Thursday, July 18, 2024
Flyboy, by Kasey LeBlanc
Friday, July 12, 2024
These Bodies Between Us, by Sarah Van Name
Callie and her friends Talia and Cleo have always spent the summer in a small town on the North Carolina beach. This summer, Cleo has brought a friend -- quiet, haunted Polly -- along with her. And she's also brought a grand idea: she wants to spend the summer making herself invisible. She's been reading secret webpages and YouTube videos about the process and she's convinced it will work.
Callie and Talia aren't so certain, but it's an annual tradition that the girls have a summmer project to work on together and this one is as good as any. Callie knows it won't work, but what is the harm in playing along? To her surprise, though, it does work. The girls gain the ability to make themselves disappear at will, and it opens up a whole new world for them. When things get tough because of nagging parents, a scary guy, a violent boyfriend, or just the stress of being an adolescent girl, who wouldn't enjoy the ability to simply disappear? But as the girls grow accustomed to using their new superpower, they discover its addictive nature and some scary side effects. Eventually the danger of continuing to make themselves invisible becomes too great. They need to reverse the process and give up their power -- but can they?
An original, albeit heavy-handed, exploration of the struggle of young women becoming comfortable in their bodies. The girls are interesting and uniquely distinct, but thinly drawn and I found myself frustrated by how little we explored their motivations for disappearing. The overall idea and its exploration of both the male and the parental gaze was interesting and thought-provoking though, and that mae it a worthy read. Definitely, one of the more memorable books I have read.
Thursday, July 04, 2024
The Worst Perfect Moment, by Shivaun Plozza
But that's exactly what it is, explains Zelda, a smart aleck girl Tegan's age who appears at the motel's front office. She's Tegan's angel (she even has the wings to prove it!) and she's reconstructed the Marybelle in all its run-down glory because she's convinced that the absolute happiest moment of Tegan's life was during the time she spent here. And that being so, it is the place where Tegan will now be spending all of eternity. Tegan is flabbergasted and horrified, insisting that this is in fact the worst moment of her life and that Zelda has made a mistake.
The two girls tussle over this matter until Tegan learns that she can appeal her angel's decision and sets in motion a process of review. Within the next month, Zelda must convince Tegan that the Marybelle was actually Tegan's moment of "peak happiness" or the forces of heaven will accept that a mistake was made, with grave and dire consequences for both tegan and Zelda.
The end result is a sort of YA This Is Your Life as Zelda takes Tegan traveling through time to highlight particularly pivotal moments in her sixteen years that gradually unravel the mystery of why Zelda believes that Tegan needs the Marybelle. Along the way a very unusual romance develops between Tegan and Zelda and the notion of "perfect happiness" takes a bit of a beating.
YA books about the afterlife are always a curious genre (Zevin's Elsewhere is my personal favorite) as they doesn't seem like they have an obvious go-to topic. What teen really frets about dying or wants to read about what happens after death? But nonetheless, some of the most creative work is done in books like this. Plozza's vision of the afterlife is a bit dark and malevolent for my tastes, but largely she makes it out to be like an alternative high school, complete with a really cool guidance counselor, a cranky office secretary, and various hapless assistant principals. She posits that a successful life in heaven consists of being at peace with the mistakes and regrets of your prior life (but then allows Tegan to challenge those ideas). The conclusion that heaven itself is flawed will give theologians headaches. Regardless, the book's weightier themes are refreshing.
Tuesday, July 02, 2024
Thirsty, by Jas Hammonds
Saturday, June 29, 2024
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Junior is a typical Indian kid living on the rez in western Washington. And in case we don't know what that means, Junior spends a good part of the book explaining his life. The humor, dry and full of homoerotic violence, works surprisingly well at explaining some pretty hard truths about reservation life -- poverty, alcoholism, and general dispair -- while keeping the story from getting overwhelmed by the miserable conditions.
Junior's a smart kid but the reservation school can't offer him many opportunities. Kids on the reservation don't go to college. So, a concerned teacher encourages him to transfer to a white high school off the reservation to give him a chance. Doing so, he faces overt racism from his new classmates and the ir community, but over time he wins over the people there. Back home, things don't go so well as his tribe sees his decision as a betrayal of the tribe. In the end, Junior finds a balance between his ambition to succeed and his respect for the traditions from which he comes.
The great strength of the book is its complete unwillingness to romanticize Indian life. Some of this is done with the humor, but never too far from the surface is a strong caution that there is nothing particularly glorious or redeeming about the reservation. And that the problems that Indians face are particularly complex and rooted in both external and internal forces.
Wednesday, June 26, 2024
The Someday Daughter, by Ellen O'Clover
Sunday, June 23, 2024
Painting the Game, by Patricia MacLachlan
Unbeknownst to her father, she's even been practicing her Dad's knuckleball. A knuckleball, for the uninitiated, is a particular type of throw which causes the ball to twitch and turn in an unpredictable fashion. Difficult to throw, it is almost impossible to hit. For Lucy, throwing out the perfect knuckleball would be a the ultimate dream, but she doesn't want to let her father know that she's learning it so she practices in secret. In the end, she gets a unique and dramatic opportunity to reveal her secret.
A throwback to a much more innocent type of children's book, Patricia MacLachlan's final novel (published posthumously) is brief and spare. And while it has the rough feel of something she hadn't quite finished (and perhaps never meant to), it a lovely self-contained gem. MacLachlan's style, while ostensibly prose, has always had the feel of good free-verse poetry. Her ability to establish themes -- courage, perfection, magic -- and spin them throughout her story through repetition and variation is a rare talent. Here she brings together the dreams of all of her characters and, in the space of only 134 pages, brings them all to fruition.
This short love letter to baseball and fathers is a fitting swansong for one of the best authors of children's literature.
Thursday, June 20, 2024
The Wrong Way Home, by Kate O'Shaughnessy
While Fern figures out how she is going to get back to the Ranch, she still has to get by. Mom enrolls her in school, where she's exposed to a lot of new ideas and to children who have never lived by the ideals that Fern has accepted without question. The exposure to others start to open her world and, while she is still committed to going back, she begins to question her loyalties. The quirky people of the seaside village they are living in help her on that path.
A pleasant, well-written, and well-paced story that uses breaking free of a cult as a metaphor of the passage to adulthood. This is a gentle middle-school variant of the theme and while some bad things (kidnapping, murder, and rape) are implied, nothing explicit is mentioned. The result is a safe, mildly suspenseful story. Unremarkable, but enjoyable.
Sunday, June 16, 2024
Kyra, Just for Today, by Sara Zarr
Friday, June 14, 2024
The Atlas of Us, by Kristin Dwyer
Sunday, June 09, 2024
Simon Sort of Says, by Erin Bow
Tuesday, June 04, 2024
Borderless, by Jennifer De Leon
Saturday, June 01, 2024
Once There Was, by Kiyash Monsef
When Marjan was little, her farther delighted in telling her old Persian fairy tales. Each one beginning with "once was, once wasn't," they told stories about magical creatures (faeries, manticores, djinns, dragons, unicorns, and even gryphons) and mankind's fateful dealings with them. Now, Marjan is coming to understand that the stories contained elements of truth and that her father (and in fact the entire family line) has a special calling to care for these magical creatures.
Care is desperately needed. Secret forces are at work to wrest control over the magical realm and the conflict threatens all of humankind. But at the same time, the conflict is also personal. Somehow, her father's death is tied in to all of this and Marjan needs to figure out how. With time running out and desperately searching for answers, Marjan must bravely face any number of fearful situations, all the time dealing with nagging doubts about herself and her family's role in all of this.
A beautifully-written fantasy with a byzantine power struggle, interspersed by stunning retellings of Persian folk tales. I especially liked the tale of the manticore, a morality tale about the cost of vengeance, but each of the stories within the story carry the dual purpose of furthering the story while being sold self-standing tales within the novel. While this could have easily become a cutesy fantasy about a girl getting to take care of cuddly animals (and there is no denying that the story will appeal to young readrs who like animal books), Monsef has higher ambitions: calling into question human intervention in the animal world and the ethics thereof.
The overall story has some rough patches, but the final fifty pages deliver one of the best bittersweet endings of recent memory and tie up all of the loose ends in a beautifully messy fashion. An instant best seller that deserves all of its acclaim.
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Tash Hearts Tolstoy, by Kathryn Ormsbee
The novel breaks some ground by making Tash asexual and addressing the problems that this causes her. This would have been more interesting if it had featured more prominently throughout the novel, but it really only rises up in the last thrid of the book. In a similar way, other subplots (like Jack's father's cancer and Tash's relationship with her sister) get rather sketchy treatment and feel like afterthoughts. Many of the subplots are of course riffs on Tolstoy, but readers without the reference point are largely left in the dark and the result is a novel that doesn't stand up well on its own.
Saturday, May 25, 2024
Breathing Underwater, by Abbey Lee Nash
Billed as a romance because of a subplot involving an aimless boy who takes her lifeguarding job when she can no longer do it, this story is really about Tess's struggle to rejig her plans and salvage the vital parts of her dream that are attainable. But it's hard to see the struggle and the focus necessary to succeed when Tess keeps screwing around. Tess frankly lacks discipline. I lost my faith in her by the third time she snuck out of the house and broke all of the warnings of her doctors (and -- surprise! -- got very sick). If you face a protagonist up against an insurmountable disease, you need to give the woman some spunk, some fortitude, and some will. But screwing up and then wallowing in self-pity got plain old and that seemed to be all Tess had to offer. I don't have the patience that her parents (or apparently her coaches) had. On a bleak positive note, I appreciated that at the end of the novel we don't see Tess getting rewarded with the happy fulfillment all of her dreams. A realistic bittersweet ending was the least the author could offer us.
Friday, May 24, 2024
The Lightning Circle, by Vikki Vansickle (ill by Laura K. Watson)
It doesn't help that it's her first summer and she's never been a camper herself. Being a camp "virgin," every ritual is a surprise for her and she approaches the experience like it is a foreign land. But with good instincts and a little help, she manages to survive the summer and learns a great deal, growing to love the place and its people.
A beautiful piece of nostalgia for the summer camp experience, this novel in verse is illustrated with sketches of camp miscellania (a bunk, a horse, a pencil, fellow campers, etc.) that beautifully evoke the innocence of the experience. It is a very gentle story with no particularly severe traumas but instead chock full of authentic memories lovingly retold by the author. While fictional, you can't make stuff like this up, so it is clearly drawn from Vansickle's own childhood at camp (in the afterward, she admits as much).
For anyone who was lucky enough to go to camp, reading this book will send you down memory lane. For others, the book and its exploration of friendships formed and social skills learned in a summer will explain the appeal of this rite of passage. Definitely a children's book much better appreciated by adults!
Sunday, May 19, 2024
The Boy You Always Wanted, by Michelle Quach
Francine is a good student and extremely conscientious, but none of that has made her popular at school. The only male acquaintance she can think of would be Ollie and they are hardly friends. Ollie for his part is always a bit amused by Francine, but doesn't think of her as a friend either. And he certainly has no interest in participating in what Francine has taken to calling "The Plan." But when Ollie turns out to need Francine's help, the two of them devise a transactional arrangement and Ollie finds himself sucked into Francine's family's drama. It's actually a welcome change for Ollie because his family couldn't be any more distant from each other. And while the entire set-up is based on deceit, a true attachment arises that proves to be surprisingly genuine.
The creepy premise of the story initially put me off the story, but it ends well and the truth is surprisingly liberating. Largely a story about family and about learning to accept change, everyone gets a chance to learn a thing or two. While there are a few rough spots and a subplot about a scheming best friend that never quite connects with the main story nor becomes the humor relief it is intended to serve, I enjoyed the cultural details and the nuanced characters.
Saturday, May 18, 2024
Playing for Keeps, by Jennifer Dugan
Ivy gave up playing when she was young, but she never lost her love of sport; she just found a new way to express it -- by officiating games. Just as June has laser focused on her pitching skills, Ivy has dedicated herself to the dream of one day becoming one of the few women to ever ref for the NFL. Now, if she could get her parents on board with the dream! But they want her to go to college and study something practical.
Girls with dreams of making it big, but who fall in love with each other instead. For Ivy, this is disastrous as referees can't date players, so they have to keep everything hush hush. For June, things are worse as she not only has the relationship to keep secret, she also is having physical problems with her throwing arm that are getting harder and harder to hide.
With all that going on, there is plenty of action to move this story, but the real high drama comes from the fiery romance itself. Neither June nor Ivy are particularly emotionally mature and theirs is a romance that is more often off than on. That provides plenty of opportunity for fights and counsel with BFFs (whom neither girl pays much attention to). But I found them hard to digest and relate to (and even hard to differentiate from each other). I liked the story well enough, but the characters simply didn't interest me. That made the novel a slow read.
Saturday, May 11, 2024
Conditions of a Heart, by Bethany Mangle
The primary characteristic of the
disease that Brynn Kwan suffers from is the easy tendency of her joints to
dislocate. Keeping herself intact (as well as managing the pain of her
condition) is a major undertaking and an obsession. In a similar fashion,
she's tried to hide her condition from her classmates as she's found how
uncomfortable her illness makes other people. But when she finds herself
accidentally in the middle of a schoolyard skirmish and gets suspended because
of it, all of her careful plans come apart. Prohibited from the social
activities that give her something to look forward to, she suffers an
existential crisis.
Any story introducing a new
condition (in this case, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome) is intrinsically interesting
to me. Giving us an opportunity to explore how this chronic disease
challenges Brynn and how she faces that challenge is a good part of the drama
of the story and I ate that stuff up. And while the occasionally repeated
rant about how the post-COVID world abandoned the disabled is muddy and
unclear, there are a lot of good points about how prevalent ableism is in our
society. That is the novel's strong suit and it does it well.
Much of that was expected. What I didn't expect was how funny the book would be. Brynn's cat cafe-owning cousin steals the show in the otherwise slow second act as we wait for Brynn to get her life together. And Brynn's sister, while insufferably self-centered, pulls off her narcissism in such a purely unself-conscious way that you just have to love her as much as Brynn actually does. The grownups, the antagonists, and the allies (off-on-off boyfriend included) are disposable, but I didn't mind that in the midst of Brynn's combustible performance.
Thursday, May 09, 2024
The Absinthe Underground, by Jamie Pacton
While the storytelling (with its persistent habit of overly convenient late reveals) annoyed me, the story itself is exquisite. Combining Belle Epoque with fantasy creates a beautiful setting for some nail-biting suspense as the girls work through a series of problems. Their very slow developing (and largely chaste) romance comes off with perfect timing. The characters themselves are distinct in numerous ways and well-developed. I enjoyed the humor, the writing, and the originality of the novel.