she reads, she blags

Th1rteen R3asons Why, Jay Asher

So I hate the dopey title, and I really wanted to hate the book. It’s such a contrived (if original) premise - girl leaves suicide mix-tapes for all the people who made her suicidal. And I’m not sure it’s especially well-executed; in particular, the parts of the novel that are narrated by Hannah (the tapes) in no way sound like dialogue, and that bothered me - after all, the author could’ve just had her write letters. My other initial hesitation was Hannah herself. I’ve had a couple of friends who have committed suicide, so to me that person looks different than Hannah, who is blonde and popular and, well, female. Add to that the fact that a few of her 13 choices seem downright petty, and I got mad at her for making people feel guilty for the rest of their lives because of an almost certainly unintended slight - 100 pages in, I was skeptical.

But it’s a weirdly moving novel, when it comes to it. It took me until the end of the book to appreciate it, but I did, and I was glad I read it. The protagonist’s part in Hannah’s suicide is heartbreaking, and the interactions he has with other recipients of the tapes are compelling and ring true - much more so than the contents of the tapes themselves. I like to see teenagers reading this book (and they do, in droves), for a host of reasons. I appreciate that Asher lays out (in a non-didactic fashion) many of the warning signs of severe depression, which is good information for kids to have. Even better, what this book teaches is the importance - in this case, a life-or-death level of importance - of treating other people kindly and with respect, all the time. A lot of the people Hannah blames for her suicide weren’t unusually mean, for high school kids. They were just callous and uncaring, and that was enough to hurt her. The more reinforcement that message gets, the better.

In short: For the win, in spite of the goofy title. A strong message and characters that teens will recognize from the hallways of their very own high schools make this a compelling read.

Read it if you like: Other “issue” YA novels, like (I’m going to date myself here) Cut and Smack

Posted on June 4th, 2009 by admin
Filed under: **** good, realistic fiction, young adults | No Comments »

The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall

In short: Super-retro tale of children running free during summer vacation and getting into adorable kinds of “trouble”. The four sisters are well-drawn and endearing, even if they fall neatly into Boxcar Children-esque sibling stereotypes, and the people they encounter while on vacation are just quirky enough to be interesting. The novel is old-fashioned in its language and plot, so it is really jarring when all of a sudden the girls’ dad pulls out his laptop. How many parents in 2009 are trusting enough to let their kids run wild around an unfamiliar area? (I mean, I did that as a kid, but that was a good 15 years ago, and in a small town with zero crime.) Of course, the whole book is set in an incredibly wholesome alternate universe (the most scandalous this book gets is when the oldest sister develops an incredibly wholesome crush on an older boy), so this is a good choice for parents who have concerns about what their kids are reading.

All in all, this is a really cute story - I’m guessing it’ll be enjoyed more by adults who want to indulge in nostalgia than actual present-day children, but that happens.

Read it if you like: The Boxcar Children, other slightly dated children’s series

Posted on June 4th, 2009 by admin
Filed under: **** good, kids | No Comments »

The Grave, James Heneghan

This is another St. Patrick’s Day find, as it was the only YA book that popped up in our catalog under “Ireland”. The cover art is atrocious, but I’m always vaguely interested in books about Ireland, so I picked it up.

It was the right choice. Tom Mullen, a Liverpudlian foster kid, falls into a mysterious mass grave in 20th-century Liverpool and wakes up in Achill, an island off the west coast of Ireland, in the midst of the potato famine. This is of course a pretty bad place to find oneself, but Tom does swimmingly: within minutes he’s rescued one of the townspeople from drowning and is hailed as a hero (possibly of a supernatural order). Oddly enough, the kid he’s rescued is pretty much his doppelganger, which lends some credence in the villagers’ minds to the “supernatural” theory. Tom bunks with the Monaghans for a few days, befriends the oldest Monaghan brother, Brendan, who is disabled and reminds Tom of his co-foster-kid back home. He also falls in love with Hannah, the Monaghan daughter. He gets shunted back and forth between 1840s Ireland and 1970s Liverpool, facing tragedy and historically accurate hardship in both places, until he finally learns why he was sent back in time–and, in the process, learns valuable lessons about family and friendship (of course). I won’t reveal the ending, because it actually surprised me, and it’d be a shame for you to miss out on it.

The problem I had with this book—and it’s relatively minor—is that Tom sounds much older than he is. He’s only supposed to be twelve or thirteen, but his attitudes and vocabulary and interests seem at least three or four years older, and it’s kind of disconcerting. Obviously he’s supposed to be more worldly than your average adolescent, what with being a foster kid and all, but this goes beyond what can be accounted for by his status. I really enjoyed his voice and the writing generally, but in my head, Tom had to be fifteen to make it work.

In short: A well-written and compelling time-travel story. Its somewhat clichéd ending and message don’t detract from the power of the famine scenes, so it works in the end.

Read it if you like: Snarky British teenagers; the potato famine

Don’t take my word for it: Reader Rabid, Reading Matters

Posted on March 22nd, 2009 by admin
Filed under: **** good, historical fiction, kids, young adults | 1 Comment »

Kathleen: The Celtic Knot, Siobhán Parkinson (Girls of Many Lands series)

So I picked this book up when I was making a St. Patrick’s Day display. I never read this series—or knew that it existed, actually—but it has a lot of the same charms of the original American Girl books. Kathleen is spunky, clever, and resourceful, taking care of her younger siblings and learning Irish dance in a Dublin tenement circa 1930-something. It’s a gentle, uplifting story, but there’s enough grittiness in Kathleen’s surroundings to stop the book from getting too syrupy. Towards the end, the plot weirdly echoes that of the Christmas Felicity book, but that might be a coincidence.

I appreciate that this book doesn’t try too hard to cater to its American audience. As a result, there are some references here that will be lost on the book’s target demographic—let’s face it, I’m better versed in Irish history than the average ten-year-old—but ideally, this is the kind of book that’ll encourage those kids to go and learn more. And I love how very Irish the book is—the writing and the dialogue are spot-on (at least, they sound just like twenty-first century Irish people; I obviously haven’t got a clue how people spoke in the 1930s, but at least they don’t sound American).

In short: Sweet, wholesome, educational—what you’d expect from an American Girl book.

Read it if you like: Irish culture and history; the other books in the series

Posted on March 21st, 2009 by admin
Filed under: **** good, historical fiction, kids | No Comments »

The Green Glass Sea, Ellen Klages
I liked this book. I suspect most children will not even give it a chance. Certainly there is absolutely no way that we could get the kids at our library to read it. (Evidence: before I checked it out, the book had gone out once–to a different library, through ILL.) This a shame, because The Green Glass Sea is really great historical fiction.

This book takes place from 1944-1945 at Los Alamos. Dewey, our heroine, is terrific and mad likable, particularly if you are/were a nerdy kid yourself. She’s living there with her scientist father–her mother is not in the picture–and having a grand old time asking for advice on her inventions from–oh man, was that Richard Feynman? Nuh-uh.

So okay, I geeked out a little. So does Dewey. Sadly, her strange, very personal utopia falls apart when her father is sent to Washington and she is left to stay with the Gordons, whose not-so-charming progeny is one of Dewey’s tormentors at school. Through a number of big events, both personal and historical, Dewey and Suze learn to navigate their relationship and the strange world into which they’ve been thrown. The two girls and Mrs. Gordon are wonderfully crafted characters, and the way the book deals with war–and with the devastating weapon its adults are building–is honest, nuanced, mature. The last chapter, in particular, is astonishing. It’s really good, you should read it!

In short: Great historical fiction that’s probably too old for most kids who are Dewey’s age–throw it to the YAs and the more mature tweens. Good news: there’s a sequel.

Read it if you like: Historical fiction, particularly about World War II; strong female protagonists

Posted on March 21st, 2009 by admin
Filed under: **** good, historical fiction, kids, young adults | No Comments »

The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly

This is one of those books that I knew was an objectively good book, but I didn’t actually enjoy reading it. (So, the opposite of The Au-pairs.)

The beginning of the book reminded me of all the other precocious pre-adolescents I’ve been reading about lately: twelve-year-old David is a bright, bookish English kid whose mother is dying during World War II. She kicks it early on, and he is then subjected to a stepmother, Rose, and a new baby brother. There’s a lot of whining and a little bit of family intrigue, as David moves into the bedroom of a little boy who disappeared decades ago. In the background is the war, which draws David’s father away from home, and creates plenty of tension in the house.

All this was fine and totally enjoyable, and of course right up my alley. However, the book quickly becomes very weird as David is transported to the world of fairy tales–and not the nice Disney-fied versions, either. He’s faced with any number of terrible creatures, from a tribe of half-wolf/half-humans (the story of their creation is the weirdest of all Connolly’s weird fairy-tale reinventions) to the Crooked Man, who really wants to eat David’s little brother. David embarks on a long, dangerous journey to meet the King–who turns out to be very Oz-like in a strange and kind of wonderful way–and is helped along the way by some interesting companions (including the Knight, who is on a suicide mission to find his dead lover, and the Woodsman, who is maybe God). There’s a discomforting hint of misogyny in a number of David’s encounters, which if you’re inclined to be generous can be read as David’s giving form to his wariness of his stepmother. I suspect it will bother some readers, though, so there’s your fair warning.

I will say that I’m not a fantasy person. If I suspect that a book will prominently feature dwarves or fairies, I do not read it. So this was outside my comfort zone, in that regard, and I’m sure that my prejudices affected my reading of the book. Still, the main problem for me was that I wasn’t expecting this book to be as gory as it was. There were too many graphic depictions of torture, dismemberment, decaying bodies and so on–I didn’t realize until after I’d finished the book that Connolly mostly writes crime thrillers. Had I known that, I probably wouldn’t have picked this book up. It’s just not my taste–but for those of you who have a love of gory thrillers, an active imagination, and a taste for the literary, this book would probably be great.

So in the end, did I like this book? I have no idea. I guess I did. I thought the ending was sad, and it made me tear up a bit. Of course, I was also relieved when it was over, so maybe I didn’t like it. Maybe you will.

In short: Though not for the faint of heart (or stomach), The Book of Lost Things is an entertaining, occasionally thought-provoking visit to the realm of childhood nightmares. Thanks a lot, John.

Read it if you like: The Wizard of Oz; the David Bowie movie Labyrinth, which I was reminded of on pretty much every page; that weird Sweet Valley Twins book where they go to the theme park and a witch tries to eat Jessica or something

Posted on March 21st, 2009 by admin
Filed under: **** good, adults | 2 Comments »

The After-Life, Daniel Ehrenhaft

In short: A pretty good road-trip novel. It didn’t leave much of an impression, to be honest (I’m writing this review about six weeks after reading it, because…well, I forgot I’d read it). But I do remember enjoying it. The premise is that a messed-up alcoholic drop-out nineteen-year-old starts attending the private school where the half-siblings he’s never met (his dad ran out when he was a baby, and he hasn’t seen him since) also go to school. Upon matriculating, Will meets the half-siblings—twins Kyle and Liz—and, shortly thereafter, his long-absent father. Daddy then dies, sending the three kiddos on a road trip up the East Coast. They chat, they do drugs, they…well, mack a little bit. But it’s all good. And the first chapter—Will’s entrance essay for Kyle and Liz’s posh private school—is insanely funny. I liked it, and I suspect most of the teens who pick it up will, too—regardless of gender, for once.

Read it if you like: The Au-pairs, but don’t want to lose any more brain cells; debauchery; sexier updates of older YA road-trip novels, like my favorite, Joan Bauer’s Rules of the Road

Posted on February 26th, 2009 by admin
Filed under: **** good, realistic fiction, young adults | No Comments »

The Education of Robert Nifkin, Daniel Pinkwater

Daniel Pinkwater can always be relied upon for slightly surreal, totally brilliant fiction, and The Education of Robert Nifkin is no exception. It’s written in first-person as the longest college admissions essay ever, and like any good personal statement, it grabs you right from the first line: “My father is a son-of-a-bitch from Eastern Europe.”

The novel/personal statement that follows is a brief, colorful trip through 1950s Chicago. At Robert’s public high school, his teachers spend substantially more time warning students of the perils of communism, homosexuality, and Judaism than they do teaching (their preferred method is to write a paragraph on the blackboard and have the students spend the period copying it down). It later turns out that the only communist around is the ROTC sergeant.

Since he’s not learning he stops attending, and instead spends most of his time wandering the city and waxing poetic about its architecture, culture, and residents. Obviously I was biased in my enjoyment of those sections, but they hold a lot of the appeal that Nick and Norah’s did: they’re such unpretentious, genuine reactions to the excitement of a big city (something Pinkwater has a knack for capturing—see Lizard Music, as well).

The first chapters of this book are riotously funny, and its depictions of lousy public school teachers are accurate enough to be cutting. After Robert transfers to the hippie-beatnik-non-school, the humor is tempered a little, allowing Robert to develop into a likeable, interesting character in his own right, rather than just a vehicle for Pinkwater’s hilariousness. And in the end, this book has a few messages that all educators could stand to hear again. Chief among them: learning does not occur in a vacuum, students are people too.

The real problem with this book, and I find it’s a problem with a lot of his work for YAs, is that it appeals to only a small subset of teenagers. All the adults I know love it, but it requires teens to have to have a degree of self-awareness (and a sense of humor about themselves) that’s pretty rare. In our library, this book also takes a hit for being historical fiction, which our kids avoid as much as possible.

With that caveat, though, this is a terrific book—one of Pinkwater’s best, I think, and worth reading for the first few chapters alone. I found myself reading aloud passages to my friends, and then not being able to stop—“Oh wait,” I’d say, “The next line is really funny too.” Until twenty minutes later, they hung up the phone. And then checked this book out from the library.

In short: A smart, funny, quick read for adults and older teenagers.

Read it if you like: Pinkwater’s other works, spitting on Joe McCarthy’s grave*

* Look, I say that not to be a jerk (though if anyone deserves it…), but because I grew up a couple of miles from his grave, and this was a not-unusual pastime.

Posted on February 26th, 2009 by admin
Filed under: ***** great, adults, historical fiction, young adults | 1 Comment »

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart

This is what I always want to give girls who ask me to put Twilight on hold for them. I want to tell them: Look, there are options for you! You can read about young women who are smart, resourceful, engaging, funny, and independent! Sometimes these young women get into lousy relationships, but unlike Bella, they get out of them instead of getting married! There are female protagonists who have convictions! And also brains! There are young men who aren’t controlling, abusive jerks!

But of course, none of that is going to sell this book to anyone. So let’s try again. Our heroine, Frankie Landau-Banks, is a sophomore at the exclusive boarding school from which her father and sister also graduated. Frankie’s dad was a member of a secret society at Alabaster, and Frankie’s hot new senior boyfriend is part of the same all-male club. Frankie wants in and can’t get in, due to her lack of a y-chromosome, so she decides to stage a not-so-hostile takeover. Awesomeness, wordplay, and some of the greatest school pranks ever ensue, and the straightforward, deadpan third-person narration only makes the already-funny situations funnier.

In short: Clever, hilarious “stealth feminism” with a highly enjoyable protagonist. 

Read it if you like: Prep schools, feminism, fabulousness

Posted on February 23rd, 2009 by admin
Filed under: ***** great, realistic fiction, young adults | No Comments »

Elsewhere, Gabrielle Nevin

Elsewhere is the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Liz, told from her death on backwards. After Liz is hit by a car, she finds herself in Elsewhere—Nevin’s afterlife, where you regress in age until, at seven days old, you’re sent back to Earth to be reincarnated. It’s a cool premise, particularly as far as books about dead teenagers go. Then again, this book stands so far above everything else in that subcategory that I’m loathe to make any comparisons.

Liz is a wonderful protagonist, who is, like all fifteen-year-olds, by turns a typical teenager and a mature young woman. Watching her grow physically younger as her life and maturity progress is heartbreaking—in particular, her relationship with Owen, who died in his mid-twenties but is about 17 when Liz arrives in Elsewhere, is devastating to read. And Elsewhere is a wonderfully constructed vision of the afterlife, partly because it is so mundane: people have jobs, make friends, get married, go fishing. Watching Liz navigate this new world is a pleasure.

Liz’s contact with the world of the living is limited, as it is against the laws of Elsewhere to attempt to communicate with Earth (though we see several attempts over the course of the novel). She does, however, spend a good chunk of the beginning of the novel watching her friends and family through binoculars that are available to all of Elsewhere’s residents. Among those she watches is the man responsible for her death, which is among the more interesting of the book’s subplots.

But anyway, here’s the truth and the bottom line: I cried through almost the entire book. It’s not that it was sad, though clearly parts of it are: I was, in complete seriousness, overwhelmed by its loveliness. The sadness that permeates this book is, after all, not very different from that which we experience here: the only difference, as one character points out, is that in Elsewhere, you know when the end is coming. And that imbues every single scene in this book with a sense of significance, joy, and, above all, gratitude. (So, you know, a refreshing change from most YA lit.)

In short: This book is a lovely, well-written meditation on forgiveness, love, and the importance of living well and fully. Read it, it’s good.

Read if you like: Reading

Posted on February 23rd, 2009 by admin
Filed under: ***** great, young adults | No Comments »