There's not really anything new here, but Holt does a nice job of showing Amelia's struggle and her eventual ability to resolve her issues. Along the way, Amelia makes some bad choices and also learns a bit from the mistakes of her friends. Overall, a short and functional story of grief and recovery.
When the incidents start to occur (animal attacks in the woods, strange mutations, withered crops, fires, and random acts of vandalism), it seems really like a string of bad luck. But everyone's a little suspicious. Tongues, primed by suppressed jealousy and resentment, far too easily spout forth accusations. And those accusations in turn spawn counter-claims, petty vengeance, and violence. The rules that seemed to bring order to the town, have simply hidden the true feelings of its inhabitants. Let loose, the rage and fury tears the town apart.
And on the sidelines, a malevolent dark force is watching and entertained.
A creepy and deeply immersive horror set in a small isolated community, roughly in the late nineteenth century. If your thing is supernatural horror, this novel provides it in spades. While it is pretty easy to figure out that something is going on, the reader is left guessing at just how widespread the problem is until nearly the end. And so while we are not entirely surprised by the reveal, its scope is shocking.
What really powers the story is not the sporadic acts of horror, but the complex web of combustible relationships that Craig has built. Almost everyone has some reason to distrust everyone else. Manipulated by evil forces that the townspeople never quite fathom, those doubts and insecurities are easy picking. The result is a sobering story about the corrosive effects of distrust (made all the more chilling by the townspeople's own creed of unity-at-all-costs). While the story ends on a note of hope, the overall Hobbesian message is a downer.
Beautifully written, finely nuanced, and deep thinking, Small Favors is book that will haunt you.
Much like Red Dwarf (if Lister and Cat were in fact gay -- in other words, just like Red Dwarf!), this is science fiction that doesn't take itself too seriously. In fact, the story only starts to flag as Hutchinson seeks to find a way to end the story, explain the mystery, and say something deep and meaningful about mass culture. The metanarrative of using sci-fi tropes to comment upon commercialization didn't work for me, but up to that moment, this is a pretty hilarious and entertaining read. Noa and DJ make a great romantic couple and their relationship has a lively sparring that keeps things interesting (although I felt bad for how underutilized Jenny is as the third wheel). Quirky and disruptive this is a story that works best as satire and shuns deep thinking.
There, her talents are less appreciated and Maisie has to deal with a hostile teacher who questions her youth, her commitment to art, and her lack of depth. While despairing over her struggle, she stumbles across an old diary, which turns out to have belonged to a young artist of the nineteenth century who also loved to draw horses (and was similarly disparaged). Reading the diary, Maisie finds inspiration from their common struggle. But it is a shocking turn of events on the streets of Paris and a brave and heroic horse which put Maisie in a place to finally let go of her inhibitions and become the artist she longs to be.
A superior (albeit formulaic) girl-and-horse story that will appeal to lovers of the genre. Lots of great horse details combined with stirring adventure and a heroine who is strong, brave, and loyal to her steed are all you really need and Gregg is an established master. As with most novels that tell parallel stories, I always find that one of the two is the better and in this case it is really the historical one told on the pages of the lost diary. Maisie's struggle, while full of contemporary resonance, seems less gripping and less interesting.
[Disclaimer: I was provided a free copy of this book by the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review. I am donating the book to charity.]
After the transplant, however, things go awry. Sophie is distressed to find Peter is drifting away from her. She thought that the experience would cement their relationship together, but instead her healthy Peter is gaining his independence. Sophie, who has always defined herself in relation to him, doesn't want to lose him and doesn't even know how to move on.
Well-written, but excruciating to read. Simply put, the characters are not very likeable. Both of them self-centered, but it is Sophie's sense of entitlement that comes across the worst. Despite her protestations that being a donor merits her to nothing, it is obvious that she feels nonetheless that Peter is hers and that he owes her his life in exchange for her loyalty to him. Peter, in contrast, is mostly oblivious to this and ultimately clueless (although at some points in the book, it seems that he knowingly exploits Sophie's dependence for his own benefit). These are not people, in other words, who respect each other as people or who can get beyond their sense of what the other one owes them.
The story has many distractions. Sophie's younger sister is an unwed mother, which might have been useful as a contrasting relationship, but it is largely unexploited. But the bigger non-sequitur is Sophie's and Peter's separate awakening sense of Jewishness. I wasn't really sure where we were going with this, but I was hoping it would either become a path that one or both of them could follow as a way of breaking their codependence (Peter briefly flirts with the idea of going on a Birthright trip to Israel to give him some distance from Sophie) or that they could use as a way to guide them through their issues. But instead, we get a couple of conversations and a random visit to temple for what are otherwise a pair of self-described "High Holiday Jews."
Finally, there is the way it all ends up. I won't talk much about that because I don't want to spoil the ending, but the fact that the end of relationship (and the book) is blamed on a specific "heartbreaking night" (as the blurb puts it) really cheapens the over-350 pages of dysfunction that we have witnessed along the way. This is a relationship that was destined to combust without an impetuous mistake.
In sum, a great story of two people in a relationship that you would never want to be in. Whether you want to read about it is up to you!
The good news is that they share the same birthday and it is arriving soon. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they each got one of the dolls on their shared birthday? When the day arrives, Esther gets the Elizabeth doll, but Michi does not get Margaret. In the commotion and attention that Esther receives from the other girls, she neglects her friend and Michi slips away, feeling hurt and betrayed.
It's 1942 and while the war rages far away from their home in Vancouver, it still impacts the children. Esther has an aunt and uncle who are trying to flee from Germany and her parents are anxious that they cannot find out anything about them. Michi's danger lies nearer, when the government announces that all persons of Japanese descent on the Pacific Coast are being relocated. Her family is forced to pack up and leave. Before Michi leaves, Esther tries to reconcile with her, but it never happens. Afterwards, Esther tries to figure out a way to make all of these wrong things right.
A sweet chapter book with beautiful illustrations and stellar design. I didn't know that the Canadian government also interned their Japanese citizens, so this was an interesting subject. But moreover, this is a nice story of friendships that get tried and tested. The world events around them may be more significant, but for these two girls, losing each other's trust is far more important.
But the real world is much more complex. No one can figure out who is bullying Hannah. Kimmy isn't very nice, but Hannah's friend Courtney isn't very nice either. The school counselor is trying to help Hannah get to the bottom of her issues, but there are things that Hannah can't say out loud about how she feels when her parents fight. To articulate those feelings, Hannah retreats into her storybook world, giving herself a voice through the characters or through inanimate objects around her.
A sweet novel, intended to be a middle reader, that is ultimately too complex for its target audience. I loved the way that Hannah explains her feelings. As a word whiz, she has an expansive vocabulary, but her emotional age makes it difficult for her to articulate her feelings -- that unique combination felt particularly authentic for Hannah. But the sophistication of the book is largely wasted in a book targeted to middle readers, even if its topics of bullying, emotional abuse, and self-loathing will resonate.
While no girl has ever played on the team, Mara knows what she is doing and, despite stubborn resistance from the coach and some of the other players, Mara shows that she's a fairly competent player. With a lot of effort she earns a place and becomes grudgingly accepted as one of the guys. But then four other girls announce they want to join the team. Citing Mara as their inspiration, they don't have her skills but they are highly motivated to prove the point that girls can play. While the boys accepted Mara, the publicity that having five female teammates brings stirs up resentments. Mara herself is angry that her attempt to prove herself as a decent football player and a team player has been sidetracked by the other girls' political agenda. She doesn't have anything to prove about being a girl player, she just loves football and wants to play.
However, as the girls struggle to be accepted, Mara comes to the realization that she was never "one of the boys" and that their fight is her fight as well. Part of her growth is in accepting that she can be tough and a girl at the same time, that strength does not have to be a masculine. The product of all this growth is a story that revels in good sports action, while taking a sophisticated look at gender roles and the maddeningly complex relationship that they have with society. It's at times funny, almost always entertaining, and ultimately profound, defying YA stereotypes right and left about how "girly" girls and non-girly girls behave.
When the star of Sinclair Prep ends up dead, her competition are prime suspects. Especially so when an anonymous person starts posting accusations against them -- accusations that turn out to be true. Because the thing that all four suspects have in common is that they each have a dangerous secret. One by one, their secrets are exposed, destroying each of their reputations (alongside their academic futures). In the high stress academic rat race these students are in, any weakness is failure and so they must fight with the lives to protect themselves against the anonymous informant. But will the final reveal prove the deadliest?
This murder mystery/gossip-girl elite high school mash up is all over the place in styles and story, but does a really interesting job dissecting the psychological costs of Asian over-achievement. The way that each of these young people have sold their souls to achieve their parents' dreams in a futile attempt to earn familial love is a sad commentary. As a serious subject, it would have made a pretty stunning YA drama. Instead, Zhao has been seduced into creating a gossipy tale of (mostly) rich NYC prep kids. The result is fluffy and hard to take seriously. The implausibility of the plot and the various motives doesn't help. The strength of the story should have been the characters but they are underdeveloped and we never get invested in them in the way we totally should.
There's a retrospective of her father's work being planned for the Met. Her mother is knee deep in curating the exhibit and their apartment is filled with Dad's old sketches and drawings. Helping her mother, Georgia comes across a sketch he made of her when she was ten years old and realizes that it might be a draft of his most famous work -- the one he never painted but planned to. Stunned by the fact that her fathers "lost" masterpiece was going to be of her, she hides the sketch away, which sets off a chain of events that get Georgia into a world of trouble.
An art mystery that does a wonderful job of showing readers how to better appreciate art (the author's background as a docent at the Met certainly shows through!). I'm not a big fan of Georgia's poor decisions and the more cringeworthy consequences of them, but the story itself is a lovely examination of Georgia's acceptance of her father's passing and her more reluctant embrace of his legacy. By the end, Georgia achieves some level of peace with the idea that her relationship with him was unique and is untouched by the fact that he was a public figure. I would not have thought that such a rarified existence as the daughter of a famous artist would create a character who was so relatable, but Georgia is an easy heroine with whom to empathize.
It is the remains of a particularly fine looking gentleman that brings her trouble. No sooner has she discovered the body than another man shows up and demands that she turn over what she found. When he doesn't find what he's looking for, he kidnaps Bren to ransom for what he is looking for. With little in the way of resources (and no idea what the man wanted in the first place), Ellie sets out on to the Flats to recover her sister. Along the way picking up the nephew of the dead man, the two of them face brutal weather, wild animals, thin ice, hostile human gangs, and a supernatural being who is at the root of the inhospitable conditions in which they live.
Rich in detail, the novel lovingly creates its Western-meets-Ice Age world, but gets bogged down by its stylization.
To feed the ambiance (and give the author a chance to have Ellie spout lots of tough posturing) Ellie's narration is full of lots of ungrammatical phrasing. This provides some flavor but becomes distracting as the usage is inconsistent. And it doesn't help that the text itself is marred by typos.
More annoying to me were the numerous scenes that were elongated by having the characters interrupt each other. The device serves mostly to drag out the action and makes little sense in a life-or-death scene as they argue with each other instead of the fighting/running/shutting up they need to be doing.
Finally, numerous actions scenes seem to be inserted into the story simply to pad the novel, adding nothing to the story itself except to give Ellie another chance to tell us that the situation is impossible but that she'll bravely forge ahead. The fact that she manages through each and every one of these situations leaves one skeptical of her ability to accurately evaluate plausibility. Such set-ups don't build suspense, they simply annoy the reader.
Beautiful writing, but repetitive and drawn out.
She doesn't know where they have gone but quickly realizes that her chances of survival will be greatly enhanced by staying put. And as days turn to weeks and to months, that is what she does, managing to scavenge for food and supplies, avoiding looters, and surviving a series of natural disasters. In these tasks, she proves remarkably resourceful following her intuition and practical problem solving skills. But she finds that the hardest obstacle is loneliness and the emotional distress that being alone brings.
A gripping and fairly dark survival story, this novel-in-verse is a far cry from Home Alone. I found it nearly impossible to put down as Maddie faces continual existential threats that I felt compelled to read to conclusion. I would not have thought that verse novel would carry enough impact to grab me but in fact the structure is a strength: the spare nature of the verse was really effective at conveying how Maddie comes to live more and more within her head.
The story did start to drag towards the end and the ending itself is disappointingly anti-climactic, but I really enjoyed the trip getting there. Maddie is a compelling heroine, smart and tough. She has a playful side too, but when it matters she makes the good choices and saves herself (as there is no one else to do it). An excellent read.
Geared towards a younger YA audience, the story does a good job of covering a wide variety of topics ranging from practical questions like how the kids will address their father to how they deal with a broad range of emotions (confusion, anger, grief, joy, etc.) that each of the family members experience. What truly makes the book shine is that it never gets preachy or teachy, but manages nonetheless to bring up a plethora of important issues while doing so in an entertaining way.
Like many British YA novels, the book assumes a level of innocence that you wouldn't find in an American treatment of this topic, but that actually serves the story well in this case as the adults are actively supportive and responsible. As difficult as the changes may be for all, no one expects the children to deal with matters on their own.
With just about everyone in the story (except Evie) knowing that she should be with Caleb, no one else is happy about it either. What makes this well-trodden romantic path actually work in this case is how razor smart these kids are. Everyone knows and everyone says so, so there's no mystery that Evie and Caleb are going to be together in the end. Evie just needs to get over her fear of getting into a relationship with her best friend.
The best part of the story is actually Evie's growth as a person, which comes out in her quest (with Caleb's help) to win a prestigious national math award. She's bright, intelligent, and articulate, but she suffers from anxiety attacks (to some extent fed by her mother's overprotectiveness). To get over her fears, she has relied in the past on a support network made up of Caleb and her BFF Bex. A good part of the novel then is her working through that and learning to do things on her own. It's a very satisfying story of growth in itself, but this thread of the plot also reveals many disturbing issues that never really get addressed properly: the sexism present in the mathematics community, Evie's difficult with dealing with her fear of being judged by others, and Caleb's unhealthy possessiveness of Evie.
Caleb and Evie have a fairly disturbing dynamic. Evie needs Caleb to control her anxiety and Caleb needs Evie to "protect." This unhealthy codependency presages some pretty dysfunctional behaviors in their "happily ever after" romance and casts a shadow over the romance itself. Add to this Caleb's nasty violent streak. On several instances, he either commits acts of violence or threatens to do so in the course of "defending" Evie. In a climactic moment, Evie preempts Caleb's anger and settles her own scores, but at no point does she (or anyone else) address Caleb's behavior.
All of that aside (and the book downplays this darker side so it is possible to do so), it's nice to find a book about science-savvy teens who are well-rounded and not geeks. Caleb plays baseball, Evie's boyfriend and her friend Bex play soccer, and even Evie herself enjoys Yoga. They make wisecracks about the humanities, but they are literate and articulate and do well in English class. Evie's anxiety issues aside, they all have active social lives. Smart kids in a smart story makes for some smart reading. This is a good read that treats its young adults as intelligent people with nuanced lives.
In the grand city of Monticello-on-the-Lake (which we would think of as Chicago), the Fair is meant to be an opportunity for St Cloud (whose borders run from Canada down to the City of Orleans on the Gulf) to demonstrate their power of ingenuity and progress. But sabre rattling and nativist rhetoric from their western neighbor Livingstone Monroe threatens the peace.
In the midst of this, Claire Emerson, the daughter of an unbalanced inventor, is plotting her escape from her father's dominion. She dreams of a chance to strike out on her own and be her own woman, but the reality is the best for which she can hope is escaping her father by subjecting herself to a husband. At first, the plan is for her to flee across the border in the midst of the Fair, but when St. Cloud is invaded, Claire finds her fate entwined with that of the young governor Remy Duchamp. And while the conflict is ostensibly against Livingstone Monroe, the Daughters of the American Crown have insinuating themselves into the mix in an attempt to bring a woman into power. Claire's instincts are to assist this feminist enterprise, but the DAC's anti-immigrant stance alienates her. With no clear support, Claire makes do as best as she can, forming alliances that are both grandly political and personal at the same time, siding with Remy while simultaneously trying to claim power for herself.
As with any complex story, keeping track of all of the characters is challenging. Some are definitely more memorable than others. Her BFF Beatrix is a highlight -- providing useful gadgets and escape routes, as well comic relief. Others, like Margarete (Claire's adopted sister and chambermaid) are underutilized in this book but may become more useful in the second half. The boy Remy is fairly forgettable and while important to the story is fairly easy to ignore. As for who is on whose side, forget about it! Allegiances are fluid and the frequency of betrayals and double-crosses make tracking teams pretty futile.
The novel is sprawling and complex, with numerous competing plots and subplots. This first installment (of a duology) is naturally more expository, but you'll probably have to re-read it to refresh your memory whenever the second half comes out. I hope she can manage to pull it all together! Confusing and dense, but lively, original, and highly entertaining.
Cavas is a poor boy living in the slums around the royal city. He has no magic and no special powers, but he is determined to do whatever it takes to find enough money to buy the medicine that is keeping his sick father alive. In the market, he randomly crosses paths with Gul. But it is no coincidence and soon he finds himself helping her infiltrate the palace, where all is not quite as either of them expected. The Raja's days are numbered, but Gul is little more than a puppet in the events that are unfolding.
Set in a fantasy world based on the Mughal empire, Bhathena has created a very dense and immersive setting for her story of magic and prophecy. It's a complicated story and a very slow read. That makes it hard to get into and at some point exhausting to track. Some of the blame for this lies in the pacing, which ranges from glacial exposition to sudden plot twists and large chronological jumps. Bhathena loves to tell us details about this universe and is constantly revealing new details. Maddeningly, large amounts of these details turn out to be inconsequential to the story. While the sudden twists and jumps keeps us on our toes, it is tiring and frustrating. Rather than good writing, it feels more like an author who cannot carry through on an idea. A beautiful book, but average storytelling.
The postcard idea (that everyone needs encouragement) is powerful and clever. I'm sure some teacher will assign a project like it to students after they read the book. I'm less comfortable with the idea that we should not judge others. While most bullies have become the way they are because of how they themselves were treated, it's simplistic to imagine that you can break the cycle with kindness and understanding. With much of the bullying in this book (Vincent being the notable exception) coming from adults against children, this is particularly disturbing. It's an ambitious idea for a story, but I'm not altogether comfortable with the idea or its delivery.
The girls are not identical. While Clare is popular at school, Audrey struggles with autism which has led to her being enrolled at a special school. She hates it and wants to be back at the regular school with Clare, but her parents are not sure that she is ready. In truth, she doesn't know if she's ready either, but being apart from Clare is so hard, especially now when they are drifting apart. When she makes friends with a boy in the park, she is surprised to find that she can develop friendships outside of her family.
With Audrey having so many special needs, Clare feels neglected. The loss of Adam hit her particularly hard and set off a new feeling that she finds hard to articulate. She feel best when she is wearing Adam's old clothes. Her "normal" life at school feels false. She's become as freaky to her old friends as her sister is. It takes a new arrival at the school to open her up to who she really wants to become and to give her the strength to be the needy sister.
Through alternating chapters, the sisters piece together a life which has been riven by shared loss but held together by their lifetime bond. Each of them are going through passages that are both personal and shared. They struggle because they have trouble communicating and in understanding each other. In the end there is the predictable reconciliation between them, but the journey through these misconceptions is what gives this novel its story. It's well done, with beautifully drawn characters, but the story is not a particularly dramatic read. To try to liven it up, the author flirts with a late attempt to add a crisis, but this is unnecessary and contributes to a sluggish conclusion.
