Reviews

Review: If There’s No Tomorrow by Jennifer L. Armentrout

Posted on by kellyvincent

If There's No Tomorrow book coverI’ve read and enjoyed another Armentrout book (I even used it for a comparison title for Finding Frances). So I was curious about this one. The back cover description didn’t excite me a great deal, but I found it on audio at the library and decided I needed to listen to it.

The beginning of the book is focused on Lena, who seems to run with the popular crowd despite being a total book nerd and having a quiet personality. This is probably because of her friendship with Sebastian, her next-door neighbor and forever crush. Sebastian is a football star and recently broke up with his long-time girlfriend, but Lena knows he isn’t available since he doesn’t like her that way. On top of the Sebastian problem, she’s plays volleyball with her friend Megan, who’s way more talented than Lena is. Despite that, their coach has told Lena he thinks she has a shot at a scholarship if she steps things up and plays well this season. It’s the end of summer before senior year and things are looking good.

Everything changes the weekend before school starts, when Lena and four of her friends make a very bad choice that ends in tragedy. The rest of the book is Lena dealing with survivor’s guilt as well the more palpable guilt of someone who feels genuinely responsible for the incident. She initially is unable to deal with it at all and shuts her friends out, which creates a lot of tension. One of her friends returns the sentiment and Lena has no idea how to fix it. Sebastian challenges her the most and she risks damaging their friendship because she refuses to talk to him. She’s basically frozen in place.

The meat of the book is her struggle to start living life again, and it’s a slog for her. But she does come out of it and it is rewarding to see it happen.

I have to admit that I wasn’t a fan of all the characters. High school football players and their friends are not my favorite type of people, if I’m going to generalize (which apparently I am). Sebastian kind of annoyed me because I didn’t really believe he was as good as we were supposed to accept. But I know a lot of people will have no problem buying into him. And there is a full cast of characters, all a little different from each other while still being believable high school students.

Good for fans of Armentrout and pretty much any teen who could use a little reminder of her lack of invincibility.

Review: A Tragic Kind of Wonderful by Eric Lindstrom

Posted on by kellyvincent

A Tragic Kind of Wonderful book coverAs readers of this blog will have noticed, I enjoy reading about teenagers’ experience with mental illness, and this book definitely fits that bill.

Mel Hannigan has a lot to deal with. She has bipolar disorder. She also had an older brother who she was really close to who died a few years earlier. She has a couple of friends currently, but lost three close friends the previous year because of her illness and a fight with one of them. Nobody outside her family knows about her bipolar disorder. She also works at a nursing home, which is where she feels most comfortable now. This is where she meets David, a boy her age who helps to start breaking down some of the walls she’s constructed around herself. But it’s not an easy or painless process.

The book opens with a memory that leads up to—but doesn’t include—Mel’s brother Nolan’s death (what happened to him is a mystery that isn’t revealed until the end). Then we jump three years ahead to Mel at 16. She is dealing with her bipolar disorder reasonably well, considering how severe it is. She tries to keep it under control with medication and mood charts, and keeps it secret from her friends because she doesn’t think they’d react well.

Her mood tracking is pretty interesting—she thinks of four components of herself (head, heart, health, and “host” (which corresponds with her overall mood plus the combination of others)) and tracks how each one is doing in order to understand her state of mind as well as possible. This is pretty important to her because her bipolar is fairly extreme and she regularly experiences mixed states and even dysphoric mania (which is depression mixed with very high energy, highly dangerous in terms of suicide risk).

Mel starts getting to know David at the nursing home at the same time as her old friend group has a major event that means that she might be able to refriend them. Things are shaky on all fronts, however, and when something devastating happens, Mel’s mental state worsens and everything goes wrong. You wonder how things are going to turn around and it’s both heartbreaking and satisfying to see it happen.

I think this book does an excellent job of conveying one experience of bipolar disorder. It’s not everyone’s experience of it, but seeing one could help a reader understand it better. But it’s also just a good story.

Review: Girl Gone Viral by Arvin Ahmadi

Posted on by kellyvincent

Girl Gone Viral book coverI stumbled across this book at Barnes and Noble and was really excited by the blurb. Supposedly, 17-year-old Opal Hopper is a big coder—she creates virtual reality worlds and so on. I thought this would be really interesting because a) girl coder and b) I wanted to see how the author makes coding interesting.

But this is one of those cases where the blurb doesn’t match the book very well, as she doesn’t really do much coding. Her friend Shane does the majority of it to create their channel on WAVE, the biggest virtual reality platform in this near-future story, while Opal becomes the accidental star of the channel. Opal, Shane, and their friend Moyo have teamed up with Kara, actress and fellow student at their challenging boarding school (PAAST), to compete in a contest by the company that runs WAVE. The prize is (among other things) meeting the company’s founder. Opal is convinced that the founder knows something about her father’s disappearance, and she has been trying to talk to him for 7 years, with no success. So she’s pretty desperate to win the contest, and that takes up the majority of the first part of the book. Kara is normally the face of their show, but when she ends up with food poisoning, Opal takes the stage and rather unintentionally starts something big.

Because Shane hacked some personal WAVE data and gave it to Opal, and she explored the data and discovered that people have empathy for a famous movie star with a reputation for breaking down in public. Now, the data scientist in me is quite skeptical about her managing to do this over a weekend (that’s not how data science works), but okay, I can suspend disbelief enough to go with it. Anyway, with Opal on camera, things explode from there.

While I did like the book, it wasn’t what I expected. It’s set in a technologically advanced America where virtual reality and augmented reality are the norm. But in a lot of ways, it doesn’t feel that different from our world, especially with the politics that seep into the story in surprising ways. But the most unexpected thing was Opal herself. I liked her even though she was nothing like I expected, as she turned out to be pretty self-absorbed and selfish at times and played some unpleasant social games. But she was interesting and I enjoyed seeing her grow and finally understand what happened to her father. The book ends a little abruptly after she finds out and I wondered what was going to happen next. Sequel, maybe?

This is a sci-fi book, but it’s pretty soft sci-fi, as it doesn’t focus on the technology—it explores the social impacts instead. So a lot of readers should enjoy it.

Review: Hold Still by Nina LaCour

Posted on by kellyvincent

Hold Still book coverI previously read another of LaCour’s books (The Disenchantments) and liked it quite a bit, so I picked up this one. It chronicles a little over a year in Caitlin’s life immediately following her best friend’s suicide. Caitlyn’s basically shell-shocked by Ingrid’s death, mostly because she never saw it coming and feels like she should have known to be a better friend.

Ingrid dies right at the end of their sophomore year. Caitlyn’s parents take her away to a coastal town in northern California for the summer so she can be away from the place where Ingrid is no more. Soon enough it’s time to go back to school. She looks forward to photography class, a class she and Ingrid shared and loved. Caitlyn imagines their teacher being happy to see her and even comforting her. But instead, Ms. Delani gives her the cold shoulder. It floors her. The other kids aren’t very sympathetic toward Caitlyn—some try but fail, while others are as heartless as you’d expect. The first weekend after school starts, Caitlyn finds Ingrid’s journal under her bed. Ingrid must have put it there on purpose, knowing what she was going to do.

Finding the journal is both good and bad. It helps Caitlyn let go, but reading it also causes her great pain, so she can only take it a few pages at a time. Things move on at school. Ms. Delani still ignores Caitlyn and Caitlyn retaliates by turning in horrible assignments. Caitlyn sort of befriends a new girl, Dylan, and then messes that up. A boy named Taylor who she’s known for a while has been talking to her, too. Her father has given her a big stack of wood because apparently when she was young, she made something with wood, and her parents think it might help her heal. She leaves it there until winter, when she finally starts a project.

It’s a long, slow road to recovery for Caitlyn, one we travel with her. But she does get there.

This is an emotionally draining book, for sure, but it’s so good. If you like moving contemporary YA, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Review: I, Claudia by Mary McCoy

Posted on by kellyvincent

I, Claudia book coverI, Claudia is a fascinating study in teenage politics gone wild in a setting where the student government at an elite prep school has practically unlimited power. The book covers three years of said government, with vastly different rulers over the years. It’s not a surprise that Claudia herself gets involve in governing, but the way things go isn’t predictable and is very interesting.

In the beginning of the book, Claudia is about to start her freshman year at Imperial Day Academy, where her sister, Maisie, will be a junior. She spends some time with her sister and her friends and ends up visiting a fortune teller that freaks her out by reading her surprisingly well. Claudia describes herself as ugly. She also talks about her limp, which comes from one leg being shorter than the other. She believes she’s not much of a catch, but she seems okay with that. She thinks,

… I was glad to be thought bookish and eccentric, but ultimately harmless. I was grateful for my unremarkable ness, for my parents’ indifference to me, that my classmates found me boring or strange.

Nothing I did mattered.

And because of that, I was free.

She’s free to do what she wants, and one notable thing she does is study history. The novel is full of her insights into current situations with reflections on past ones, which I really enjoyed (even if I didn’t always know the events she was referring to, it was still really cool).

After a year at the school (when a lot of interesting things happen involving the Honor Council that Maisie’s on, where we see how they run the school and how irrelevant adults are there), Maisie convinces Claudia to run for student senate for her sophomore year. She’s shocked when she wins. She and a boy named Hector are the two sophomore representatives. Claudia sort of accidentally brings down the entire senate and ends up as vice president. Everything steps up from there and eventually we get to the watershed point.

All of this is framed in a series of therapy visits where Claudia (as a self-described “teenager in crisis”) is explaining what happened to her up to this point. We know something big must have gone down by the end of the book since she’s in therapy, but we don't know exactly what that is.

This unusual book is worth your time if you appreciate genuine novelty and a good story. Claudia’s a great character who finds something in herself she never expected to be there.

Review: You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins

Posted on by kellyvincent

You Bring the Distant Near book coverI think this book came to me through a book club I’m in and I’m glad because I loved it. I’m not quite sure why I love books about identity so much, but I do—it’s probably one of the reasons I like YA so much.

You Bring the Distant Near is, as I mentioned, all about identity. That is racial and ethnic identity, but also everything else that makes a girl who she is. It’s really about four girls—sisters and their daughters—but the mom/grandma has a few scenes that add a different perspective to the story.

We start off with Sonia, at eight years old in 1965. She and her sister, Tara, live with their parents in Ghana. In this scene, Sonia’s mother (Ranee) ruins a swimming race she was going to win, which reveals quite a bit about both of them. But then the book jumps forward to the mid-seventies, when the family moves to Queens. Both Sonia and Tara settle in well enough. Tara channels Marcia Brady to fit in as much as possible while Sonia embraces the feminist movement. Then they move to New Jersey, where Tara finally gets her official start in drama. The story jumps ahead two more years, when they are both nearing real adulthood, and continues until we see them married. Then we jump to 1998, where we meet Sonia’s daughter Chantal and Tara’s daughter Anna. Chantal is as American as can be and when Anna comes over from Mumbai to go to high school with her, it’s a real struggle for Anna because she’s used to life in India. By the end of the book, Chantal and Anna are grown but their futures are yet to be decided. Possibilities are everywhere.

Okay, having written all that, the theme of identity may not seem obviously present, but it’s absolutely crucial to everything that happens. Ranee is distrustful of anyone who isn’t Indian (preferably Bengali) or white, which is a challenge for her in Flushing, Queens. Sonia hates her mom’s racism and her restrictions that keep Sonia basically locked up in the apartment. Tara’s always looking for her identity by trying on different personas, Twiggy the British model and Marcia Brady to name a couple. She’s able to manipulate her accent how she wants. Both she and Sonia push against their mother’s idea of who they should be to be good Bengali girls. They fight against what they perceive as outdated traditions at their father’s funeral (I don’t know the right word), shocking all the Bengalis in attendance. When we get to Chantal and Anna, the struggle for identity is even stronger, particularly for Chantal because her father is black. But it’s there for Anna, too, who wants to hold on to her own Indian identity even when in America. The final question of identity comes into play with Ranee herself, an interesting surprise near the end of the story.

Although the story jumps ahead at several points (which I don’t always love), it’s told in chronological order and is easy to follow. And as I’ve implied above, the characters are all complex and interesting. I personally most identified with Sonia, but any reader should be able to find one of the girls to relate to. The character arcs are clear even if there isn’t a strong plot that spans the whole book (I don’t think one is necessary).

I think anyone who enjoys exploring identity will enjoy this book, but it will especially appeal to Indians and other people who have strong ties to countries other than the one they live in. It’s a well-told story.

Review: Dryland by Sara Jaffe

Posted on by kellyvincent

Dryland book coverI read this quiet book in just two days, which says something because my reading pace has slowed to a crawl at this point (I’m still 14 whole books behind on my Goodreads challenge).

It’s 1992 and Julie is a slightly lost fifteen-year-old who doesn’t really like anything. Her best friend, Erika, is far more engaged in more typical teenage pursuits than Julie, like boys. Julie’s older brother was a highly competitive swimmer who almost qualified for the Olympics and disappeared from Julie’s life to move to Germany afterward. It’s not clear that she technically misses him, but it is clear that his leaving has unmoored her. She follows Erika around for lack of anything better to do—hitting the arts and crafts market, watching skater boys, and doing yearbook at school. At yearbook, she meets a couple of other girls, Alexis and Melanie. Alexis seems to take a shine to Julie, offering her snacks and inviting her to join the swim team. Early in the book, she also meets Ben, an old friend of her brother.

Julie does join the swim team and Erika joins with her. But Julie, ever-unmotivated, struggles in practices. She can’t seem to keep going and randomly stops in the middle of her swims. Erika, who’s got a crush on one of the other swimmers, talks her into going to some parties. All Julie wants to do is leave, but then things get surprising and complicated with Alexis. She hangs out some with Ben, who never comes across as a creepy older guy for reasons that become clear later and actually seems to fill a role her brother might have formerly filled.

Throughout the novel, I wondered if she’d ever find out what was up with her brother, if she’d get over whatever was keeping her from trying at swimming, and what would happen with Alexis. Because the possible lesbian overtones are there from the beginning, though it’s clear to the reader that nothing is really clear to Julie.

The book does a few interesting things, craft-wise. For one, there are no chapters. And Jaffe doesn’t present dialogue in the conventional way. It appears without quote marks, often embedded in paragraphs. This gives the entire story a stream-of-consciousness feel (though I’m not saying it goes far enough to actually be stream-of-consciousness). The prose is subtle, lyrical, and full of great imagery. It’s also set in Portland, Oregon, which adds a dreary backdrop to the story (which sets the mood perfectly).

I recommend this to anyone who wants a thoughtful coming-of-age story. It will especially appeal to older readers who remember the early 90s, but younger readers will also appreciate its rawness and honesty.

Review: Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb

Posted on by kellyvincent

Cures for Heartbreak book coverI’ve already reviewed Rabb’s other book, Kissing in America, which I really liked. So I had high expectations for Cures for Heartbreak, her first.

This book is relatively compact, with a lot packed into only 230 pages. At the opening, fifteen-year-old Mia’s mother has just died twelve days after receiving a diagnosis of melanoma. Mia is heartbroken because the two were very close. Mia and her older sister fight all the time instead of providing comfort to each other. Rabb effectively shows Mia’s bereavement and her acting out in ways the reader can understand. Then Mia's father has a heart attack, which he survives, but it ushers in new hospital time. Mia is still trying to recover from her mom’s death all while dealing with everything else a teenager has to deal with, especially school and (sometimes inappropriate) crushes, and now she has to worry about her father, too. The book’s really about Mia coming to understand that love is complex and that it isn’t lost when you find a way forward.

Mia’s a very well portrayed character—authentic and compelling. We see her father through her embarrassed and frustrated eyes, and he’s a good character too. They get closer after her mom’s death and her older sister’s departure, with their weekly trips to Wendy’s. Of course the writing is also lovely, evocative and full of moving details.

I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Kissing in America (though that one is a little funnier than this one) or who likes to see portraits of people dealing with grief in the best way they can.

Review: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler

Posted on by kellyvincent

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things book coverThis book originally came out in 2003, but Mackler revised it in 2018. She didn’t make major changes, but did upgrade it to fit with today’s technology a little better. One of my writing friends recommended the book to me because of the kissing in the beginning (it was relevant to a story I was writing). I’m glad she did, because I quite enjoyed the book.

Virginia is a fifteen-year-old fat girl who feels like a failure next to her perfect family. On top of that, her best (and only, really) friend moved across the country for a year. And she’s got this weird kissing thing going on with a boy (rather unfortunately) named Froggy. Her mom is pressuring her to lose weight. After her perfect brother—the one she’s always looked up to and loved tremendously—does something truly awful, she has to reevaluate everything about him and their relationship. This causes lots of additional stress in her life. The possibility of a trip out to see her best friend makes everything seem bearable again—until her mom nixes that. Virginia has a lot of things to figure out, and I think she does a great job of doing just that. She’s kind of remarkable—despite all the things going against her, she maintains a reasonably positive attitude. (And it’s believable even to grumpy old me.) One exchange Virginia has with her dad (after he tells her it looks like she’s lost weight) near the end of the book made me particularly happy:

“Dad? We’re trying to be more open with each other, right?”

Dad nodded, but his forehead was wrinkled in confusion.

“Then I have to tell you that I’d rather you don’t talk about my body. It’s just not yours to discuss.”

Overall, the book has a good message about body image and other issues important to girls. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in a fun read that still manages to be quite substantive. There's even a sequel I'm going to check out.

Review: Zombies Vs. Unicorns edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier

Posted on by kellyvincent

Zombies Vs. Unicorns book coverThis is fun collection of mostly urban fantasy stories centering on (duh) zombies or unicorns. It is framed as a competition between the two editors, where Team Zombie is led by Justine and Team Unicorn by Holly. There are twelve stories in the collection but I was only able to read ten of them due to a weird printing error (pages from one story later in the book replaced pages in two other stories earlier in the book). Not sure how that happened with a major publisher like Simon & Schuster, but okay…

The first story is “The Highest Justice” by Garth Nix, on Team Unicorn. It’s a fairly simple fantasy story about a princess being given what’s rightfully hers with the help of a unicorn dispensing justice.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Alaya Dawn Johnson is the first Team Zombie story. It’s about a zombie named Grayson who’s got a big crush on a boy named Jack. There are some pretty funny moments in it. When he’s talking about how he doesn’t know who he was before he caught the prion that makes him a zombie, he says about the prion:

That means it has to be drunk, snorted, dripped, or anally inserted. Yeah, I don’t want to know what the fuck I was doing either.

The story’s told mostly in second person (“you”), which I am not a fan of. (Actually, it drives me crazy and I sort of hate it. But I didn’t hate this story, mostly because it moves at a fair clip.)

The next story is “Purity Test” by Naomi Novik, a unicorn one. It’s also funny. An evil magician has been kidnapping baby unicorns and an adult unicorn is on the hunt for a virgin to help stop the bad guy.

The next two stories—“Bougainvilla” by Carrie Ryan and “A Thousand Flowers” by Margo Lanagan—are the ones that got the pages from another story dropped in the middle of them. So I can’t say anything about them.

“The Children of the Revolution” by Maureen Johnson is another zombie story. It too is funny (this is a theme for much of this collection). In this one, a college girl dreamily follows her boyfriend to England to pick berries only to find that this is backbreaking, soul-destroying work. After he abandons her for the greener pastures of London, she ends up getting a gig babysitting some weird kids. Some very weird kids.

“The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn” by Diana Peterfreund gives an interesting take on unicorns. Maybe they’re not what they’re supposed to be—maybe they’re vicious killers. But what about a baby one?

“Inoculata” by Scott Westerfeld is another zombie story. A few years after the zombie apocalypse, some teenagers are bored living with each other and a handful of adults, running pointless drills to stay prepared. So one of them figures out a way to make things more interesting—for both the kids and the zombies.

The next story is “Princess Prettypants” by Meg Cabot and it has the honor of being my favorite story in the collection because of its humor. A seventeen-year-old is given a unicorn for her birthday and doesn’t know what to do with her—until she figures out a perfect way to use her, to great effect.

“Cold Hands” by Cassandra Clare has a slightly different take on zombies (the book says it’s like the voudin tradition of the possessed dead) that leads to a very different love story.

Kathleen Duey’s “The Third Virgin” takes a dark look at the downside of being a unicorn with healing powers. It’s told from the perspective of a unicorn who just wants it to all be over.

“Prom Night” by Libba Bray is definitely the most haunting in the collection, ending with a surprise for the reader and a promise of an unpleasant surprise for the characters.

A lot of these stories are fairly long, but they also are pretty deep. They explore different themes and in the end, I can’t say whether zombies or unicorns won. That will have to be up to you. But if you like fantasy/dystopian, you might enjoy this collection even though it’s almost ten years old.

Review: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez

Posted on by kellyvincent

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter book coverThis is a really interesting and unique book. It’s steeped in Mexican-America culture, but not really in a positive way—the main character, Julia, basically hates every aspect of it. To me this was interesting because one of the reasons she hates it is that she can’t navigate it well—she’s socially awkward, but not in the “standard” way (at least this was my take on it). No, she says and does the wrong thing for her culture, which might be okay in white American culture (though definitely not always).

The book opens just after Julia’s older sister, Olga, was killed when she accidentally walked in front of a moving semi. Julia is of course upset by this even though they weren’t particularly close anymore. But what has a more direct impact on her life is the way her family is handling it—her mother has completely withdrawn and her dad is as silent as he ever was. What’s more, Julia figures out that there was more to her sister than anyone thought, but she can’t figure out what was going on.

As things get back to normal, we can see that Julia’s still not okay, but it becomes clear that it’s not really about her sister. Her mother is incredibly controlling and doesn’t let Julia do much of anything. She’s supposed to want to stay home like any good Mexican daughter should want (and like her sister). But Julia’s “different”—as her mother puts it when she’s being nice about it—and wants other things out of life. First, she wants to be a writer and has befriended her English teacher, who thinks she’s one of his best students ever. She wants to go to college. She wants to go to an occasional party and maybe have some friends, even though she’s as awkward about that as she is with her family. Her mom doesn’t want any of those things for her.

One thing I have to mention is that Julia isn’t necessarily very likable. She’s not nice or very appreciative of the people around her and she generally says what on her mind without thinking much about it first. But as I’ve said here, she’s an interesting character and I did care about what happened to her because in some ways she's making the best of a bad situation (one that's bad for her, not necessarily everyone).

I think this is an important book because it teaches about a culture in a way that doesn’t sugar-coat things. It also addresses depression (which I didn’t expect, honestly—I knew we were skirting the topic but I thought that’s all we’d do). Julia’s a character worth getting to know, even if you’re not going to necessarily want to be her friend.

Review: Cut by Patricia McCormick

Posted on by kellyvincent

Cut book coverThis short book first came out eighteen years ago but it’s still relevant today. It’s (fairly obviously) about a girl who cuts herself.

The book starts with Callie in the hospital—a mental ward—sitting with her therapist. Pretty quickly, we learn the circumstances of when she cut herself for the first time. And then we learn that she’s not speaking, at all. She has to go to these group therapy sessions with other girls who are there for different reasons—some have eating issues, some drug issues. So, very early on we’re set up to wonder why she’s cutting herself, if she’s going to talk, and what’s going to happen with her group.

McCormick obviously did her research on cutting and what drives people to it. She portrays Callie sympathetically without romanticizing cutting in any way. And she addresses how cutting can make people feel better at times but shows how that’s a fleeting thing. And it stops working:

The pain is so sharp, so sudden, I catch my breath. There’s no rush, no relief. Just pain, a keen, pulsing pain… It’s never hurt like this before. And it’s never not worked.

Callie is shown to have depth even though we don’t really get to know her reasons for cutting any sooner than the therapist. The other girls are portrayed realistically, too, and there’s an interesting subplot involving one of the anorexic/bulimic girls. And even though we see her brother Sam only once in story time, he is a good character and critical to the story.

Check this one out if you’re up for a short but deep portrait of a troubled teen.

Review: Almost Love by Louise O’Neill

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Almost Love book coverAlthough I generally review only YA books here, I’m making an exception this week. Not because it’s St. Patrick’s Day and this book is by an Irish writer, but because Louise O’Neill is one of my favorite authors even though she hasn’t written that many books—I’ve read her other three, all of which are YA (and all of which I’ve reviewed here). Almost Love is about a woman in her mid-twenties and almost has the feel of New Adult, but not quite.

O’Neill is clearly great at creating main characters who aren’t really likable but who you still care about, as she does this in Almost Love like she did in Asking for It. Almost Love tells two parallel stories from Sarah’s life—one when she twenty-four and another three years later. In the “then” timeline, she’s recently graduated from Dublin Art College and is living with some of her buddies from school, including Fionn, who’s basically her best friend in Dublin. She’s from the Tipperary area and has friends back there, but she hardly ever goes home. Fionn is already becoming a semi-famous up-and-coming artist in Ireland and Sarah feels inferior and never works on her art anymore. She’s teaching school art and is still in the party mindset. But then she meets a student’s father and soon they begin a relationship that is doomed from the start, even though she doesn’t see it.

In the “now” timeline, she’s living with her boyfriend Oisín, who’s mother is a very famous and rich artist. Sarah’s still friends with Fionn but we know that she did something horrible in the earlier timeline that has strained their relationship. She also is still unable to make any art even though she’s still teaching it. Sarah was happy with Oisín in the beginning but there are seeds of trouble now and it’s not clear how things will go.

Sarah really isn’t a nice person. She’s self-absorbed and a pretty terrible friend and girlfriend. She’s also clearly a little depressed and feeling inferior to the important people around her, so she’s not a great joy to be around for the reader. However, despite all that, I still really wanted to see how things worked out with her. When she becomes obsessed with the student’s father and lets him mistreat her, I kept wondering if she’d finally see how horrible he is or if he would destroy her in the end. And I really hoped things would work out with Oisín because he seems like a really nice guy.

O’Neill is great at getting into her protagonists’ minds, and she does it here, too. We see Sarah change, and not always in a good way, and understand her bad choices even if we’re screaming at her to make different ones. And of course this is a feminist book, with several good lines that I really like. Here are a couple:

Being admired by him didn’t feel like when other men would look at her, teeth bared as if they wanted to devour her. Smile, love, men would shout as she passed them on the street. You’d be so much prettier if you smiled, as if performance of joy was the price Sarah had to pay for existing in a female body in a public space.

and

Maybe men didn’t want women to be funny, not the women they were having sex with anyway. Sarah suspected that men wanted a girlfriend to be ‘fun’, which seemed to mean she should find them funny and laugh at their jokes, never making any of her own.

If you’ve read O’Neill’s other work and like it, you should check this one out. It won’t disappoint. And if you’re new to her but like slightly challenging books, you should try it, too.

Review: The Radical Element (A Tyranny of Petticoats, #2) edited by Jessica Spotswood

Posted on by kellyvincent

The Radical Element book coverThis book is a collection of short stories set in various points of US history ranging from 1838 to 1984. The stories are all about girls bucking the system in some way, but those ways vary widely over the book. The stories are all realistic except for a couple that have some magical realism elements. The stories also run the gamut on the diversity spectrum, including girls of several different religions, several protagonists of color (and different ethnicities, too), at least one lesbian, one character in a wheelchair, and another on the autism spectrum.

“Daughter of the Book” by Dahlia Adler is about a Jewish girl stuck in Savannah, Georgia in the mid 19th century, where she’s forbidden to do the one thing she really wants to do—study. She’s restricted by both societal expectations—she should be sewing etc.—and actual religious limitations—women and girls were not allowed to study the Talmud, which is what all the men and boys around her were studying. I could definitely relate to her desire to study and would have felt as stifled as she did if I’d been in her situation, but the devotion to religion is definitely not something I relate to. Still, I enjoyed it.

The second story is “You’re a Stranger Here” by Mackenzi Lee. This one is about the early days of the Mormon community, starting right after Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed when the Mormons were in Nauvoo, Illinois. The main character works as a printer’s apprentice and she has to protect the original Book of Commandments. It’s an interesting story about a Mormon teen not entirely sure about her community and what she does for it, anyway.

“The Magician” by Erin Bowman is about a girl in the wild west of 1958. She’s masquerading as a boy and has become a card shark, getting all the newcomers who came to town. She doesn’t know her history but has an enigmatic note that leads her to believe she might have family in California. The story’s about how she’s going to get there.

The next story is “Lady Firebrand,” written by Megan Shepherd and set during the Civil War.  The main character is in Charleston, South Carolina visiting relatives. Unbeknownst to the confederate family, she’s not just some “pitiful girl” in a wheelchair. No, she has real skills and puts them to use at night disrupt shipments of commodities. She can’t do it without the help of her free black maid, however. This was one of my favorites of the collection.

Next comes “Step Right Up” by Jessica Spotswood. It’s set in Tulsa, Indian Territory (this was pre-statehood for Oklahoma) in 1905. The main character dreams of joining the circus as a high-wire walker and needs to make it happen because of family issues. I liked this one, too, even though the circus is historically sort of evil.

“Glamour” by Anna-Marie McLemore is set in LA of the 1920s. It’s an interesting one that uses a small dose of magic to make a point about the rampant racism of LA then (and hints to now). The main character is desperate to be one of Hollywood’s stars, but she’s Mexican so that would never fly. She uses some family magic to glamour her face so she looks white but has to deal with the consequences.

The following story is “Better for All the World” by Marieke Nijkamp. This one’s set in 1927 in Washington, D.C. It features a girl who’s clearly on the autism spectrum who wants to become a lawyer. It starts with her attending a trial over the forced sterilization of a woman deemed mentally deficient and identifying with the woman because of her own “differentness”. So it’s personal, but she’s also interested in the proceedings. She meets a young man at the court and he challenges her (though she challenges him right back).

“When the Moonlight Isn’t Enough” by Dhonielle Clayton is the other story that uses magical realism. The premise is that the main character and her family have eternal life by consuming moonlight. But she’s not sure that staying under the radar is the right thing to do since it’s the middle of World War II. They are black and her family feels like there’s no reason to get involved in a war when America treats black people so badly. She has to decide what to do.

“The Belle of the Ball” by Sarvenaz Tash is set in Brooklyn in 1952. The main character dreams of becoming a humor writer even though that’s no easy task for a girl of that time (or of any time, really). The story is steeped in I Love Lucy references, which I’m sure some people will love (they went over my head). The main character’s mom is set on her being presented at a debutante ball. So she has to go through all that, but it doesn’t keep her from seizing an opportunity to get noticed as a writer.

The next story is “Land of the Sweet, Home of the Brave” by Stacy Lee, which is set in Oakland, California in 1955. This one deals with a girl from Hawaii who is of mixed descent, including Chinese and Japanese. She is going to audition to be the face/mascot of a sugar brand even though she knows what she’s going to face in terms of overt racism.

Fast forward to the early 1970s for “The Birth of Susi Go-Go” by Meg Medina. It’s set in Queens and features another stifled girl with a conservative mom. She’s dreading the upheaval that will happen when her grandparents arrive from Cuba. But she ends up using that moment to redefine herself instead of getting shoved to the side like she feared.

“Take Me With U” by Sara Farizan is about a teen girl from Iran staying with family in Boston during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. She feels so out of place and just hangs out with her six-year-old cousin. She meets a hip girl from an upstairs apartment and gets introduced to all kinds of music and it really opens up her world in ways she’d never have expected. This ended up being one of my favorite in the collection, too.

Overall this was an enjoyable book with a bunch of very different stories. But they all remind us of how much we share in common despite the time period and who we are. If you’re a fan of historical YA or YA short story collections, this one should make you happy—especially if you like to see girls empowering themselves.

Review: Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

Posted on by kellyvincent

Darius the Great Is Not Okay book coverDarius the Great Is Not Okay is a unique book. Darius is an American kid whose mother is from Iran and whose father is Teutonic stock, and he is under treatment for depression. You don’t see a lot of YA featuring boys of color with depression, so I was curious to see how this one would play out. Also, most of the book is set in Iran, which is cool—I’ve only personally encountered one other YA book set there (not that I’ve looked extensively, but still).

Darius doesn’t fit in in Portland, Oregon and feels second-rate even in his own home. He does have an eight-year-old sister he adores, but his relationship with his father is rough. It’s clear from the very beginning that that causes him the most grief. Almost as soon as we’re first introduced to his father, Darius refers to him by his first and last name—Stephen Kellner—which is jarring. But he does this repeatedly, making it clear that he feels distant from his father.

In addition to things being difficult with his father, Darius has a bully (who also gets the first/last name treatment). He has one friend at school, a Persian girl. But she’s full-Persian rather than being “Fractional” as he thinks of himself, so he feels less than her. Interestingly, Darius has been on medication for depression since he was twelve, and that doesn’t seem to faze him much. He’s not 100% comfortable with it, but it doesn’t bother him as much as the other things do. His father also has to manage his own depression, so they’re very matter-of-fact about it. (I should mention that the depression representation is very good.)

Darius has a Skype relationship with his family back in Iran. But when it becomes clear that his grandfather’s brain tumor is getting worse, his family decides to visit the country for the first time. This is when the story really gets started—it’s the first time he really feels at home, after meeting his family and becoming friends with a boy named Sohrab from down the street, but he still has a lot to learn about his family, friendship, and himself.

Sohrab is a great friend to Darius and the two of them really bond. Darius spends most of his free time with him. It’s an interesting relationship from an American perspective, because Sohrab is very tactile. That’s realistic for a male relationship in Iran, even though it feels a little like there might hints of a romance between the two for an American reader. There are also hints that Darius’s “difference” might include being gay, but this never goes anywhere substantial, which made this a nice book about genuine friendship and family. Iran turns out to be where Darius finds himself and finally comes to an understanding with his father.

If you want a book about depression, or one about a kid who doesn’t fit in, or one about a half-Iranian kid going to Iran for the first time, etc. try this one out. All in one package. It’s very good.