Reviews

Review: The Geek’s Guide to Unrequited Love

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The Geek's Guide to Unrequited Love book coverWho knew you could write a book set almost entirely at a comic con? Apparently you can because Tash managed it.

Graham is in love with his best friend, Roxy, who’s also his next door neighbor. She’s either oblivious or in denial. But not only are they friends, they’re also a comics-generating partnership. She’s the artist and he’s the writer. And they are massive super-fans of a somewhat obscure sci-fi comics series that had a short-lived life. Think Firefly in terms of fandom, though the story is about an alien who comes to Earth and meets a man. There’s love involved.

The comics were written by a genius who’s made himself a hermit since the series ended. There is a lot of speculation about him. Right before their very own New York Comic Con starts, Graham and Roxy find out the elusive man is coming to do a talk, and they pretty much freak out. Graham plans to impress Roxy by getting exclusive tickets to the event and decided he will confess his love over the weekend.

However, things do not go as planned at all. They are so off-plan that Graham goes a little crazy, especially when he angry-drinks a few beers. It looks like maybe everything is damaged beyond repair. But is it? Sometimes the plan isn’t the right thing, after all.

This is a cute book, very light even though it deals with the pain of unrequited love (I’m not giving anything away since it’s in the title). It’s also fun and there are loads of pop culture references, some of which I think are made up, even though there were some I got. Still, the sense of fun is there throughout, and anyone who’s a bit of a fandom geek will recognize themselves and their friends, and will appreciate the book.

Review: Everybody Sees the Ants by A. S. King

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Everybody Sees the Ants book coverEverybody Sees the Ants is outwardly about bullying, but it’s really about many things, including masculinity, self-respect, and standing up for yourself. It’s really creative and like many of King’s books, has more than a touch of magical realism.

Lucky Linderman is a passive Pennsylvania kid. Unfortunately, he’s also got a big target on his back because the meanest bully in town has made it his personal mission to punish Lucky just for existing. Nader favors physical punishment, and the book’s inciting incident is when he injures Lucky significantly enough that Lucky’s mom takes him away to Arizona after school’s out. This introduces Lucky to two more adults—his aunt and uncle—who become important in his life.

Prior to the book starting, Lucky managed to get himself in hot water over an assignment. He was supposed to create a survey question for a class, and his offering was, “If you were going to commit suicide, what method would you choose?” Not the most well-thought-out thing, since it got the school and his parents all freaked out and convinced he was suicidal. And he isn’t overtly suicidal, even if he is supremely unhappy with his life. But there are definitely red flags that go up throughout the book that indicate to the reader that things aren’t quite healthy in Lucky’s head, even if he doesn’t see it himself.

It is significant to the story that none of these supposedly well-meaning adults seem to think anything needs to be done about Nader, or at least they don’t do anything about it. His father avoids Lucky and his mom by spending all his time at work; his mom avoids dealing with anything—including her own marital troubles—by swimming lap after lap at the pool.

Passivity is a major theme in the book, and Lucky has to learn to overcome his. His grandfather helps him through his dreams, where Lucky attempts to rescue the man who’s officially MIA in Laos from the Vietnam War. It’s in the dreams where Lucky actually feels powerful. His grandfather even helps him see that he’s not crazy even though he sees ants—a little group of characters that appeared because of all the stress with Nader. They follow Lucky around and comment on his life, giving voice to his fears. As the name of the book implies, everybody’s got a little bit of the crazy in them because that’s part of being alive—all people have some things in their lives that make them feel out of control.

One of the great strengths of the book is the numerous supporting characters. As you’d expect in a book from King, the characters are all deeply drawn and interesting. The adults especially are as flawed as Lucky (if not more). The writing style is uncomplicated and it fits Lucky’s voice perfectly. There isn’t really a strong plot per se, but the story doesn’t suffer for it as we live Lucky’s complicated life with him.

Overall, Everybody Sees the Ants is a solid exploration of bullying and building self-respect—and it’s funny, too.

Review: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

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We Were Liars book coverLockhart is definitely a writer I admire, and one of the things I like most about her is the fact that she is so versatile. All her books (or series, at least) are so different from each other. That’s some skill.

So I was looking forward to reading her psychological suspense. We Were Liars is about Cadence Sinclair and the rest of the Sinclair clan. Specifically, she spends all her summers on the family island with her cousins (Mirren and Johnny) plus the nephew of her aunt’s live-in boyfriend, Gat.

Cadence gives us a quick history of her childhood on the island, which is where the families come together for the summer only—they don’t see each other at all outside of summer. Then we get to “summer fifteen” when she and the others are fifteen and they hang around, swim, and talk. Just generally laze. But there’s more going on. For one, Cadence is in love with Gat, who supposedly has a girlfriend back home, but the two start up anyway. Everything is grand.

And then one day it’s not.

Cadence is narrating the book as a seventeen-year-old. She suffered some traumatic brain injury in summer fifteen and all she knows about what happened was that she’d been found basically washed up on the beach in her underwear. Now she gets horrific headaches and is half-addicted to pain pills. She doesn’t go back to the island until summer seventeen, when she’s still desperately trying to remember what happened. It starts coming back in bits and pieces until we finally get the final fragment.

We Were Liars seems to be kind of a polarizing book, looking at Goodreads. So I feel a little odd reporting that I wasn’t super-wowed by the book. I liked it and I’m glad I read it, but I didn’t really feel strongly about it. Everyone knows there’s a twist near the end and some people see it coming and some don’t. My experience was kind of odd—I didn’t specifically see it coming, but once I hit it, I didn’t feel particularly surprised. Maybe I was in a weird mood when I got there. I don’t know. Still, it’s the kind of story you think about even after you put the book down.

If you like psychological thrillers and YA, or Lockhart, give this one a shot.

Review: The V-Word edited by Amber J. Keyser

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The V-Word book coverThe V-Word is a collection of writing about real first-time sexual experiences. It’s not even specifically YA, though it will definitely be of interest to a lot teenagers. Everyone wants to know what it’s like, after all, even if they’re not intending to find out from personal experience any time soon.

The essays run the gamut from good experience to bad, but most capture the awkwardness of the first time. All the experience are women’s, with the writers looking back to high school, college, or even later. Most of the articles address sex with boys/men, but there are several about lesbian experiences. Some of the girls wanted to shed their virginity. Others were more resistant. Some experienced abuse. One waited until she was married. I won’t go into the details of any of them because it’s best to read them as-is.

After the experience essays are some extras: a short essay about how girls should take charge of their sex lives by: knowing their bodies, knowing what turns them on, knowing what they’re up against (in terms of society’s expectations, ever-present porn, and lack of reasonable sex ed), safe sex, knowing how to talk about it, and knowing when they’re ready. Then there’s an interview with a teen media specialist that talks about how most media targeting teens doesn’t address the female sexual experience at all, usually fading to black; labels like slut and prude frame much of the conversation; and several other interesting things. Finally there is a list of resources for both girls and their parents.

I’d recommend this to all teen girls at least, say, fifteen. Or anyone who’s really curious.

Review: Once and for All by Sarah Dessen

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Once and for All book coverDessen is one of my favorite YA authors because she paints such realistic teens. Yes, they’re white and usually reasonably well off with mostly functional families around them. But still, she digs deep into their lives and makes even an average girl interesting.

Eighteen-year-old Louna Barrett is the daughter of a very successful wedding planner and works most of the weddings herself. She doesn’t necessarily love it but it’s what she knows and she’s good at it, and she only has to do it until she goes off to college. Louna is incredibly guarded, due to a tragedy that we know very little about for the first part of the book. When she meets Ambrose, she can’t stand him because he’s an irresponsible hassle. When her mom hires him to work for the company for the summer, Louna can’t believe it. She’s got to work with this idiot.

Louna and Ambrose first meet at his mother’s wedding, where she has to retrieve him for pictures with his mother and the rest of the family. Her first thought is that he’s really good-looking, but her second thought is that he was too annoying. She says:

He was like that upside-down exclamation point at the beginning of a sentence in Spanish, the mere appearance of which warned of something complicated ahead.

He’s outside flirting with a couple girls instead of inside where he needs to be, and Louna strong-arms him inside. Later he asks her to dance and makes it clear he’s interested in her even though she turns him down. So she isn’t happy to be stuck working with him, but she tries to make the best of it by offloading some of her work to him.

Once it gets going, the book alternates between the current day, where Louna’s dealing with Ambrose, and flashbacks to her time with Ethan, her first real love. We know something really bad happened to him and it takes a little while before we get the full story. Still, we know that Ethan was a great guy and it’s no wonder Louna can’t get over him and move on. In the present day, Louna and Ambrose make a bet that requires him to date just one girl for seven weeks and her to date multiple guys over the same period.

I have to admit that this wasn’t my favorite Dessen novel. I never really warmed up to Ambrose. I mean, it’s not like he was a horrible guy, but he did do some jerky things, even if sometimes it was passively—by not doing or saying something he should have. And Louna herself is a little on the bland side.

That’s not to say that the book doesn’t have strengths. A lot of people will love the background of all the weddings, and I admit even though I find weddings tedious, those elements were actually interesting to me because it went totally behind the scenes and aired some of the dirty laundry. And Louna’s best friend, Jilly, is entertaining and very likable. And supportive. Louna’s mom and her business partner, William, are both good characters, too.

So I’d definitely recommend this for Dessen’s fans, as well as anyone who really digs weddings.

Review: The Nature of Jade by Deb Caletti

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The Nature of Jade book coverI always like a good book that deals with mental health issues, as long as it does so realistically and non-preachily.* The Nature of Jade fits the bill.

Jade’s a very open character, revealing a lot about herself early on, and she’s frank as the book proceeds, too. She has Panic Disorder and struggles to keep herself under control a lot of the time. She has found that watching elephants calms her down, so she keeps the Seattle zoo’s 24-hour elephant webcam on, which is where she first sees a boy in a red jacket coming regularly to visit, a toddler in tow. She becomes mildly infatuated and even goes there hoping to meet him, but he doesn’t show up again. In the end, she volunteers with the elephants and becomes a bit of an elephant care expert.

Then the red-jacket-boy shows up again and she actually meets him and learns his name. They start seeing each other and she really likes him, but her instincts tell her that something is up, though she doesn’t know what. When she finds out, it’s a bit of a shock. Other readers might guess, but I didn’t. Also, once I found out, I assumed the book would go one direction, but it went another.

The Nature of Jade is only my second Caletti book, but I consider myself a fan. She creates wonderfully deep characters who go through interesting journeys. Even the non-viewpoint characters are fleshed out really well. Her writing is nice—great setting details, realistic dialogue that fits each character, and the internal thoughts are powerful. Take this:

Some guys give you the edgy feeling of dogs behind chain-link fences, and some give you the nervousness of high heels you’re not used to. But Sebastian—he makes me feel like I just buried my nose in warm laundry.

She also made me laugh (with understanding) with lines like this:

Blushing is so unfair. Might as well wear a sign: WHAT YOU THINK MATTERS TO ME.

I have to mention the bizarre similarities between this book and E. Lockhart’s Ruby Oliver books, which I don’t feel bad about because the two of them expressed the same surprise (I wrote about seeing them speak here). But it’s uncanny—neither knew about the other’s book when she wrote her book (the road to book-completion to publication is long, and the first Ruby Oliver book came out in 2005 and The Nature of Jade in early 2007). Ruby also lives in Seattle, has anxiety attacks, sees a therapist, and volunteers at Seattle’s zoo. Ruby lives in a houseboat and Jade’s boyfriend lives in one. Also, on a side note, there’s a guy named Titus in the story and Lockhart’s got a major character with that name in Fly on the Wall. Weirdness.

Anyway, that’s not important. If you like books about complex people facing difficult situations, you should enjoy this one.

* According to Merriam-Webster, this really is a word.

Review: All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

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All the Bright Places book coverAll the Bright Places sort of destroyed me for a day, it was so emotionally demanding. I mean, the story took me through the wringer and once I’d finished it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and reliving the emotions I’d felt while reading it. I came to the book without being aware of the hype and the comparisons to Eleanor and Park and The Fault in Our Stars. Despite that, Eleanor and Park was exactly the book it made me think of, not because of the story, but because of the emotional depth and the journey it took me on.

Mental illness and suicide are at the forefront of everything in the book, but the story goes beyond the mental illness to tell a story about two teenagers who seem unbelievably real. Violet Markey was in a car accident that killed her sister several months before the book begins. Violet blames herself for what happened and has pretty much stopped living. She just floats from day to day and slips further into depression. The things she used to care about most don’t matter to her at all anymore. One day her feet carry her to the top of her school’s six-story-tall bell tower.

That’s where she encounters Theodore Finch, the school’s resident “freak,” as the bullies call him. But Finch isn’t a freak—he’s a kid with a serious and treatable mental illness that he doesn’t understand or want to acknowledge. We don’t initially have a name for what’s wrong with him, but he loses track of time, sometimes seems to wake up with no memory of how he got places, goes days without sleeping, and at times has so much energy that he has to run for miles to feel normal again. It’s not hard to figure it out if you know a little about mental illness, but it doesn’t get named until close to the end.

Finch is self-aware despite being afraid of labels, which he thinks will lead to being mistaken for a mental illness. Here he is thinking about a breakdown he had:

It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic when they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other recognizable just to make it simple for me and also for them.

He’s not wrong.

Despite Finch’s obsession with death, I was convinced throughout that he does want to live, but that he needs to learn how. And he’s trying. Although he resists the efforts of the school counselor he’s required to see, there are moments when he’s almost honest with him. And one time he tells Violet that he gets into these moods that he can’t shake:

“Kind of black, sinking moods. I imagine it’s what being in the eye of a tornado would be like. All calm and blinding at the same time. I hate them.”

It’s a huge moment because he’s actually being open and honest about how he feels. But Violet doesn’t have enough experience with him to recognize it. She chalks it up to being a teenager. Earlier in the book, he describes his father’s black moods:

“Like, the blackest black. Like, no moon, no stars, storm’s coming black.

She doesn’t make the connection right away—but it’s sad, because why would she? She’s not a psychiatrist. She’s just a kid with not much real-world experience.

If Finch isn’t going to get through to Violet, someone who deeply cares about him, what about his family? Violet and Finch’s families are radically different. Violet’s parents are engaged with her even though they don’t really know what to do for her. Admittedly, they don’t catch on to how badly Violet’s handling her sister’s death—they don’t see the depression for what it is. Probably they should have gotten her into counseling other than the school counselor. But it’s not unbelievable that they wouldn’t think of it.

Finch’s family, on the other hand, is horrible. He has a physically abusive father and a super-detached mother who is herself likely suffering from depression after being dumped by Finch’s father. She pays no attention to Finch or his sisters and it’s a deeply frustrating situation for the reader throughout the book. It’s so obvious that something is really, really wrong. But again, it’s entirely believable that a family like this could exist. It’s also clear that whatever afflicts Finch also afflicts his father and that his father would never, ever admit to having a mental illness.

I’ve talked mostly about Finch here, but Violet’s journey is just as significant. With his help, she learns to live again—she overcomes things that scare her and starts wanting to enjoy herself again. Rather than living a day at a time, she starts planning ahead. It’s a very realistic and believable recovery, given that her depression had a specific trigger.

Although this book is about mental illness and suicide, it’s not overly message-y. It’s a great story written really well. It is told in dual perspective, and Violet and Finch’s voices are totally different and true to their situations. Niven loads the book with little details that make the characters and settings authentic and relatable (this is one of the things that makes it like Eleanor and Park for me—because Rowell is a master of important details). Her descriptions throughout are excellent. Here’s Finch thinking about how he sometimes feels:

[T]he headaches are part of it. It’s like my brain is firing so fast that it can’t keep up with itself. Words. Colors. Sounds. Sometimes everything else fades into the background and all I’m left with is sound. I can hear everything, but not just hear it—I can feel it too. But then it can come on all at once—the sounds turn into light, and the light goes too bright, and it’s like it’s slicing me in two, and then comes the headache. But it’s not just a headache I feel, I can see it, like it’s made up of a million colors, all of them blinding.

I really cannot recommend this book enough. It’s important and well-executed and everyone should read it for insight into authentic depression and suicidal ideations, as well as for the good story.

Review: Break by Hannah Moskowitz

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Break book coverThis book distressed me. Probably not in what could be said to be a good way, but in the right way (the way it was intended to).

The book is about a boy who is intentionally breaking his bones because he knows they grow back stronger. Jonah’s on a mission to break every single one in his body. This just gave me the willies every time he talked about it, or broke another. It’s hard to willfully break your own bones. I’m pretty sure that not many people can intentionally hurt themselves. It’s unnatural, after all.

So, it’s distressing to read about.

On top of his bone-breaking mission, Jonah has a complicated life: his parents fight all the time, he has an 8-month-old brother who screams constantly, and his 16-year-old brother, Jesse, is severely allergic to many foods. And Jonah feels responsible for taking care of Jesse. Jonah’s also got his friend Naomi, who films all his breaking, and a not-girlfriend named Charlotte who he makes out with.

We know going into the book that Jonah’s doing the bone-breaking because everything’s falling apart around him. And more than the first half is just more of that and all his family troubles and responsibilities. But then he gets found out about two-thirds of the way through the book and everything gets a little crazy. Unsurprisingly, Jonah’s self-destructive choices become a mental health issue and that has big consequences for him.

I’ll be honest—I’m not sure if I liked this book. It was definitely well-written (lots of realistic tough moments, well-drawn and believable characters, evocative use of language, and more). But the sense of discomfort was with me the whole time I was reading it. And once Jonah’s mental illness starts getting addressed, I felt like several improbable things happened. I also thought the ending left several things unresolved.

It still could easily appeal to a lot of readers, though. It’s definitely gritty and the characters are complicated and interesting. A lot of people will be able to relate to Jonah’s attempt at dealing with his problems in the wrong way.

Favorite Reads of 2017

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I thought I’d go over my favorite YA books that I read in 2017. (These aren’t necessarily books published in 2017.)

E. Lockhart tops the list with her Ruby Oliver Series. The four books (plus the prequel in Not Like I’m Jealous or Anything) are so good—funny while dealing with some significant issues. See the review for the series or the one for Not Like I’m Jealous or Anything.

Next comes One of Us Is Lying by Karen McManus, which is clever, fast-paced, and has more depth than I expected from a thriller. See the review here.

I really enjoyed Unbecoming by Jenny Downham. It also delves deep into the complicated life of a teenager but has extra layers dedicated to her mother and grandmother (both of which are interesting despite the fact that this is a YA book). You can see the review of the book for more. The other book by Downham that I read this year, Before I Die, also makes the list. This is a gut-wrenching book about, well, dying. I reviewed it here.

Lockhart shows up again again with The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, which was technically a reread in 2017, but I think that counts. Frankie’s a fantastic character who takes something to the kind of extremes we’ve all probably wanted to go to at some point (but have been too chicken). The review is here.

One last that I’d like to mention is The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth. This is a seriously long book about being a lesbian in a harsh, not-understanding place. But it digs deep and keeps you interested. See the review here.

 

A Bonus

The view from my dining room window on Christmas day:

the march of the snow-capped bushes
They’re Coming…

I swear there didn’t use to be so many of them. Clearly, they’re multiplying.

Review: Not Like I’m Jealous or Anything edited by Marissa Walsh

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Not Like I'm Jealous or Anything book coverThis is really a weird little collection. I got it for the Ruby Oliver prequel short story by E. Lockhart. But it has six short stories, four essays, a poem, a tongue-in-cheek quiz, and a few bonus lists of jealousy-related things (music, books, movies, etc.). My favorite extra is the list of names of green Crayola crayons.

It’s weird for several reasons, but one is that although it’s supposed to be a YA title as far as I can gather (since most of the stories deal with the teenage years), the very first story is about a girl’s tenth birthday party. She’s jealous of her richer friends because her family can’t afford a fancy party. What’s a middle grade story doing in a YA book? I have no idea.

The second story is the Ruby Oliver one, and its great if you already love Roo. It’s about her involvement in a bake sale, when she’s paired up with her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend and finds herself maddeningly jealous of her.

There are several more stories: one about a girl whose boyfriend becomes infatuated with someone else; one about a girl who’s so in love with the circumstances surrounding her relationship with her boyfriend that she can’t deal when those circumstances change; one about a girl who ends up being jealous of the attention her little sister gets from the guy she herself likes (and about getting back at a bully principal); and finally one about a girl who’s jealous boyfriend drives her to find a well of courage within herself.

There are a couple of essays from friends Ned Vizzini and Marty Beckerman. Vizzini talks about death and envy, which is sad in retrospect since he committed suicide a few years ago (the essay probably can’t be taken quite at face value). Specifically, he’s jealous of Beckerman for being better at apparently everything. Beckerman’s essay is the second really weird thing about this collection. It’s full of f-bombs and innuendo, which is just odd in a collection with a middle grade story. Otherwise, it’s about being jealous of Vizzini because he’s better at everything. Two additional essays deal with sibling jealousy and overcoming jealousy of practically everything you don’t have.

I’d recommend this book mostly for the Ruby Oliver story, but if you are particularly interested in jealousy, you might find it entertaining overall. The stories and essays are a mix of serious and funny, with a dose of weird thrown in for good measure.

Review: Stay by Deb Caletti

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Stay book coverIf you’re sick of all the romanticized obsessive love that’s in YA literature today, this is the antidote.

17-year-old Clara Oates goes with her father to a small coastal Washington town from Seattle to escape an obsessive and increasingly dangerous ex-boyfriend, Christian. The plan is to hide out for a while and hope Christian moves on. The book tells the story from that point, but also goes back and gives us the history of the relationship, from the first night they met. The first chapter opens with that very first meeting before bringing us back to present time, where Clara and her dad are getting settled in the Airbnb-type house they’ll be staying in and trying to figure out what the guy who owns it does for a living.

Her dad is a well-known mystery writer so hiding out is a little iffy. Still, they hope it works. While there, Clara gets a job and meets another boy and we see her really starting to move on. All while she goes over the increasingly disturbing history of her relationship with Christian.

Caletti could have been lazy but she gives us numerous subplots in the present-day that keep us intrigued. And something I loved about the book is that although Clara is clearly wiser than she was before Christian, there are still many things she doesn’t know, particularly about her mother and her father. So she still has more to learn, even though at the beginning of the book she already thinks she’s learned everything she needs to.

The voice in the book is wonderful. It’s told in first person and Clara is open and so real. She’s also self-aware at the point she’s narrating the book, but she’s telling the story of herself going from a fairly naïve girl to a much wiser one. It’s unusual in its use of footnotes, which adds something kind of fun, because Clara gives us little facets of the story that aren’t necessarily required but are interesting. For instance:

** Telling people about your dead mother is always delicate. You have to be prepared for them to spill their sympathy as if it happened yesterday. … I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing.

Caletti’s writing is beautiful and it’s no fluke that she was a National Book Award finalist. The characters are all well-drawn and distinct through witty and natural dialogue.

I’d recommend this for all teens who are dating or considering it because it provides a very relatable and realistic (but not preachy) cautionary tale about possessive and obsessive love—the kind that leads to long-term domestic violence. And too much of YA features those kinds of relationships as admirable. They’re not, and this book shows why.

Review: Fly on the Wall by E. Lockhart

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Fly on the Wall book coverHave you ever wished to be a fly on the wall somewhere totally inaccessible to you? Gretchen Yee does, and, strangely and without explanation, she gets her wish.

It sounds weird—and it is—though it starts off a simple story about a girl attending a competitive arts high school in Manhattan. Gretchen is a little obsessed with superheroes—reading them, drawing them, and wanting to be one (who doesn’t, at least a little). She’s a bit of an oddball. She’s awkward around and confused about boys, although there is one she particularly likes, Titus. She has a single friend, Katya, who has become a little distant recently. Then some unexpected turmoil starts at home, causing her to have to take a hard look at her mess of a bedroom and really her life. She’s a bit of a pack rat but can’t imagine getting rid of any of the stuff she has.

Gretchen’s an interesting and well-developed character full of contradictions. She seems a little shy, but she’s not. She’s not afraid to tell of the realtor who asks if she’s adopted when she’s with her white mom (her dad’s Chinese). She’s a little immature for 16 and needs to grow up. But boys… boys just frustrate her. She wants to understand Titus but can’t figure him out.

One day after class, she manages to initiate a chat with him about a weekend museum assignment, which provides a perfect opportunity to suggest they go together. She chickens out, but not before making an observation I loved:

Titus bends over to pick his pencil off the floor. There’s a strip of skin between his shirt and the top of his jeans in the back. I can see the top of his boxers. Plain light blue.

She can’t figure out boys as a whole, especially after an interaction she has with Titus, her ex-boyfriend Shane, and three other guys:

As they move past us, Shane bangs a locker hard, just to make noise, and I jump.

Why do boys do stuff like that?

Then Shane pinches her butt and she wants Katya to tell her what it means. Katya tells her it means nothing and not to worry about it.

In frustration, Gretchen says, “I wish I was a fly on the wall of the boys’ locker room.” That evening when she goes home to an empty house because both of her parents are out of town, she reads some Kafka and bam. Fly.

She witnesses exchanges she never expected and finally comes to understand some things about Titus and boy politics. It’s not at all like she expected.

The book is a little unusual in style, alternating fonts when going between inner monologue and real-time story. I wasn’t really sure what the point of that was, to be honest, and I found it a little distracting. But then again, it sort of suited the general strangeness of the book. I mean, the girl becomes a fly for a week and we never come to learn how. But it’s fine—we just accept it and enjoy the book for what it is. An interesting story about a girl coming to terms with sexuality, really (without any sex involved, though there were a fair number of “gherkins” in sight).

This is definitely a fast read, coming in at under 200 pages. Even though there are fantasy elements, I still think of it as contemporary more than fantasy. Anyone who’s enjoyed other Lockhart books will like this one, and so will anyone looking for a complex 16-year-old girl trying to figure things out.

Review: How to Hang a Witch by Adriana Mather

Posted on by kellyvincent

How to Hang a Witch book coverI joined one of those new monthly book clubs where they send you a book you aren’t specifically expecting, and this was the first one they sent me. I hadn’t heard of it, although I was at Barnes and Noble the other day and they had about 5 outward-facing copies on display, so I’m guessing it’s gaining in popularity. It’s certainly got good reviews on Amazon (4.8 stars, which you rarely see).

It’s an interesting book about the Salem Witch Trials and the modern-day consequences—and how that relates to bullying. Which ies a really interesting take on the situation. Mather (the author) is a direct descendent of Cotton Mather, who is famous as the instigator of the Trials. So her main character, Samantha, is also one of his direct descendants. She moves to Salem into her dead grandmother’s house with her stepmother after her father has gone into a mysterious coma.

This triggers what appears to be an old curse that’s only active when all of the descendants of the major players of the Trials are in town. There’s a group of goth kids—four girls an a boy—who are known as The Descendants, because their direct ancestors were the ones executed in the Trials. Since Sam is a direct descendant of the man who started it all, they hate her. And the rest of the town, including many of the school’s teachers and administrators, also dislike her.

That’s partially where the connection to bullying comes in. Mather’s point is that its somewhat arbitrary—it can happen to anyone for any reason, but the community as a whole has to support it. This rings true for me, as although we usually view bullying as a kids’ problem, in many cases adults are nearly as complicit. In may own experience of being bullied, many adults explicitly blamed me while others just looked the other way. In her Author’s Note, Mather says, “Group agreement and group silence are equally as deadly.”

Anyway, in the book, The Descendants don’t like Sam and they blame her for the string of deaths and bad luck that have been hitting their families since she arrived. But Sam befriends a prickly ghost living in her house who also helps her uncover the cause of all the deaths, which can be traced back to the time of the Trials. Sam tries to tell everyone that the curse isn’t new and that she and her father are both in as much danger as anyone else, but instead they continue to blame her. Somehow she has to convince The Descendants to work with her to break the curse.

Sam is a complex character trying to make sense of her past. She’s grown up believing she’s cursed, so when she finds out she sort of really is, it’s a shock and she has to figure out how to deal. Her stepmother is also interesting because it’s really hard to tell if she’s good or bad or what. The ghost and his formal way of speaking are entertaining. Also, I should mention that there were moments late at night when I had to put the book down because I was getting a little creeped out. I get a tiny bit superstitious in the dark. A ghost, creepy woods that Sam is sensible enough to be scared of, and magic.

Review: The Ruby Oliver Quartet by E. Lockhart

Posted on by kellyvincent

The Boyfriend List book coverThis series contains some of the most readable books I’ve come across in a while. I devoured all four of them in a week (while reading some other books, too). Admittedly, they are short and I was trying to catch up on my Goodreads challenge (finally 82 books in, 0 behind at the time of writing) right before NaNo started because I don’t get much reading done in November, but still. I couldn’t put the last three down and read them in one day each. The first one took me three days because I have a job and other stuff I have to do.

The Boy Book book coverThe premise of the series sounds a little underwhelming—fifteen-year-old Ruby is having serious boy and friend trouble. But there’s so much more to it than that. First off, due to some real nastiness on the part of her boyfriend of six months and best friend of ten years, she loses both as well as her two other really good friends. Basically, her friend Kim steals her boyfriend. They do this highly transparent thing where he breaks up with Ruby and a few days later is going out with Kim, and everyone acts like they behaved nobly because technically he and Ruby were already broken up. Then because of some weirdness, Ruby ends up going to the dance with the ex in question and kisses him—he kisses her back but when they’re caught, claims it was all her. So then everyone thinks she’s a tramp. As a result of all this, she starts having panic attacks and ends up visiting a shrink twice a week, which results in something that only makes her situation worse. In the first book (The Boyfriend List), her shrink has her write up a list of all boys she’s had any kind of romantic or quasi-romantic contact with. She comes up with a list of fifteen but then not-very-cleverly discards an old copy of the list, which Kim finds and distributes to everyone at the school. Suddenly Ruby’s a “slut.”

The Treasure Map of Boys book coverYou can imagine how this would be stressful. But it sets up a pretty good story. The first book is structured in an interesting way, too. Although it’s basically told in chronological order, each chapter is one of the fifteen boys on the list and focuses on explaining that past situation plus the one in current story time. In the second book (The Boy Book), she’s got one of her friends back and a new one, and a potential boyfriend, but that goes south when she has to turn him down because her friend likes him. The third book (The Treasure Map of Boys) is mostly about that same boy, but the nature of real friendship comes up, too. The final book (Real Live Boyfriends) delves more into the nature of relationships.

Real Live Boyfriends book coverWhile the series itself has a clear arc, each book also tells a complete story. Ruby herself is hilarious. She’s quirky (I feel like that has become a sort of cliched description, but in this case it’s true) without being weird in a bad way. She’s troubled and going through some pretty horrible stuff, but it doesn’t get to her as much as it might others. The other characters are also well-drawn, all through Ruby’s eyes. The books are set in Seattle, too, which is fun because I’m nearby and sort of know some of the places they talk about. The dialogue is fantastic and Lockhart perfectly captures Ruby’s world. Lockhart’s clearly one of the most talented YA authors around right now. I can’t believe it took me so long to find her.