geek so well (Miller obviously enjoyed showing off her knowledge of LARPing) that I couldn't see how it had ever been a secret.  Add to this that there wasn't much in the book about her popular girl/cheerleader side, and I was left doubting that Maddie had ever been anything other than a geek.  For a story about conflicting cultures, that seemed like a fatal weakness, even if it left her more sympathetic to the (presumably geeky) target audience.

If I Was Your Girl, by Meredith Russo

After transgender teen Amanda is beat up by transphobes, she is sent to live with her father, in a town where no one knows that she used to be a boy.  Given what happened to her, Dad would like Amanda to keep a low profile, but when she meets handsome Grant, she's lovestruck.  He's a dream and seems smitten with her as well, and she cannot resist falling for him.

All of this, in spite of the inevitability that Grant will find out her identity in the end -- an outcome that Amanda actually accepts.  The mystery is how he will react.  What will he feel when he knows that she was born as Andrew?

A briskly-paced story about the complications of being adolescent and transgender.  I felt on edge the entire time I read the story, fearful of a violent end.  However, while danger is always present, Russo manages to impart a certain amount of fun and humor into the story.  In fact, there were times when the attempt to depict Amanda as a normal teen seemed to be too good to be true.  Amanda integrates surprisingly well into her setting and develops strong friendships that provide her with support and safety not commonly found by transgender adolescents in real life.  Russo admits in the afterward, that her story has taken liberties (downplaying not only social dangers of being identified as transgender, but also the difficulties and expense of surgical intervention).

But I liked the story nonetheless. It shows the complicated world of Amanda with sensitivity and emotional honesty.  Given the trendiness of the topic, we've seen a number of books like this recently, but I believe that this is one of the best I have read so far.

Unbecoming, by Jenny Downham

Before Katie's grandmother appeared in their lives, Katie didn't even know that she was still alive.  And now that she has, Katie doesn't understand why her mother is so eager to get rid of the woman.  For Katie, her grandmother is a key to a past that she knows nothing about and she races to find out as much as she can before the old woman's senility steals away all of her memories.

For Katie's mom, losing memories would be a blessing -- she's been living in denial of her past and resents the way her own mother's arrival has stirred the pot.  But Katie is obsessed with figuring out what drove her mother and grandmother apart.  And as she explores that secret and forbidden past, she is forced to confront issues in her present as well.

A complicated multi-layered tale of three generations of women with a lot of emotional baggage and dysfunctional behavior.  I found the mother particularly unpleasant; her bitterness hard to sympathize with.  Downham tries to redeem her in the end, but I found the transformation unconvincing.  It also took a while to get into the story as a whole.  Some pruning of the various peripheral subplots might have helped tighten the focus.  In all, it's an interesting concept and tale, but not presented in a compelling fashion.

The Thing About Luck, by Cynthia Kadohata

Summer’s family is having a run of bad luck.  Her parents have had to go to Japan to care for ailing relatives, leaving Summer and her little brother with their grandparents.  The family’s regular seasonal job of harvesting wheat for farmers has to be borne by the grandparents who are in poor health.  For Summer, this means helping her grandmother, whose back is weak and who seems to always find fault with her granddaughter.  Through various hardships, the experience helps Summer come to understand how even a young person can do a lot if she sets her mind to it.

An interesting setting (seasonal subcontractors operating combines for wheat farmers in middle America), combined with a multi-generational immigrant family, provides color and cultural diversity.  So, the whole thing starts off well, but it never engaged me.  This is a common issue I've had with Kadohata's books.  She writes well, of course, but the stories don’t go anywhere.  There are lots of ideas developed (Summer’s fear of contracting malaria, her learning to operate heavy machinery, helping her brother make friends, falling in love, etc.) that simply get dropped with a one-page wrap-up at the very end.  I suppose the resolutions are all intended to be implied, but the bare bones of storytelling simply aren’t there.

Fish In A Tree, by Lynda Mullaly Hunt

For years, Ally has had creative ways to avoid revealing that she can't read.  She tries to read, but the letters just seem to swim around and she can't put them together.  Her efforts to avoid detection, meanwhile, get her into lots of trouble -- with her teachers labeling her a troublemaker and her classmates teasing her as a freak.

But a new teacher sees through her subterfuge and helps her to uncover the cause of her learning differences.  And with the confidence that this brings, she discovers her strengths and inspires her classmates.

Pitched at middle readers, the story of a girl struggling with dyslexia is far from fluff.  Instead, it takes on a wide variety of serious topics including bullying, racism, poverty, and separated families.  I'd have preferred more focus, but the shotgun approach does permit quite a variety of discussion topics.  The ending is also a bit too perfect but the story picks a wonderful pay-it-forward theme that provides heartwarming and redeeming closure.  Readers will enjoy Ally's kind heart and perseverance, and despite her numerous flaws and mishaps, will cheer the way that the novel rewards her in the end.

First & Then, by Emma Mills

Devon feels like she is drifting through life.  She’s in denial about being infatuated with her friend Cas.  She’s avoiding the entire subject of college.  And she’s definitely not interested in football star Ezra.  But things are changing around her:  her cousin Foster has come to live with her family, Cas has become distant and inaccessible, and Ezra turns out to be really nice.  The rest of it all is predictable light teen romance stuff.

There’s some potential here to explore the expansion of Devon’s family and the relationship between Devon and her cousin is nicely played.  But overall, not much happens here of note.  There’s jealousy and some crossed signals, the obligatory Jane Austen love fest (second only in popularity in YA to out-of-date music – a trope which is blissfully absent here!).  For the most part, though, the characters are forgettable and hard to distinguish.  Unfortunately, the story as a whole is as well.

Under the Egg, by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

As Theo's grandfather lies dying he tells her to look "under the egg." This cryptic message actually makes sense to her as there is a prominent painting over the mantle of an egg that he painted.  So, she looks where he told her, checking every corner and crack around and behind the painting, but finds nothing.  That is, until she discovers that the painting covers a richer and far older artwork:  a painting that Theo comes to believe (on the basis of her strong familiarity with art) might be a lost work of Raphael.

But why would the family possess such a priceless work of art?  Where did it come from?  And does the fact that her grandfather used to work as a security guard at the Met mean that it might in fact have been stolen?  With the help of another girl and a motley collection of characters including an Indian hot nut vendor, a priest with an art history background, a burly librarian, an eccentric French tea seller, her absent-minded mother, and her backyard flock of chickens, Theo finds her grandfather was much more than she ever imagined.

A middle grade mystery with lots of interesting historical notes, most notably about the theft of art from the Jews during World War II.  There is plenty of lighter material on exotic teas, urban chicken farming, and (of course) art history.  In many ways, it's a bit of a heavy work for middle grade readers, but the sensibilities are all appropriate.  You won't find a romantic thread here, but the girls are resourceful and brave, the story educational, and the pace brisk.  I found it fun and enjoyable.

A Step Toward Falling, by Cammie McGovern

When Emily and a football player named Lucas confess to failing to report a rape they witness, their school assigns 40 hours of community service at a center for people with disabilities (the victim Belinda is herself developmentally disabled).  But the service doesn't bring either of the teens closer to terms with what happened or with a desire to achieve closure with the victim.

Belinda meanwhile struggles with understanding what happened to her and, after some time at home, becomes anxious to return to public life, where she sees Emily and Lucas again.  This sets off some awkwardness, but the teens find common ground and develop friendship and mutual understanding.  Told in turns by Emily and Belinda, the story explores relationship building through the surprisingly similar views of the two girls.

The most powerful part of the novel for me was the way that McGovern showed how alike the two girls are.  While Belinda obviously has more trouble expressing herself and was not always so developmentally mature, there was still much that the girls shared in common, with their same anxieties and desires.  The story achieves a sensitive portrayal of developmental disability that is honest and insightful.  Emily's and Belinda's strengths and flaws are critically (yet sympathetically) treated and revealed a lot.

I did have trouble accepting that the guilt of the Emily and Lucas was as big of a deal as the story wanted it to be.  Part of the problem is that they are such sympathetic protagonists that the story sets them up to be forgivable (McGovern hedges their culpability with a lot of mitigating circumstances).  But is also just seemed a stretch to claim that what Emily and Lucas did (or did not) do was such a heinous offense.  I wonder if the story might have been stronger without that element which, while central, seemed forced and unnatural.

The Girl from Everywhere, by Heidi Heilig

Nix and her father travel between times and places. But they are far from rootless.  Dad is obsessed with getting back to Honolulu in 1868, when Nix's mother was still alive.  He could get there if he could find a map of Oahu made in that year.  With their ship and her father's talents, all it takes is a map to sail to any place or time, real or imaginary.  But getting the right map is tricky.

What seems like a solution at last leaves them tantalizingly close:  in Hawai’i, but two decades too late.  And instead of finding what they want, and become embroiled in a fantastical plot to destroy the monarchy and force the islands into America’s grasp.

A stunning and novel fantasy that combines motley characters, a small dash of real history, and a great psychological conflict between father and daughter.  It doesn’t always make sense and there is little emotional depth, but it is a thrilling adventure with lots of fun moments.  A dash of Indiana Jones with a TARDIS thrown in for good measure!

Roses, by G. R. Mannering

She is a foundling and her mother and father a mystery.  But when she is brought to Ma Dane's home she is taken in without a word.  Her silvery skin and amethyst eyes scare everyone in town.  They fear her and they hate her, and yet call her "Beauty." Raised cruelly, she lives in loneliness broken only by her discovery of her talent with and love for horses.  Yet even those early days are idyllic compared to what awaits her when she must flee for her life.  Mortals and magic beings break out in war.  Though she claims no magic of her own, her appearance is enough to make her suspect and threatens her existence.

Life in exile has additional challenges and Beauty and the stable hand of her old home who helped her escape struggle to integrate her into life in the hills with superstitious mountain people.  Despite the challenges, they manage and flourish until a day when he is delayed returning home.  When he does return, in poor health and bearing a curse, Beauty must ride into an enchanted forest where a terrible and ghastly creature awaits her.

It's a very dark and languorous retelling of  Beauty and the Beast (but one where the Beast doesn't even appear until 200 pages in!).  Instead, the focus is on Beauty's life before the two encounter each other.  Mannering's attempt to subvert the Disneyfication of the story is brilliant, from the early destruction of the candelabra (poor Lumiere!) to the fact that Beauty arrives illiterate.  In this world, the enchanted furnishing are sinister and threatening, not inviting us to dance.  And themes of jealousy and vengeance predominate.

Mannering's style is fast-paced but also quite busy.  Many characters and subplots are introduced, but not all are resolved (lending to future twists in the sequels, one supposes).  The writing itself is full of cliches and prone to overstatement.  The snow did not merely fall in this world, but instead it "fluttered from the gaping sky like pearly droplets." A character does not walk into a room, but enters "with a sweep of her bejeweled dressing gown." And so on.  The words are very pretty, but largely chosen without regard for furthering the meaning of the story.  It grows tiresome as we go and one just starts skipping adjectives, adverbs, and empty metaphors.

Dumplin', by Julie Murphy

Go big or go home.  Willowdean (or "Dumplin'" as her Mom calls her) has always been a husky girl.  And while she's generally comfortable with her body, it has not escaped her notice that her mother isn't.  Mom is a former Miss Teen Blue Bonnet queen and the obsessed organizer of the pageant.  She'd wish her daughter were one of the thin wisps worthy of a crown, or at least try to become one.  Will naturally resents this and hatches a plot to settle the matter for all by competing in the pageant.  Much to Willowdean's delight, her mother is horrified by the thought.  Far from a victory, though, even Will recognizes that she faces not simply defeat, but also humiliation and ridicule on the walkway.  And in spite of her confidence, Will's relationship with her body is complicated.  When a handsome and athletic boy named Bo shows an interest in her, she can't accept that she is worthy of his affection.

I enjoyed Murphy's sophisticated take on body self-image.  I also liked the complexity of the relationships in Willowdean's life (whether with Bo, her BFF El, friend Mitch, or her mother).  But the story was cluttered with characters and subplots, and it suffered from its ambition.  Concepts like Will's love of Dolly Parton or the rather crucial loss of Will's beloved aunt seemed buried amidst so many less-important threads.  Thus, this was a near miss -- many wonderful ideas, but imperfectly realized.

Liar & Spy, by Rebecca Stead

When Georges and his family move in to the building, and he's urged by his father to meet some new kids, he’s not sure he wants to make any new friends.  But a sign in the basement announcing a “Spy Club” sounds like fun.  It turns out to be run by a boy his age named Safer.  Safer’s a little strange, spending the day watching the building’s other tenants and spying on them.  He convinces Georges that one of the tenants is actually a murderer and recruits Georges to help him uncover the crime.

Meanwhile, Georges struggles at school with bullies, with missing his Mom who’s stuck at the hospital where she works, and the whole relocation.  But Safer’s adventures provide him with distraction and escape until Georges learns that things aren't exactly the way safer has presented them.

Liar & Spy is a compact story with a lot of twists (perhaps a few more than were actually necessary).  It's a fun read that explores what I'll call the purpose of truth and the value of lies.  If that seems an unfairly cryptic summary, it's still the best I can do without providing spoilers.  I found it original and fascinating, in a way that Stead's books often are.