fiction

Review: Stay Sweet by Siobhan Vivian

Posted on by kellyvincent

Stay Sweet book coverI heard about this book and put it at the top of my list since it was about a girl working in an ice cream stand, similar to one of my characters. I didn’t quite pick up the authenticity tidbits I’d hoped for (the situations were different), but I got to experience a good story.

Amelia is going to be head girl at the Meade Creamery ice cream stand for its summer season in their vacation town before she heads off to college. The Meade Creamery has always only hired girls, ever since its founder Molly Meade opened it after World War II. Amelia and her best friend, Cate, have put their time in, starting as freshman and working there through their senior year. But just before the stand is scheduled to open, Amelia makes a shocking discovery that results in a boy—Grady Meade—taking over the stand. Molly’s hands-off management style no longer applies.

Amelia takes her head girl duties seriously which eventually causes friction with the more free-spirited Cate. But even more significant is the fact that Amelia has to work with Grady to learn to make the four ice cream flavors the stand offers. In the process, she discovers Molly’s diary, which she reads as the summer progresses. Consequently, we get two different storylines—Amelia’s and Molly’s. Molly’s comes with a surprise at the end, and Amelia’s friendship with Cate is tested as her relationship with Grady develops unexpectedly.

I’ll be honest—this is a fairly quiet story, but it surprises you at the end with a feminist twist. And the ice cream theme is fun and gives it a summer feel. I liked the story and the quest for the recipe that Amelia and Grady go on. Grady is a good character even though I found him kind of off-putting at times, but he grows and you learn more about why he’s the way he is. Cate is also a well-developed character. And of course Amelia is complex and interesting.

Pick this up for next summer, or for a reminder in the middle of winter. You will want to go get ice cream, though.

Review: The Firebird Trilogy by Claudia Gray

Posted on by kellyvincent

A Thousand Pieces of You book coverThis is the first sci-fi I’ve read in a while, but I quite enjoyed it, despite some reservations I had and will address below. I consumed these three books as audiobooks, which I think were well-executed, all by the same narrator.

The overall plot involves dimensional travel. The idea is that there are an infinite number of dimensions (fully-formed worlds) that make up the multiverse. The idea is that all dimensions derive from the same starting point, but every possible variation creates a new dimension that proceeds from that point and so on. As an example, if someone is presented with a choice, choice A will continue with the same dimension, but choice B will spin up a new dimension that’s identical up to the point immediately before the choice. Apply this choice-based dimension-splitting to every single person who’s ever lived and you can imagine “infinity” is really incomprehensibly large and always growing.

Marguerite Caine is the artist daughter of two scientist parents who have invented a way to travel through the dimensions with the help of their two graduate students, Theo and Paul. In the first book, A Thousand Pieces of You, Marguerite’s father is apparently murdered by Paul before he fled to another dimension, the first to do so. Theo and Marguerite take off after him, intending to kill him in revenge. One of the dimensions Marguerite spends a great deal of time in is a Russia where the House of Romanovs never fell. And to her surprise, Marguerite is in the middle of it all. It’s also where a love triangle between Marguerite and Theo and Paul starts.  The book eventually wraps up fairly tidily, with only a hint at a sequel.

Ten Thousand Skies Above You book coverIn the second book, Ten Thousand Skies Above You, Marguerite deals with a major conspiracy (I’m trying to not give away much here) involving multiple dimensions and her in a way she never would have expected. She travels to several different dimensions in this one. The conspiracy unfolds more and more, which is interesting and complicated. The love story gets complicated. Then the book ends on the worst kind of cliffhanger. At first everything seems great, and then in the last sentence, you discover it’s not.

Reading the final book, A Million Worlds with You, is necessary once you finish the second, because of the killer cliffhanger. Marguerite again travels to different dimensions here, this time trying to save her other selves, who are all in danger because of the conspiracy. This book has some heart-breaking moments and also explores the ethics of dimensional travel a little more than the earlier two. The series is effectively wrapped up, with an epilogue to give us an even more illuminating conclusion.

Now, to my reservations. I have to admit that there are some pretty significant logic and scientific weaknesses in the worldbuilding of the book. For instance, each person travels by inhabiting the body of their counterpart in the new dimension, the original person’s consciousness getting pushed down, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I was really bugged in the first book by the fact that I wondered how they could be gone more than a couple days if nobody was feeding and watering their body in their original dimension (this was eventually explained, but not until near the end). More importantly, the big conspiracy involves many dimensions, but they’re all ones where all the main characters exist, which would actually be a tiny (infinitesimal, really) fraction of all the dimensions out there—why would these be so important? There are more things, too, that bugged me as I went along. But I chose to ignore them as the books proceeded because the story overall was well-told and interesting. If you just accept that this is how things are, you can go with it. But if you start the first one and these things nag at you and you can’t get past it, you should know that the latter books just get even more hard to believe.

A Million Worlds with You book coverAdditionally, I felt like the characters ignored the ethical ramifications of interrupting other people’s lives in other dimensions. This does eventually get somewhat addressed, but it bugged me throughout (especially some of Marguerite’s decisions along the way). And I should mention that some of Marguerite’s choices didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Still, although I clearly have reservations, I did like the series overall. If you’re a fan of alternate history stories, this one will especially appeal to you.

Review: The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle

Posted on by kellyvincent

The Great American Whatever book coverI had heard of Federle because of his Better Nate Than Never middle grade series, but I’ve never read them. So The Great American Whatever was my introduction to him. It’s about a movie- and screenwriting-obsessed sixteen-year-old boy named Quinn. About five months before the book opens, Quinn’s sister Annabeth was killed in a car wreck, which has him devastated and not particularly functional. She was his filmmaking partner—they had a production company called Q&A Productions and Quinn envisioned them going to Hollywood together some day.

Now, he hasn’t been to school since the accident, which happened the day before Christmas break, and summer’s already started with its incessant heat (he’s in Pittsburgh). In the beginning of the book, Quinn’s long-time friend Geoff shows up to force him out of the house. This sets off a series of events that finally brings Quinn out of his shell (and out of the closet, even though everybody already “knew”). Geoff takes Quinn to a college party, where he meets love interest Amir, and things take off from there.

I feel like there isn’t a strong plot in the book, but Quinn does have a clear coming-of-age character arc. He learns better to look at things from other people’s perspectives and matures quite a bit in other ways. He’s a good character in that he’s very flawed and still relatable. He’s rather self-absorbed and a bit on the arrogant side, at least in his two known subjects (i.e. movies and screenwriting), but he's vulnerable and cares about his family and friends. His friend Geoff is a generally good guy who turns out to have a secret that blows Quinn away and drives them temporarily apart. Amir is fine as a love interest, though he was kind of bland. Quinn’s sister features a lot in the book through flashbacks, and she is very interesting and more complex than you realize at first. Still, Quinn’s voice and attitude make the book what it is—funny and full of movie references any film buff will love.

So if you like coming-of-age stories, especially those with coming out storylines, you will probably like this.

Review: The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis

Posted on by kellyvincent

The FEmale of the Species book coverThe first thing I have to say is that this is an unusual book. It’s about violence and rape culture, which means it’s wasn’t easy to read. But it felt worth reading.

We know from the beginning that Alex Craft has killed someone in the past. Over time we learn that the way she did it was pretty brutal. But we also understand why she did it—the guy got away with raping and murdering her older sister, Anna. And this has us pondering violence in general. This is good since Alex’s brain is slightly fixated on her own penchant for violence, which she worries could emerge again at any time. In the meantime, she’s just trying to just make it through the day-to-day of school and a life in a dark home. This is difficult, as she’s not like other kids and she knows it.

Rape comes up more explicitly at a strange assembly at school early in the book, where a cop comes in and starts listing off stats about rape, even pointing out specific girls to exemplify the numbers. This scene definitely sets the expectation that rape culture will be an important theme, even though there’s no real way to know which girls will be impacted.

Besides Alex, the book features two other protagonists: Peekay (P.K., the preacher’s kid) and Jack (the local popular over-achiever). Both Peekay and Jack know who Alex is, but they don’t know her at all. No one does. Peekay and Alex meet when they both start volunteering at the local animal shelter as part of their senior year experience, and Jack and Alex meet when they’re called into the office to discuss the valedictorian status that they’re competing for, even though Alex doesn’t care about it since she has no plans for college. Both Peekay and and Jack are good characters who are as different from each other as they are from Alex.

With this setup, I wondered where the story would go. Alex gets to know both Peekay and Jack, getting pulled into the ”normal” teenage social world of parties etc. She and Peekay become friends and even though Peekay’s good friend is really leery of Alex, Peekay’s convinced she’s a good person—because she’s got a clear soft spot for animals. Alex and Jack eventually get together. Jack’s historically gotten around quite a bit and has an on and off thing with the town’s unofficial beauty queen, Branley. But he fixates on Alex in a way that surprises him, but not as much as Alex’s feelings for him surprise her.

An event at a party brings both rape culture and Alex’s violence to the forefront and we wonder what is going to come after. Peekay and Jack get to know Alex better, but not as well as they think. And when Jack finally learns a dark secret about Alex, he doesn’t know what to do and ends up looking like the bad guy. The eventual climax of the story surprised me. Again, both rape and violence feature significantly, but the events themselves do not go as I would have expected. The resolution was satisfying enough, the character’s lives being changed in important ways, but still left me feeling a little unsure.

Speaking of characters, this is an area where the book definitely excels. Alex is probably the most unique character I’ve encountered. She’s complicated and not necessarily morally admirable. She made me really uncomfortable at times, which was sort of awesome. Peekay is also great. She was my favorite, actually. She too doesn’t always behave the way she feels like she should, though she doesn’t really feel bad about it. And she brings Alex out of her shell, something that seems impossible at the beginning. Jack is also a good character (even though I never really liked him too much) because he’s complex and just so human, flaws and all. He’s pretty self-aware, too, which made him interesting. The secondary characters are also compelling—specifically Branley and Peekay’s friend Sarah.

This book definitely isn’t for everyone, but if you like to see rape culture challenged and violence pondered in a feminist way, check it out.

Review: A Heart in a Body in the World by Deb Caletti

Posted on by kellyvincent

A Heart in a Body in the World book coverI admit I’m a fan of Caletti, even though I haven’t yet read all of her books yet (I’m at about half). I love how she writes about mental health issues without making the stories issue books. So I was predisposed to like this one. Which was fine, because I did. I should mention that I listened to the audio book rather than read the paper book.

The book takes an interesting approach to revealing a major incident that took place before it starts. We know something happened and that it had a huge impact on Annabelle, a teen at the beginning of her senior year. But Caletti holds back, only delivering tiny bits of info at a time, waiting until very close to the end to really reveal the full event. I feel like it might annoy impatient people because so much isn’t known (and because of that it feels slow in the beginning), but I liked it because it kept my curiosity up. And as much as I guessed about the event itself, I was still a surprised by the details.

The basic story is that Annabelle spontaneously begins a run across the country, from Seattle to Washington, DC. At first, she is woefully unprepared, but soon her grandfather appears in his RV to provide support and a place to stay each night. Her younger brother Malcolm and two of her friends back home form a publicity team, setting up a fundraising page to help pay for expenses. She becomes a bit of an activist, against her wishes, because of what her journey represents to other people.

And this is an arduous journey for Annabelle for a variety of reasons. There’s the obvious physical challenge. Even though she’s already a skilled runner, the distance starts to take a toll on her body, with horrible blisters, sore knees, and painful chafing (and more). But it also means that Annabelle is totally stuck in her head with nothing but her thoughts. And those thoughts are themselves painful, because she thinks what happened was her fault. Since we don’t know what happened (we only know early on that her best friend Kat is “gone,” presumably dead). The one who committed the evil is a boy at her school she calls The Taker.

Structurally, the book is mostly told in flashbacks because the running basically provides a frame for her to relay her memories of The Taker and her friends to us. But I think it works well because what else would you do while running other than dwell on the things that stress you out? I mean, that’s not the healthiest thing to do, but it’s pretty human.

This book touches on some really important issues. I won’t name them all, but I love how Caletti is quietly feminist in this book. Annabelle consistently thinks about how wrong the treatment of girls and women is in our society without getting in your face about it (not that in-your-face feminism is a bad thing, but it’s definitely not for everyone). And it looks at guilt, PTSD,  violence, and self-punishment (that’s what her running really is). It also explores the idea that maybe if you’d made different decisions in the past, things might have turned out differently—but that doesn’t make you responsible for the actions of other people.

Overall, I think this is an important and deep book that a lot of people will appreciate. It is quiet, as I’ve implied, rather than being full of action so you might want to make sure you’re in the mood for that kind of book before picking it up. But I think it will be worth it.

Review: Chi’s Sweet Home by Konami Kanata

Posted on by kellyvincent

Chi's Sweet Home book 1Normally I stick with YA here, but I couldn’t resist reviewing what is probably my favorite graphic novel series, even though it’s totally for kids.

The Chi’s Sweet Home series is twelve short manga about a little kitten who gets lost in a park while out with her mama and two siblings. After looking for them, she collapses on the grass in exhaustion and depression. She is found by a family—the Yamadas—with a little boy named Yohei. They take her home and become cat owners, despite early attempts to rehome her. After some litter box tribulations, they name her Chi, which apparently (and hilariously) means something like ”pee.” In the beginning, Chi is all about trying to get home, remembering cuddling with her mama and siblings. But she’s very distracted by food, eating herself into a stupor and passing out in her cat bed every time. Eventually she becomes so entrenched with Yohei and the adults that she forgets she’s a cat. Then, when they start letting her outside, she meets other cats and has many adventures, both fun and frightening.

The series is really quite adorable. I mean, it’s hard to describe it otherwise. Konami captures cat ownership and cat behavior so, so well—she puts all these little details in there that you've probably forgetten about, but when you see them, you think, “Yes! That’s exactly what it’s like!” The way that food is the key to her heart and how she sleeps so hard, among others. In the first book, her first visit to the vet is pretty funny, especially once they get the thermometer out.

The art is simple and in soft colors, but somehow conveys a great deal of feeling from Chi, her cat friends, and the humans. I think the story in the first book isn’t the most exciting, but the story that spans the twelve books is deeper and more interesting. I definitely feel that if you like the first one—even if you don’t love it—the others will make you happy. The Yamadas go through a lot for Chi, even moving to a new apartment. I can say that the ending was a little bittersweet for me, because Chi had to leave some of her friends and family behind in order to stay where she felt she most belonged.

I should mention there’s one thing that some people might find a little off-putting (I feel like I should have, too, but didn’t), which is Chi’s baby talk that. It’s not every thought, but Chi’s R’s and L’s are often W’s, and W’s are often inserted in unnecessary places (“gowing” for going, “wittle” for little, “scarewy” for scary). This may simply be a translation thing since I haven’t been able to read it in the original Japanese. However, I think the series still worth trying (twying?) because it might be worth it.

Anyway, this series is definitely for cat people. If you don’t like cats, I imagine it would be boring and tedious. But if you do like cats, you will probably enjoy it, whether you’re six or sixty-six. The original versions are out of print, but you can get them used for pretty low prices. Plus, there are new versions out that appear to be longer, omnibus editions (I think there are four that complete the series).

Chi's Sweet Home book stack

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.