Meet Cute

Short story anthologies are difficult to review because the stories tend to be chosen for their diversity.  This collection features fourteen stories about people meeting and predominantly (but not exclusively) falling in love.  They range from the mundane (boy and girl hold up in a bathroom at a party that is about to be raided by the police) to the fantastic (boy and girl become “ensnared” and watch their alternative futures unlock) to the truly exotic (a “department of dead love” where you can perform an autopsy on your failed romance).  They tend to lean towards LGBT themes and there are a few attempts to bring in some non-white perspectives (most notably through Ibi Zaboi’s story of an African dressmaker).  Strikingly, the editor is anonymous, there is no introduction, and the authors have no bios included.

For the most part, these are pretty good stories.  A few of them could have been expanded upon and been quite enjoyable in a fuller length, but most of them are nicely self-contained.  There are no outright duds, but little that stands out either.  Two strangers getting to know each other is a pretty basic rubric and the anthology has the feeling of being a creative writing exercise for a group of established authors.

Snow & Rose, by Emily Winfield Martin

An adaptation of the classic (albeit frequently mis-told) fairy tale of two sisters -- blond/white Snow and black/red Rose.  After their father disappears during a trip through the woods, they and their mother are thrown out of their home and forced to take up occupying an abandoned house in those same woods.  Their mother warns them to stay close, but the girls long to find their father and they wander.  In the woods, they find many strange and scary things:  wolves, a hunter, a tiny little man who speaks in riddles, a injured bear, and an old woman who maintains a ”library” of objects which tell stories.

Illustrated with original watercolor sketches, this handsome fairy tale is a striking book.  The story, not always so straightforward, gels well enough in the end, although is not as strong as the presentation.  Rather striking for the genre, the narrative is surprisingly animal-friendly, whether it is showing kindness to a hungry bear or to the girls’ cat.  The more gruesome nature typically associated with fairy tales is largely absent.

The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily, by Laura Creedle

Lily has ADHD and suffers from poor impulse control.  She’s bright, but failing most of her classes.  She considers it pretty much inevitable that she will fail at everything she undertakes.  So, it comes as some surprise when she finds herself in a budding relationship with Abelard, who is autistic and has issues of his own.

Somehow it just happened (admittedly when she decided to impulsively kiss Abelard while they were sitting in the principal's office!).  But a relationship between the always late and easily distracted Lily and the obsessively punctual Abelard will be full of greater tortures than the medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise!

A charming love story that sounds like it should be a comedy, but never really goes into romantic comedy territory.  Instead, Creedle plays this straught, exploring with openness and sympathy the emotional rollercoaster of adolescent love (full of so many expectations and impulses as it is) through the eyes of the neuro atypical.  The character building is lovely and you really get inside Lily’s head (Abelard's somewhat less so).  She's a unique character – maddening much of the time but so easy to like as well -- that it is easy to see how Lily’s friends and teachers can like her and support her.  And you find yourself doing so as well!

Secret Sisters of the Salty Sea, by Lynne Rae Perkins

Alix and her sister Jools get to take their first vacation to the sea.  There, they make a new friend and have a variety of adventures including floating on the ocean, making (and remaking) the perfect sandcastle, getting buried in sand and escaping, and taking a trip to a raptor sanctuary.  Whimsical illustrations throughout capture the playful mood of this recollection of a memorable vacation.

An extraordinarily gentle book, there is very little action and no drama in this story.  Nothing threatening happens to the girls, but the vacation is still eventful.  That makes the book more about capturing a mood of discovery than any particular lesson.  I enjoyed it as a welcome respite from the stories where so many things weigh down on children.  In this world, adults take care of anything serious and the girls just have fun.  Perhaps we could all use such a break from life?

Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World, by Ashley Herring Blake

In Ivy's private sketches and drawings, she has confronting the confusion she feels about liking girls. It's the sort of thing she won't share with friends or family.  All of that gets literally upended when a tornado goes through town and demolishes her home.  In the confusion that follows she misplaces her sketchbook in a rescue shelter.  The sadness of losing it is replaced with horror as drawings from the book start to appear in her locker at school from an anonymous source.

The good news in all of this is that losing her home gives her some confidence to start expressing her feelings for another girl in her class.  But, this being seventh-grade, things don't go terribly smoothly and the (almost) teens fumble through their feelings and emotions in this sensitive LGBTQ middle grade story.

The tornado might seem like an awfully heavy-handed plot device but it actually fits in pretty well, providing opportunity for the young people in this story to break free of their comfort spaces.  And while it is very much present in the background, disaster recovery is not really the focus of the story.  The issue of gender identity is similarly in the background -- the children are experimenting and considering feelings like homosexuality, but even they don't feel terribly committed to any thing. Instead, the story is really centered on a more general identification of young people with their family and their peers. Part of that are Ivy's feelings towards girls and the author does a great job of showing how inalienable those feelings are from the rest of Ivy's "letter to the world."

P.S. I Miss You, by Jen Petro-Roy

When Evie's older sister Cilla finds herself pregnant, their ultra-religious parents ship Cilla off to Aunt Maureen to have the baby.  Evie devotedly writes her sister almost every day, but doesn't hear back.  While this hurts (and Evie occasionally gets angry at the silence) it doesn't discourage her from writing.  In doing so, she shares secrets ranging from a girl crush on her BFF June to her doubts about her faith.

The novel, made up nearly solely of this one-way correspondence, tracks Evie's development from scarred and lonely younger sibling to a young woman willing to challenge her parents and their destructive creed.  The plot takes a while to get going.  It is hard to build much excitement around what is essentially a monologue.  But ultimately (with a little ratcheting up of the drama) the story and Evie's growth become truly interesting.

For a book that could have been quite inflammatory, it is surprisingly even handed and fair to religion.  The parent's intolerance is clear, but not harped on.  There are even some signs of softening (especially from the mother) which help to explain their behavior and make them more sympathetic.  This makes the ultimately tragic ending more effective and memorable.

And She Was, by Jessica Verdi

When Dara has to find her birth certificate in order to apply for a passport, she is surprised to find her birth mother’s name doesn’t match her Mom’s.  Assuming from this that she was adopted, the truth turns out to be a much bigger shocker:  her Mom is actually her biological father.

Shocked by the discovery and the realization that she has been deceived for her entire life, she flees home.  She follows some clues to track down her biological mother’s family and reconnects with them.  While she refuses to talk with her Mom, she agrees to read a series of emails along the way, in which her Mom explaining her life and how all of this happened.

While strained to the edges of credulity (could a non-CIS female hide the fact from her daughter for 18 years?), the whole thing becomes a vehicle to describe a composite trans life.  This mostly works, although at times, Verdi tries to cram in too much.  But if you are going to try to explain the struggle that a non-gender conforming person goes through and make it palatable to a broad audience, there is a lot to tell.

The remainder of the story is hit or miss.  An obligatory romance to accompany the road buddy story between Dara and her BFF Sam is a throwaway, Dara's aspiration to become a professional tennis player, while seemingly unrelated, is nicely tied in.

Lucy Castor Finds Her Sparkle, by Natasha Lowe

Lucy wishes everything would stay the same.  But as fourth grade begins, her best friend Ella has decided she no longer wants to play their old games.  The mean lady next door has erected a fence that blocks out the sunlight in their backyard.  Worst of all, Lucy's mother has announced that she's going to have a baby!  There are some changes that you can't control, Lucy learns, and you just have to learn to make the best of them.

Not a lot of new ground broken here. The by-the-numbers middle grade focus on changing friends and changing families are well-trod ground.

The story is sweet and trauma free and if I have a complaint about the story it is that the lack of drama means that it isn't terribly interesting.  The ex-best friend is actually pretty nice and a few kids who say mean things apologize for doing so almost immediately.  The crabby next-door neighbor is about as nasty as we get here and she isn't much of a threat.  Everyone is terribly nice.

Humor might have helped, but that is lacking as well.  Lucy is a bit of a trouble maker, but not in the fun way that Clementine (to pick a similarly-targeted heroine) would be and there is not much in the way of consequences for her bad choices.  All of which feeds in to Lowe's focus on keeping the drama minimized.

Finding Felicity, by Stacey Kade

When Caroline and her mother moved to Arizona, introverted Caroline found it difficult to make new friends.  Rather than worry her mother over the issue, Caroline began lying to her and making up "friends" and activities to portray herself as popular and socially active.  When the ruse is exposed at graduation, Mom seeks counseling for her and and reconsiders Caroline's plans to go away to college.  But going away to college and starting afresh is something Caroline feels is important for her plan to build a real social life with real people.  Mom reluctantly lets her go but only under close supervision.

College, however, does not quite turn out the way Caroline had hoped.  Reaching out and making friends is just as difficult.  And her carefully laid out plans keep falling through.  Success in the end means letting go and allowing things to simply happen (and risk and confront failure).  But to do that Caroline must overcome her fears of losing control.

An interesting study of introversion.  The title -- a reference to the TV series Felicity -- refers to Caroline's obsession with that show and the characters, but is surprisingly inconsequential to the story, except to illustrate how unlike the TV world the real world is.  What the story actually focuses on is the way that so people try to reinvent themselves in their first year away from home.  Kade does a nice job with that, although some of the logistics of orientation that she describes seem outdated (like rushing to the college bookstore to buy books).

The book is a breezy read, but that comes at the cost of some character development.  Caroline and her roommate have some depth to them but the other characters (so important in a story about friendship) were underutilized.