The Names They Gave Us, by Emery Lord

Lucy suffers a crisis of faith when her mother's cancer returns.  But as much as she hates God for letting this happen, she's committed to spending the summer helping her parents run their Summer Bible camp, just as she's always done.

But her mother has other ideas:  she wants Lucy to work as a counselor at a camp nearby for troubled kids.  Way outside of Lucy's comfort zone, Lucy is reluctant to go.  These are not her kind of people and being there will mean not being with her mother for what might be their last summer together.  But in the end, Lucy honors her mother's wish.

Working at Camp Daybreak is every bit as hard as Lucy has imagined and more so.  Her own doubts in Divine Providence aside, she cringes as the children have even less belief in God.  While she initially falters at her new job, she slowly learns how to deal with young people from different backgrounds and develops a greater ability to manage her own world, coming to peace with her own doubts and her fears for what is happening to her mother.

I love a novel which knows how to handle faith and religion.  Neither dogmatic nor condescending (as so many books about young Christians tend to be), Lord portrays Lucy's search for meaning as a reorganization of her attic of faith.  Lucy doesn't code everything in religion, but instead finds herself naturally drawn back to core principles that sound authentic in a person who has been raised in such a world.  Lucy is no zealot, but lives in her faith more comfortably than even she realizes.

I also love Lord's writing style.  There are amazing individual passages in this novel that take your breath away.  The final three pages are probably the most heart-wrenching and merciless prose I have read in years.  A constant barrage of such force would be exhausting, but a tighter less-distracted narrative would have kept up the emotional impact.  Instead, to a maddeningly degree for such a well-written novel, Lord piles in idea after idea (there's an ex-boyfriend, a new romance, a couple different camper hard-luck cases, conflicts with co-workers, and -- way too late -- a family secret that serves no purpose to the overall story).  It's distracting!  I wish her editor had said to her, "That's beautiful, Emery, but why don't you save it for another novel?  Don't you think poor Lucy has enough going on?"

Geekerella, by Ashley Poston

With a nod to Cinderella, Geekerella gives us Elle who lives for her favorite TV show – the long-since cancelled Starfield.  It helps her escape from the hell that is home and forget about her evil stepmother or her spoiled stepsisters.  Starfield was the one thing that Elle shared with her late father.  Her stepmother will stop at nothing to obliterate that legacy.

Darien Freeman is the heartthrob star of soap Seaside and his overbearing manager/father has gotten him the lead role in the Starfield reboot.  But while the fans are disgusted by this cynical commercial ploy (in an attack led by Elle herself on her fan blog), no one knows that Darien is actually a huge fan himself.  Feeling trapped by his inability confess his geekiness to fandom, he starts to secretly text to another fan (who, as it turns out, is Elle).  And the two fall in love over their texts without knowing each other’s true identity.  This culminates at the cosplay ball at a sci-fi con and includes the conniving stepsister, a giant pumpkin for transport, and even a forgotten glass slipper.

In sum, a lot of silly fun.  And I did enjoy the tributes to sci-fi fandom.  But the Cinderella stuff was either too dark or way over the top.  Abusive and nasty, it really clashed with the fun, and it wasn’t very realistic.  Poston doesn’t really do any of the antagonists very well, giving them fairly pathetic justifications for their actions and making them thin and hysterical – more laughable than anything else.

Girl Out of Water, by Laura Silverman

Anise can't imagine living anywhere but with her Dad in their oceanfront house in Santa Cruz, surfing every day, and spending time with her friends.  But things are changing -- one last summer before her friends start to go away to college and beyond.  So, Anise is committed to making the most of this summer.

But then her aunt is in a bad accident and Dad announces that they are going to have to spend the summer at her aunt's house - in Nebraska - to take care of her cousins while her aunt recovers.  There's definitely no surfing in Nebraska!  And worse, no friends either!  She'll miss the whole summer!  Will her friends even remember her when she gets back?

Nebraska, in the end, isn't all that bad.  She spends the summer caring for her cousins and develops a stronger bond with them.  And she meets a handsome one-armed skateboarder named Lincoln with whom she grows close.  But as the summer comes to close, she finds herself torn between her two worlds -- the comfort of the old and the new world she's recently discovered.

The best way to describe my disquiet with this book is to point out that the culminating sequences of the story are told in rushed flashback, as if even the author knew that they would be so dull that she didn't want to spend time with them!  But then, how interesting can it be to have your climax be having your protagonist admit that she's been terrible to her friends all summer, by ignoring them?   Or, in other words, this Santa Cruz world of Anise's was so uninteresting to the author that she barely mentions it for over half of the book.

And the human growth story (about a young women discovering that absence does not have to mean forgetting is simply slipped out there for our approval).  The subplots provide plenty of additional frustrations, including Lincoln's alleged disability, which is played down so far that it serves no actual purpose in the story (Hey! There's this guy and he only has one arm, but you'd never know it because he does everything and we never call it out for any reason).  I understand Silverman's desire to paint disabled people as "normal" but this is really about invisibility.  Anises's cousin and her anger at her mother's injury or Anise's half-hearted searching for her mother also hung out there as unresolved.

In sum, it was light, fluffy, and readable, but really fell apart story-wise for me.

Windfall, by Jennifer E. Smith

For the eighteenth birthday of her best friend Teddy, Alice decides to buy him a lottery ticket.  Given the hard luck both of them have lived through, neither of them think of it as anything more than a silly joke.  But $141 million later, they are shocked senseless.

Becoming instantly wealthy changes everything and Alice is none too pleased to see how it plays out.  Teddy, unable to come to grips with his windfall, initially fritters it away on toys and trinkets.  Alice, meanwhile, is unwilling to accept any gift he offers, and is afraid she is losing her friend.  In the long run, she may be right.  The money has a way of opening old wounds (from Teddy’s long absent father returning to Alice confronting the loss of her parents nine years before).  Will it destroy their friendship as well?

The premise, while far-fetched, is interesting enough to support the novel.  But I had trouble moving beyond how much I disliked Teddy.  Despite numerous protestations that he won’t change, he seemed perfectly capable of doing so repeatedly.  In fact, I found him to be as unreliable as his gambling-addicted father (probably an intentional resemblance). There’s a lot going on in the story (grieving for the dead, romances falling apart, life choices) and then the lottery stuff on top of it all.  And the ending (a quick pat-it-forward idea) seems so weak, like Smith couldn’t think of a proper way to resolve the story and just slapped this in.

Alex, Approximately, by Jenn Bennett

Bailey loves classic movies and shares her passion with an anonymous online friend "Alex." She doesn't know much about him, except where he lives (which happens to be the same California town where her Dad lives).  So, when she ends up moving in with her Dad, she really should give Alex a heads up that she's in the neighborhood.  But she's afraid of what will happen and keeps her move to herself (although she is curious enough that she initially tries to figure out who Alex is by sleuthing around town).

Meanwhile, she settles in to her new home, quickly makes friends, and finds herself alternately attracted and repelled by Porter, the son of a local surfing legend.  Soon, that relationship takes off, placing Bailey in a jam between her former crush on Alex and her burgeoning relationship with Porter.

Now, of course, the identity of "Alex" is pretty easy for a reader to figure out, so it is the one plot point that can't keep the novel together (nor can it be resolved too soon).  Instead, the story is filled out with the usual romantic stuff (featuring a few pretty hot scenes, but otherwise average), some quirky family members, an embittered and unstable bully, and a few unresolved threads (like Bailey's absent mother). Bennett relies on lots of action to keep the story going.  What gets lost in this approach is the human growth story: Bailey's transition from being a conflict-avoiding "artful dodger" to learning to take risks.  It's lost amidst all of the other plotlines and spottily developed.

The Warden's Daughter, by Jerry Spinelli

There are two things Cammie is known for – being the the daughter of the warden and being the girl whose mother was killed by a milk truck twelve years ago when Cammie was still a baby.  Now, in the summer of 1957, as Cammie is about to enter Junior High School and become a teenager, Cammie has only one thing on her mind – she wants a mother.  And she knows exactly who she wants:  Eloda – their maid and a convicted felon finishing up her sentence at the jail.

That Eloda doesn’t quite return the interest doesn’t dissuade Cammie from her mission.  But in this summer of Elvis and American Bandstand and Sputnik, Cammie will learn some powerful lessons about love, loss, and serving her time.

An extremely well-written work by an established master (he’s got a Newbery and a Newbery Honor, and he’s the author of Stargirl – one of my all-time faves).  The book has lots of things going for it. Spinelli captures the details of time and place well.  The characters are compelling, although Cammie herself can be hard to like as she makes many mistakes and is so angry.  And the emotional whammy at the end is breathtaking – the sort of climax that takes you completely by surprise.

The story is a bit mature (not in terms of subject matter, but in format and delivery) and one could worry that this is likely to be banished to Book Report Land (like, The Book Thief).  Hopefully, kids will discover it's also a fun story!

Defy the Stars, by Claudia Gray

Many centuries in the future, Earth has become an overcrowded and exhausted world, with its people anxious to immigrate to newer worlds. Noemi Vidal is a young soldier training for a desperate suicide run to save her planet Genesis from that invasion. For Noemi, she has nothing left at home anyways, so she is eager to make what little contribution she can make.

But while training for the mission, her group comes under a surprise attack and Noemi ends up on an old wrecked vessel.  There, she comes across an abandoned mech (android) named Abel.  Mechs are a common tools for Earth's people, doing their labor and fighting their wars, but this is not an ordinary soldier or servant.  He's stronger, smarter, and has developed a sense of self that is almost human.

Despite a strong mistrust of each other, the two of them embark on a mission to save Genesis (and maybe Earth as well) that takes them through several universes and adventures.  As one would expect from such a girl-boy set up, there's a relationship brewing as well, but not necessarily with the ending that one expects.  Mostly, their journey takes them to mutual understanding and some personal growth.

Nicely written and lively, the novel doesn't do much downtime.  Whenever one issue is resolved, Gray introduces another one.  There was a lot of potentially interesting stuff to be made out of having a girl with no faith in her future meet a "boy" with lots of future in front of him.

But the human growth story is fairly smothered in the fireworks of sci-fi cliche. All the usual elements are present, from "blasters" to tractor beams to wormholes and star gates to robots acquiring humanity.  It's comfortable ground, but all very formulaic.

Hidden, by Miriam Halahmy

Alix struggles to take care of her Mum and she has plenty of worries, but she can't help but notice the unfair way that some of the kids at school treat Samir.  Samir is a refugee, but to hear the kids talk, you would think he was a terrorist or worse.  She knows that they get such ideas from their parents and Alix wonders if she is the only one who feels that treating people badly because of where they came from is bad.

Then, one evening, walking on the beach with Samir, they find a dying man.  He's delirious and speaking Arabic.  In a split moment, they decide to rescue him and, at Samir's urging, hide him away. Now, they struggle to keep him alive and hidden, while they figure out some way to save him.  But as teens living in a small British coastal town, they don't have many resources.

It's a book with a definite agenda and mission: to raise awareness about the refugee crisis, which is of course quite topical (especially in Europe).  It's a little hard for me to picture Alix being so naive and uninformed about the state of the world, but doing so allows Halahmy to lecture the reader about the situation (I also assume that Halahmy is pitching the situation softly to make it more palatable to adult readers, who may feel the material is inappropriate for children).  As for the story itself, it is lively, but a bit hard to track due to cultural differences (parental, teacher, and even law-enforcement behave strangely in this world).  I found it all a bit odd, but certainly readable.

Radio Silence, by Alice Oseman

Frances has two major obsessions -- doing well enough in school to get into Cambridge and listening in the evenings to an enigmatic science fiction podcast about a survivor in 26th century Earth by the name of Radio Silence.  No one know who writes and performs these podcasts, but uncovering the identity of the "Creator" (as he is known in the fandom) has Frances and a few hundred other diehard followers are obsessed.  Then, quite by accident, she discovers that the Creator is actually her old friend Aled and a new world opens to her.

However, the anonymity of the podcasts turns out to be a crucial ingredient and, as it is cracked open, Frances discovers disturbing truths about Aled and about herself.  The publicity threatens not only to destroy the joy that Radio Silence brings her but also causes her to question every thing else she's ever valued.

Quirky and engrossing, Oseman's second YA novel creates a unique world with vibrant and authentic characters.  The mood is dark and gloomy, but the story is fast-paced and never boring.  I didn't really see the appeal of the podcasts, but I didn't need to in order to appreciate the characters and their motivations.

It Started With Goodbye, by Christina June

Getting busted for shoplifting with her best friend threatens to ruin Tatum's entire summer.  Forced to do community service during the day, she is kept under virtual house arrest by her stepmother.  That’s OK, since her best friend isn’t talking to her.

Tatum is miserable – her Dad’s gone away on business for the summer and her stepmom and stepsister are horrid to her. But she still has plans and ideas: starting a web design business, a guy she corresponds with, and her stepgrandmother who revels insights and secrets that help Tatum solve her problems.

Ostensibly inspired by Cinderella, Tatum is a lot more self-reliant than a fairy tale heroine.  She uses her wits, hard work, and a lot of personal drive.  She also has a strong enough character to forgive others and move on with her life and not overly dwell on her misfortunes.  All of which are very useful character skills that the author holds up as life-transforming. 

The story suffers from a lack of background development.  Tatum misses her friend, but given that we never see much of their friendship, it is hard to understand why.  And even the romantic story seems underdeveloped and lacks spark.  The ideas are all there, but aside from each character’s assertions, there’s no evidence to back up the motives.

The Most Dangerous Thing, by Leanne Lieberman

Sydney has been struggling with depression for years and she feels that she finally has gotten the "fog" under control.  But when her lab partner Paul starts to show a romantic interest in her, her fears all return.  The attention is welcome and yet scary at the same.  Her instinct is the run away and hide, but yet she knows that she would like to have a boyfriend.

In the meantime, her sister is trying to stage a production of The Vagina Monologues at school and Syd can't imagine anything more embarrassing.  She understands her sister's fervor and even agrees that girls need to speak out for their rights.  But do they really need to be talking about sex and their girl parts, and using those words?  For Sydney, there is nothing more dangerous than the minefield of sexuality, especially her own.

At times pedantic about sex (and religion to a lesser extent), Lieberman's novel is at its strongest with Sydney herself and with illustrating her struggle with depression.  This is sensitive stuff and handled well, allowing Syd to have wishes and desires, yet feel restrained by all sorts of fears.  I loved the give and take between strength and vulnerability -- how she can be so terrified of Paul at one point, yet willing to come back and fight to overcome those fears.  The story would have been even better if Lieberman had let Sydney tell her story without so many adult voices intervening -- she's smart, interesting, and capable of expressing herself.  I wanted to hear more.