Unstuck, by Barbara Dee

Lyla has plans for a major fantasy novel.  The story's so complicated that she has trouble explaining it and it's going to take several books to cover the whole tale.  In other words, it will be truly epic!  At least, the story will be when she can get around to start writing it!  But there is background to research, geography to sort out (maybe she should draft out a map?), and a whole genealogy to draft out; to say nothing about coming up with names for all of the characters and places.  With all those distractions to figure out, it's understandable that she's struggled to put even a single sentence to paper.  And while she has a very supportive creative writing teacher, she really needs to get started!

Back home, her older sister seems to be suffering from a form of writer's block of her own.  She's supposed to be writing her application essays for college but hasn't gotten started.  Mom and Dad are going crazy nagging her and homelife has become unbearably tense.  Lyla wonders if any of the advice her teacher is giving her about writing could help her sister as well?  But Lyla is also confused by her sister's unwillingness to try.

Dee is really one of the best contemporary writers at capturing middle school mindsets.  Lyla has all of the awkward tween-ness of the age -- negotiating new school, new friends, and new avocations.  Rebelling against things she judges to be "babyish" while still struggling to understand the world to come, Lyla bravely experiments.

Dee's description of writer's block and real advice on how to work through it is a clever topic for a book, suitable for all writers, young and old.

The Wonderful Wishes of B, by Katherin Nolte

Ten year-old Bea has experienced a lot of pain lately and she has five wishes connected with those losses. She wishes her grandmother had not died, that her best friend had not moved away, that her Mom could keep her business afloat, that her Dad would visit, and that her grandma's old doll would come alive and become her little sister.  And, if nothing else, she wishes she could become like Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and lose her heart so it would stop aching.

A new boy moves to town and convinces her that his own grandmother is a witch and can perform magic.  For the price of doing some things for the witch that Bea grows to regret, the woman is willing to grant Bea's wishes.  And while grandmother can't manage to grant all of the wishes, Bea's father does reappear with promises of his own to grant Bea's remaining wishes.  But in the end, Bea discovers that there is no magic fix for the losses we feel and that a heart is made for feeling the bad and the good.

A folksy middle reader featuring small bits of magic, adorable kitties, and plenty of friendly and quirky side characters.  While a few bad things happen, this is a light and safe story that manages to reach a predictable conclusion with a few  unexpected surprises along the way!

Emmett, by L C Rosen

Emmett is popular -- a fact that he attributes immodestly to how nice he is.  He's always thinking of other people's needs.  He's even taken it upon himself to help all of his friends find partners and he's overjoyed with planning ways in which his single friends can find each other.

He has no interest in finding a guy for himself.  He doesn't mind hooking up for sex, but getting into a committed relationship will inevitably lead to heartache and Emmett has no intention of getting hurt!  The human brain doesn't physically stop growing until you're twenty-five and so that's the earliest he'll be ready to find his life partner.

It's all very neat, but Emmett's perfect world is starting to come apart.  A string of matchmaking failures make Emmett question his skills.  And when he hurts some of his friends in the process, he doubts whether he is really as nice as he likes to to think he is.  But most grievous of all is the nagging doubt in his mind that maybe (just maybe) he would like to have a romance of his own.

I'm not sure that we need yet another adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma for the YA market (even if this version is the most flaming gay boy version to date), but my primary complaint is that I found it hard to really engage with the story.  Perhaps, because the characters really didn't seem like high schoolers, but rather more like college students.  You don't really get the feeling that Emmett and his friends live at home with their parents.  Their lives seem to mostly center around parties and flirting.  That's very Jane Austen, but it's not very American high school.  There's a fair amount of emortional drama, but not really any emotional depth and the result is more satire than romance.

Hunger, by Donna Jo Napoli

Life in the Irish countryside has alwatys been a bit precarious.  Lorraine and her family lease land from an English lord and subsist on the potatoes they grow, selling their grain harvest for income.  But when the crop fails in 1846, things start to look dire.  And in the year that follows, mass starvation leads to societal collapse.  

In the midst of the suffering, Lorraine befriends the naive but kind-hearted daughter of their lord named Susanna.  Miss Susannais a complicated character: arrogant, ignorant, and rude, but she nonetheless performs important acts oif charity that ultimately keep Lorraine alive.

Based entirely on historical fact, this is a story that won't exactly qualify as a pleasure read.  So while Napoli writes excellent historical fiction, but it's hard to imagine too many young people who would pick this book to read on the beach.  That's a shame as the book doesn't just serve as a historical account, but raises significant questions about how racism and ignorance affect the topic of immigration and of charity.

The Color of Sound, by Emily Barth Isler

Feeling burdened by her mother's expectations, violin prodigy Rosie declares that she's "on strike" for the forseeable future and not going to play.  Her furious mother punishes her by taking away her internet privileges but still holds out hope that Rosie will return to practicing.  Steaming at each other over the impasse, mother and daughter are forced have to cohabit as they visit Rosie's dying grandmother.

To get away from her family Rosie explores the property and runs across a peculiar girl her age.  Through some time travel magic, the girl turns out to be Rosie's own mother.  While Rosie frets a bit about impacting the future by interacting with her past-Mom, she is able to use the experience to learn why her mother is so controlling.  At a pivotal moment, she is also able to repair their relationship by solving a crisis in her young Mom's life.

A touching story of family regrets and legacies that is laser focused on being a Mother-Daughter Bookclub read (there are even discussion questions at the end of the book!).  I found myself getting annoyed by the way that mom's anxiety is portrayed and excused.  I also bristled at the or the heavy handed discussion about social interactions between children of different ages.  It felt like a kind of story that someone let Rosie's overbearing mother edit for appropriate content.  That made things safe, but not necessarily fun.

Those objections aside, I loved the magical time travel angle and the device of daughter teaching mother in the past (which of course was more famously done in Back to the Future).  I also enjoyed the fact that both Rosie and her mother have synthesia and hear music as color, an idea that has been explored in nother middle readers.

Break To You, by Neil Shusterman, Debra Young, and Michelle Knowlden

A series of bad choices in friends hands Adriana a seven month stretch in the Compass juvenile detention facility.  Allegedly based on novel approaches to rehabilitate young adults and avoid recidivism, Compass is really a morass of selfish and embittered adults who manipulate the children under their control for their own ends.  So much for the social critique element of this team-written novel.

The meat of the story though is an unusual romance.  Strictly segregated, boys and girls don't interact.  But when Adriana accidentally leaves her journal at the jail library, it is discovered by Jon, who reads and writes in it before leaving it for her.  The two develop a correspondance, clandestinely writing entries and leaving the book hidden on the shelves for the other to find later.  Soon, simply writing to each other is not enough and Adriana and Jon hatch a plan to find a way to meet face to face.  Doing so sets in motion a series of events with tragic consequences.

The story is gripping and briskly paced.  The characters are well developed and diverse, illustrating a variety of different incarceration experiences.  The adults are far less interesting, but do a good job of moving things forward.  The end, while unexpected, is satisfyingly open-ended.  I enjoyed the book, but I doubt it will do much more than entertain.  The authors bring up a number of flaws in the justice and corrections systems, but it is unlikely readers will make much of a connection between these one-dimensional baddies and the real world issues that exist.

The No-Girlfriend Rule, by Christen Randall

In the six years that Hollis and Chris have been dating, Hollis has been shut out of Chris's Friday night Secrets and Sorcery games.  That's because his group has a strict "no girlfriends allowed" rule -- a rule that Hollis is determined to chip away at.  It's not that Hollis particularly likes the misogynistic and homophobic group that Chris plays with, but she wants to be in Chris's life.  So, Hollis has been studying how to play and she's found a group of her own to play with to get better.

The new group is made up solely of young women, racially diverse, and representative of a variety of gender and sexual identities. The woman who runs the group is all about building a supportive and safe environment.   In a nutshell, it's everything Chris's group is not.  And when Hollis finds that she not only likes them better but also, for the first time in her life feels she has real friends, it causes her to question why she cares so much for Chris.  And while breaking up seems unthinkable, there's no denying that she is discovering that there's so much more to life than being some guy's girlfriend.

I was initially going to write this off as a fluffy romance set amidst table-top gamers, but it has a surprising amount of substance.  Dungeons and Dragons (and gamer culture as a whole) is notoriously misogynistic.  Randall takes some pretty easy shots at that at the start, but then she imagines what a campaign would be like if it wasn't and Hollis's group is a wonderful exploration of how one could play the game without succumbing to toxic masculinity.  I'm sure the discussion has been had in the gamersphere but I've never seen it in fiction before and it's eye-opening.

Beyond that is a really strong story of Hollis's growth from an anxious and dependent girlfriend, unable to see her own self-worth, to a young woman with contributions to make and a right to be loved.  It's hardly smooth sailing and she has a lot of very relatable struggles with doubt and insecurity, but the honesty of the portrayal makes the payoff at the end so much more moving.  She also has a very authentic struggle with her sexual identity when her heart leads her towards a girl in the group -- a search which is never fully resolved and feels very satisfactory being left as such.

Throw in a couple other topics like body images, clinical anxiety, and abusive relationships, and you get a lot of value for a story about girls and gaming.

Such Charming Liars, by Karen M. McManus

After years of life as a jewelry thief, Kat's mother has finally decided to go clean.  She just needs one more job to make a new life possible.  It ought to be pretty straightforward: under the cover of being a caterer for a rich guy's 80th birthday run off with a valuable ruby necklace that belongs to his daughter while everyone is distracted blowing out the candles.  But things go wrong from the start:  on the way to site, their car gets a flat tire and the person who stops to help them is hardly a stranger.

Years ago, Kat's Mom married a man in Vegas and his son Liam was friends with Kat for 48 hrs.  But after a series of best-left-forgotten adventures, Mom and Dad split up non-amicably.  And now by strange fate they've suddenly been reunited, but it's not random chance: Liam's father is catfishing the same rich guy's daughter.  So, we have two con artists targetting the same person for very different reasons and their children are thrown into the middle of it all.

The story's a LOT more complicated than this, of course (especially when we start stacking up dead bodies), and there are layers upon layers of crosses and double crosses.  In the midst of all that story, it's easy to lose track of the characters and forget who is what to whom.  The characters are not particularly memorable and the plausibility of the plot wanes as things get complicated, but none of that really matters.  This is a well thought-out story and it's great fun to take a ride on the adventure, but it wasn't much to my taste. I had to wonder in the end if any of this made much sense.

Leila and the Blue Fox, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (ill by Tom de Freston)

It's been six years since Leila has been with her mother.  They've spoken on the phone and on the computer, but there's never been a provate moment.  A climate scientist working above the Arctic Circle in Norway, Mom's work has been a convenient way to keep her and Leila from talking about their time in Syria and their forced emigration to the West.  But now during a summer visit to a land where the sun doesn't set and land easily becomes ice and melts to water, Leila finally has that time to talk.

Mom is tracking an Arctic Blue Fox, who they have named Miso to learn more about the impact of climate change.  Searching for a new home, Miso is undertaking an epic migration of her own, traveling what will eventually be a 2700 mile trek from Norway to Canada.  

Beautifully illustrated, this short and quick read deftly merges two very different stories (the reconciliation of mother and daughter and Miso's instinctive fight for survival) into a seemless story about the travels we take and what we hold on to.

The Final Curse of Ophelia Cray, by Christine Calella

When your mother is a feared and hated pirate and reputed witch, it's hard to keep a low profile.  Raised by her father, Ophelia has borne not only her mother's name, but the weight of her mother's notoriety.  Hated by the townspeople, Ophelia longs to run away from her small island and sail the seas -- not as a pirate like her mother, but as a sailor in the Royal Navy.  When her bloodline prevents her from enlisting, she presents herself as her half-sister Betsy and joins on.  Her sister is a helpless homebody and unlikely to be noticed by anyone, or so Ophelia thinks.  But when Ophelia slips away, Betsy surprises everyone by racing off to sea after her.

And soon, the best laid plans go astray as a set of curses cast by Ophelia's mother at the gallows come to pass.  Pirates, sword fights, sunken ships, gold, betrayals and doublecrosses, and endless adventure unfurl over the next 300+ pages of this frenetic adventure.  The cast is huge (although so is the body count) and keeping track of who is on whose side at any point in time is an ordeal, but if you let the story just take you along you are guaranteed a good ride.  It's not every YA novel that lets the heroine duel and get whipped in the first hundred pages so don't imagine that this is much of a "feelings" book or particularly focused on character development. But if pirates are your thing, there's plenty of that to go round here.

The Luminous Life of Lucy Landry, by Anna Rose Johnson

Orphan Lucy Landry comes to live with the Martin family at a lighthouse on Lake Superior.  Life on an island in the middle of the Lake is harsh and isolated, and the Martins are a large family.  Lucy, who has never spent much time with other children, struggles with learning how to get along with her new step-siblings.  

Lucy is her own worst enemy as she weaves wild imaginations about herself as a queen, a fairy, or the daughter of a famous actress and tries to lord over the other children.  More troublesome is the way that her active imagination leads her into a series of mishaps -- some amusing, some cruel.  Key amongst these fantasies is a legend of a ruby necklace lost at sea nearby which Lucy feels compelled to locate, ultimately putting herself and the Martins in danger.

The story makes for an interesting peek at the history of the lighthouses on the Great Lakes.  But while the whimsical romanticism of Lucy Landry evokes the beloved melodrama of Anne from Anne of Green Gables),  Lucy's behavior is more selfish and thoughtless (and her caregivers overly indulgent) to really become a sympathetic character.  Lucy's willing to put her adopted family at risk out of greed and then her stubborn refusal to accept responsibility turned me off so sharply that I didn't care that, in the end, she gets a chance to become a heroine and save the day.  The damage was done.

Salt and Sugar, by Rebecca Carvalho

Lari's family owns Salt, a bakery in Olinda, Brazil.  Pedro lives across the street from them at Sugar, their culinary competition.  For generations, Lari's family and Pedro's family have been locked in a feud, convinced of the treachery of their neighbor.  Both of the kids have been raised to distrust each other.

But the two families have acquired a much greater enemy:  a grocery store chain called Deals Deals, which threatens to run both family bakeries out of business.  Divided, they are easy pickings for the megastore, but Lari and Pedro realize that teaming up might give them a chance.  After generations of hatred and accusations, can the two young people form an alliance and can they learn to trust each other?  And when their plans end up sparking romance, can they open their hearts to learn to love their enemy?

A loving tribute to Brazilian food and the melodramatic stylings of Brazilian telenovellas!  There's a rather tiresome amount of feuding and talking past each other, but the story is saved by its mouth-watering depictions of cuisine, strong supporting characters, and Lari's iron will.  True to its inspiration, the ending is also amazingly over-the-top and you can't take much of it seriously, but everything resolves in a surprisingly satisfactory and believable fashion.  Formulaic, but I enjoyed it like a good cake!

The Word, by Mary G. Thompson

Caught in a custody battle between her parents that also pits her between the harshly patriarchal (but safely predicatble) world of the Word and the frightening freedom of the outside world, Lisa struggles to figure out where she fits in.

Stolen from her mother at the age of seven, Lisa's been raised in her father's religious community and taught to obey men without question.  Even after her father is expelled, she follows him nearly unerringly as they end up on the streets.  And when she is finally rescued and returned to her mother, she must perform one final act of loyalty for the man.  But having tasted a world of freedom in which she can make her own choices, is she still obligated to obey her father's last order?

A suspenseful thriller that follows a well-worn path.  But while it uses familiar tropes, Thompson avoids spending inordinate time on them.  Yes, the reclusive messianic cult that Lisa and her parents are involved in has lots of abuse, hypocrisy, and shaky theology, but we spend little time on it (and the focus is mostly on how incompatible her Dad is with the faith). Lisa has plenty of symptoms of PTSD, but we skim over the events that caused them. In place of gratuitous scenes of physical jeopardy, there a strong drive to race to the end.  The plot's notable feature is its focus on its goal.  Strong characters and some unusual supporting rules (like Lisa's homeschooled boyfriend) also give this novel some originality amidst the familiar.

In the Orbit of You, by Ashley Schumacher

When they were little, Nova and Sam were inseparable playmates.  They played with snails in the backyard and styled themselves as the King and Queen of Snailopolis.  They planned to be friends forever, but Sam's father was hurting him and Sam got taken away.  And then Nova and her Mom moved away as well.

Moving is a big constant in Nova's life.  Thanks to her Mom's job as a consultant, they have to pull up stakes every few months.  When she was younger, Nova liked the excitement of going to a new place and having a new beginning, but as she grows older it has begun to wear on her.  Not only has she been unable to form any lasting friendships, but also she has struggled to develop any sense of herself and who she wants to become.

The latest move seems like all the others until she stumbles upon Sam at school.  At first, he doesn't recognize her, but thanks to a gimmicky personality test the students take, he is drawn to her when they are matched as "99% compatible" (much to the chagrin of Sam's girlfriend Abigail).  After the initial shock of the reunion, they agree that they will just be friends.  Nova will be moving on in two months.  Sam has a good thing going with Abigail.  They agree it is better to stay "on course." But of course that isn't what ends up happening.

While the idea of destiny and fate can seem very romantic, there is the hanging dread of eventual discovery as Nova and Sam start fooling around that weighs heavily on any of the fun.  And with Abigail portrayed as unusually nice and understanding, their betrayal seems cruel and selfish.  In the end, Abigail herself rightly calls them on their immaturity and I was left without much sympathy (and even less empathy) for Nova and Sam's angst.  It doesn't help that the story gets dragged out far longer than it needs to be.  The subplots about Nova and Sam's individual struggles with their futures would have been far more interesting with less of the secret forbidden romance (maybe without any of it).

The Wilderness of Girls, by Madeline Claire Franklin

With her father arrested and her stepmother on the lam, Rhi is left trying to find her footing living with her uncle, a forest ranger.  Hiking in the woods one day, she comes upon a pack of four feral girls dressed in furs and animal skins, guarded by two wolves.  

From where did they come and how did they survive for so many years?  The girls believe that they are enchanted princesses, who have been raised by a man named Mother, in an old collapsed tree that they call a "castle." Mother's magic protected them, helped them find food, and healed them when they grew sick.  It was Mother who explained to them that they were four of five and when they met the fifth princess they would be ready to fight to free the people of a kingdom in another dimension.  Through all their hardships, the girls believed in Mother.  But when he died, the magic went away and the girls sought out help.

Who was Mother?  Was he magical or some sort of psychopath who kidnapped the girls.  Are the girls princesses or victims? Finding the answer to that question will tell the girls as much about themselves as it will explain about the man.  Now thrust into the modern world, they are pressured by the authorities, the media, and the people who are caring for them to define themselves so they can be properly categorized.

For Rhi, their struggle to understand and explain themselves feels like her own and it soon becomes apparent that she might share their destiny.  But what is the fate for young women raised in the woods and totally unprepared for the brutal wilderness of the larger world?  Their instincts are to fight for their survival and they are unversed in the subtleties and duplicities now around them.  They don't understand the behaviors that are expected of them as young women and, while they desire to integrate into society and uncertain that they can compromise themselves to do so.

This complex and multi-layered novel explores female friendship and companionship.  While Franklin brings in some pretty horrific abuse and violence (including a brief scene of cannibalism), the story is less about pointing out the brutality of the world for women and more about the way women connect and communicate in the face of such abuse and violence.  This can occasionally grow preachy for the benefit of young readers who may struggle with the nuanced reading of feminine negotiations with patriarchy that Franklin employs, but this is all good Feminism 101 stuff.

Written in more of the style of a legend or an extended parable, as if Franklin is recounting an epic journey, there's not a lot of depth to the characters or examinations of their personal feelings.  Instead, the girls are largely symbolic from their backstories (which are a catalog of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse).  Even their names (Verity, Sunder, Oblivienne, Grace, and Eden)`suggest meaning.  

Overall, the writing is gorgeous, the thoughts profound, and the story memorable.  Definitely one of the best YA books of 2024. 

Flyboy, by Kasey LeBlanc

In his daily life as a senior, Asher can't find the courage to tell people he's a boy.  All that anyone sees is him wearing the stupid plaid skirt that the girls have to wear.  But in his dreams, Asher is an acrobat in the Midnight Circus, a magical place where everyone sees him for who he actually is -- a boy.  And for months, that is how it is:  daytime spent dealing with controlling prejudiced grandparents and a largely absent mother, nightime sailing through the air. The two worlds never meet, until the day Asher discovers that his trapeeze partner walking the halls of his school.

The discovery corresponds with troubles befalling both worlds and Asher must take drastic measures to save the Circus.  These steps will involve coming clear in the daytime world about who he is and accepting what that will cost him.

The novel is a peculiar mix of a realistic coming out story with a fantasy element.  It's clever and allows for a steady comparison of the brave hopes that Asher has in his dreams conflicting with the reality of the way fear paralyzes him.  But while Asher has some nice depth, the other characters seemed more like caricatures (especially, the odious grandparents).  And the story, which  builds towards a nice climax with Asher finding strength in his fantasies to take action in the real world, gets sidetracked with an ending that pulls out lots of unnecessary drama involving his mother's unrelated backstory and a similarly out-of-the-blue disaster.

These Bodies Between Us, by Sarah Van Name

What starts off as a typical summer beach story, transforms with the help of a little magic, into an extended metaphor about how we see ourselves and other.  

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.

The Worst Perfect Moment, by Shivaun Plozza

Tegan is dead, killed while riding her bike.  But heaven isn't anything like she expected it. Instead of clouds and pearly gates, she'd found herself at the Marybelle Motor Lodge in New Jersey.  The motel is hardly a happy memory -- this was the place where her father took her and her young sister after their mother walked out on them.  It was the place where he promptly had a four-day breakdown and Tegan had to take care of her sister.  It is not any sort of afterlife that Tegan ever imagined.

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.

Thirsty, by Jas Hammonds

For the last couple of years, Blake, her BFF Annetta, and her girlfriend Ella have had the same dream:  get accepted at Jameswell College and pledge the Serena Society.  For Annetta and Ella, joining the Serena Society means following in their mothers' footsteps.  For Blake, whose parents did not go to college, Serena a gateway to a new world.  The Serena Society is a sorority for women of color, populated with some of the most influential women in the country.  Membership means a lifetime of networking and support, and an opportunity to enter a world of power and privilege that Blake can only dream of.  But she knows that, unlike her friends, she doesn't really belong there, so she does everything she can to fit in and be liked.

And for Blake, being liked has come easiest when she's drinking and  acting the life of the party.  The fact that she blacks out and does irresponsible and dangerous things when she drinks doesn't initially bother her because everyone occasionally drinks to excess, don't they?  And anyway, Ella assures her that it's fine.  But as Blake's behavior starts to hurt her friendship with Annetta and strain relations with her own family, Blake starts to wonder if she's gone too far.  With the future of her candidacy at Serena on the line, Blake must make choices between her friends, her family, and her dreams.

Tackling racism, classism, transphobia, alcoholism, suicidal ideation, and many other triggering subjects, this is one very busy story!  Blake, in a word, has issues: mostly, problems with confidence but tinged by family tensions and her discomfort with being mixed race.  That lack of confidence makes her easy pickings for the toxic affection of her abusive girlfriend.  The whole business of pledging Serena just pours gasoline on this smoldering mess.  Of it all, alcohol dependency is actually the least of her issues.  Her real "thirst" is for self-respect and she's not good at finding a potable supply.

I think this was a really good book and I was very impressed with how it dealt with its many issues.  It's one of the few books on racism that I've read that didn't feel like it was lecturing me (even though I was most certainly learning).  It's a bit of a spoiler, but the fact that Serena does not end the book at an AA meeting took me by surprise.  And the relationship between Blake and Ella ends with a lot more nuance than I was expecting.  I haven't read Hammonds first novel, We Deserve Monuments, but I'm now very intrigued and may well go back and do so.  Original and profound, with a strong uncompromising voice.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

Yeah, I know, it's not exactly a new book.  In fact, it's been over seventeen years since it came out.  So, sue me.  I'd claim that it just slipped through the cracks, but I think at the time I thought the book was overhyped and just couldn't get into it.  Plus, it was about a boy and I read very very few of those books.  It's not so much that I hate male protagonists, but I always find the profanity-heavy, gross-out humor, and violence inherent in books about adolescent boys to be either off-putting or too close to home.  In any case, I have never gotten around to reading it until now, when my wife picked it up in our local Free Library, brought it home and read it, and slipped it into my "to read" pile.

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.