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

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

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

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

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

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.

Review: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give book coverThis is a remarkable book that lives up to the hype surrounding it. Most of you will probably already know of this book, so you’ll know it’s about a black girl whose unarmed, black male friend gets shot by a white cop in front of her. Obviously a topical subject, but the book really delivers a great fiction experience all while introducing readers to a world they probably don’t know at all, as well as an inside perspective on what black people regularly face. I love reading books set in places or cultures I have little to no exposure to, even though it’s uncomfortable at times, and that was all true for this book.

Starr Carter’s a great character, complex and just flawed enough to be deeply interesting. She’s a pretty normal sixteen-year-old girl, except that she attends a private school named Williamson while living in a neighborhood plagued with violence and drugs. Gang life is all around her, except when she’s at school or tucked safely in her home. Her mom is a nurse and her dad runs the local grocery store, making them a little different from many of their neighbors, even though her dad does have a history with the local gang. Not surprisingly, Starr thinks of the school Starr as distinct from the home Starr. Navigating those two identities is complicated. As she says:

Williamson Starr doesn’t use slang—if a rapper would say it, she doesn’t say it, even if her white friends do.

And when her boyfriend is visiting her family so her worlds are colliding:

I can use some slang, but not too much slang, some attitude, but not too much attitude, so I’m not a “sassy black girl.” I have to watch what I say and how I say it, but I can’t sound “white.”

This is typical of that frustrating pattern where people of a power-compromised group are held to a different standard (and it’s not just minorities—women face that in the corporate world, too).

At school, her best friends are a white girl named Hailey and an (east) Asian girl named Maya. And her boyfriend is white, too. They bond over basketball, which they all play (with skill).

Starr manages her two lives pretty well, even though there are cracks in her relationships already showing at the beginning. Hailey unfollowed her on Instagram, which Starr knows is because of posts she’s put up related to mistreatment of blacks over the decades. And although we don’t know what it is for a little while, something happened with her boyfriend that pissed her off (before the book starts).

Starr’s family is also complicated, but her relationships with both her parents are solid. It’s also a source of some of the humor in the book. An exchange between Starr and her mom:

[Her mom:] “What is Tumblr anyway? Is it like Facebook?”

“No, and you’re forbidden to get one. No parents allowed. You guys already took over Facebook.”

“You haven’t responded to my friend request yet.”

“I know.”

“I need Candy Crush lives.”

“That’s why I’ll never respond.”

It’s not the only funny thing in the book by far.

Hailey is an interesting, if unlikeable, character. Starr’s been friends with her for many years. The two bonded when Starr first started at the private school because they both had just been through the trauma of losing someone (Hailey’s mom had died and Starr had just witnessed one of her good friends murdered in a drive-by shooting while they were playing outside). Still, Hailey’s very much a White Girl. I first heard that as a capital-letter-term in reference to someone I know, and I knew what it meant—she’s very entitled and all her problems are very much first-world problems. Hailey, like so many white kids now, thinks of herself as enlightened and probably post-racial. But the problem is, she is still looking at things through her very privileged eyes. Eventually that causes some big problems with Starr.

As I mentioned, this book will introduce many readers to a setting they probably have little experience with. The neighborhood is very real. And we see it through Starr’s eyes—both through school Starr’s perspective and home Starr’s perspective. School Starr finds it embarrassing, but home Starr gets it. She doesn’t like everything about it, but she understands how it works, how to navigate that world, and how she has to deal with the important players. The dialogue in the book is natural and flowing, as well as very up-to-date and realistic (I’m assuming—there were quite a few slang words whose meaning I didn’t know, and which I would certainly never use even if I “learned” the meaning).

One of my favorite lines in the book, probably because it perfectly sums everything up, comes just after Starr has been through the initial interview with the detectives investigating the shooting she witnessed. It’s clear the detectives have an agenda and it isn’t the right one. She says:

This is gonna be some bullshit.

Anyway, I’m glad they’re making a movie out of it and I look forward to more books from Thomas.

Review: Lost It by Kristen Tracy

Lost It book coverThe back blurb sets this book up as very comical. Although the book does have funny moments, that’s a little misleading, as it’s not nonstop laughs. It’s clear from the setup at the very beginning that it’s really about a girl losing her virginity and everything leading up to (and following) that, and it’s serious to her. The title therefore sums it up pretty well, although the title does tie into some other losses in the book, as well. There were a couple other storylines, but the romance between Tess and Ben predominates.

Because Tess has already told us in the beginning that she’s lost her virginity, she has every reason to tell her how surprising that was, given where she was just a few months before. Tess is pretty self-aware of everything except how easily what she wants can change. She’s anxious about a lot of things, but especially wild animals. She’s awkward. She’s naïve. She’s been brought up fairly repressed by her religious parents and knows very little about sex, except that she figures she will never have it until after she’s married. But then she sees Ben.

After she admires his butt, he impresses her in general with his response to something she says:

’I didn’t mean to suggest that you did,’ he answered.

I thought his reply was very adult. He seemed much more mature than the rest of the high school baboons.

After this encounter, she starts imagining a relationship with him. When she actually more properly meets him, it’s a funny moment and really shows us her voice. Right after Ben introduces himself:

I nodded. He waited. I nodded again. Then he nodded back. I kept nodding. He slammed his locker and walked off.

Yes, it was going to be very difficult for us to start dating each other exclusively considering I hadn’t even told Ben Easter my name.

After they start dating, Ben isn’t pushy or anything, but she starts to want more herself. Then something dramatic happens that makes things more intense for both of them, and they decide to take the leap. The only potential problem in their relationship is a lie Tess told very early on, for no good reason except her own awkwardness, which Ben doesn’t know about. This lie did its job of making me nervous throughout the book.

One of the book’s subplots centers around her best friend, Zena, who has gone a little wacko and is threatening to make a bomb to blow up a poodle. It’s a little hard to know whether this is funny or serious, which makes it interesting. Tess is stressed about it but is unsure what to do. When that storyline finally culminates (not the way I expected), I found it a little funny but also sad. The whole thing has strained their relationship and the book works through that.

I enjoyed the book because Tess is honest and awkward and has to learn to take risks every now and again. This theme comes out in the very end, and resonates with other parts of the book. It makes the fact that she doesn’t come clean about her lie make sense. Readers should enjoy this book, which is also a fairly short, quick read.

Review: One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus

One of Us Is Lying book coverThis is quite a book, very addictive. It’s a debut, too, which makes it extra surprising, because it feels a little masterful. It’s a tricky psychological thriller with four unreliable narrators. Actually, I’m not sure if the label “psychological thriller” quite fits because it’s not particularly intense like you’d expect with a thriller. Although the book messes with your head, it’s a little mellow compared to Gillian Flynn’s books and The Girl on the Train, I think because there’s more of a sense of danger in those than in One of Us Is Lying. In this book, the mystery is at the forefront. Who killed Simon and how are they hiding that from us despite the fact that we’re in their heads?

Simon has a regularly-updated gossip app that publishes humiliating secrets of the kids at school. When he ends up in detention with four other kids and then ends up dead during that detention due to a well-known peanut allergy, it’s pretty clear that one of them must have poisoned his drink (with a particularly potent type of peanut oil). Bronwyn is the perfect academically-inclined girl; Nate is the delinquent everyone knows sells drugs on the side; Addy is the somewhat personality-less girlfriend of a football star; and Cooper is a baseball star in his own right.

The strange thing is that someone obviously engineered it so that all five kids ended up in detention for the same reason—a cell phone planted in their bags during a class with a rabid cell-phone-hating Luddite teacher, Mr. Avery. So we are pretty sure that at least some of the kids have been set up. But with the way things went down, it seems unlikely that at least one of them didn’t put the oil in the cup Simon ended up using.

The police think this, too. When it comes to light that Simon was about to publish a post that would out some damning secrets (whether true or untrue) of the four remaining kids, they become strong suspects and (as it appears as the story unfolds), the only ones. Which is admittedly odd because Simon had humiliated plenty of other kids along the way, any of whom might have framed the four.

The writing is great, with fantastic and realistic dialogue. Bronwyn, Nate, Addy, and Cooper are all wonderfully complex. Bronwyn is so driven that she’s actually done a stupid, reckless thing that could destroy her chances of going to her dream school. She seems the least complicated of them all. Nate is a delinquent, yes, and he’s a playboy, but he’s got a nasty home life and still doesn’t seem like a killer. Addy has let herself be metaphorically absorbed into her boyfriend. So when something messes that up, she’s got to dig deep to redefine herself. Finally, Cooper is a very talented baseball pitcher likely to go pro after graduation. But the question is, is he on steroids? And what’s his other secret? We’re not sure. Even the secondary characters—especially Bronwyn’s and Addy’s sisters—are also interesting. There are layers to the book, too, with multiple engaging subplots.

Really, you should go read this one now if you like good books.

Short Story

Balls of knitted wool in basket, closeup

I’ve posted a short story I wrote called “Now Would Be Good” and posted it here. It’s a story of knitting and revenge. It may not sound like these belong together, but read it and you’ll see that they totally do. It is a long story, however, coming in at a little over 8000 words.

I intend to write additional stories and will continue posting them on my site, though I don’t have any more in the works right now. Stay tuned.

Edit 11/27/2017I’ve taken the story down for now because I’m entering it in a contest.

Edit 6/7/2018—The story’s back up since I didn’t win the contest, which doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading 🙂

Review: Unbecoming by Jenny Downham

Unbecoming book coverThis story is really about the generational after effects of the restrictions and expectations placed on women in the mid-20th century. It’s definitely YA, though it’s a little unusual in that it contains an adult’s point of view as well as Katie’s, a 17-year-old English girl. Katie’s overbearing mom, Caroline, drives her crazy, although she doesn’t have the nerve to do anything about it. And Katie’s got her own secret that she’s struggling to come to terms with. When her mom’s own mother, Mary, is abruptly thrust into their lives, Katie becomes fascinated by her. She doesn’t know why Mary’s estranged and she doesn’t know why her mom’s the way she is, nor why she’s so bitter about Mary.

As the book progresses, Katie starts to unravel many family secrets and also begins to come to terms with her own identity as a lesbian. Along the way, she deals with the breakdown of her own long-term friendship and begins cataloging Mary’s stories. Through that and an eventual extra find, she pieces together what happened with her mom’s aunt, Pat, who Mary surrendered Katie’s mom to when she was a baby. Pat’s story isn’t a happy one, either, but her story goes a long way in explaining why Katie’s mom is the way she is.

Then, Katie fights her mom about what to do with Mary. Her mom wants to get her into a home as soon as possible, but is stymied by bureaucracy. Katie doesn’t see the need and thinks it’s heartless to send her away. And in starting to see what needs to happen with Mary, she learns to see what she should do in her own life. That includes learning to speak up for herself, accepting who she is, and trying to truly live. Like in real life, this doesn’t mean everything works out perfectly, but it does mean it’s the right thing to do.

Downham’s writing isn’t overly ornate, but everything she writes is so real. There are nice descriptions that perfectly tie into how the characters are feeling. Here’s Katie just after her last exam—and getting a party invitation she didn’t expect:

Birds twittered overhead and it was so hot it looked as if water beamed at her from the walls of the main school buildings across the playground. They actually looked rather beautiful, as if waterfalls swept their sides.

One of the interesting things about the book was also frustrating at times, and that was that Downham was absolutely true to her characters. Katie isn’t an extremely open girl, and although we’re definitely in her head, she’s clearly in denial about some things and almost avoids thinking about them. Also, with Mary suffering from her Alzheimer’s we are never going to get her full story, especially on the current boyfriend who died just before the book starts (for some reason, I really wanted this). She’s stuck largely in the past, with only fleeting moments of more solid lucidity. We do get insight into those lucid moments, which is the only way we would have gotten Mary’s story, to be realistic.

I ended up loving this book, despite the fact that it was a little slow to get into. It’s told in third person, which I generally like, but the psychic distance was a little greater than I’m used to, so it took a while to start to really feel for the characters. But once I did, I was engrossed. The overall story is nicely layered and will easily appeal to adults as well as teens.

Review: I’m Not Her by Janet Gurtler

I'm Not Her book coverA lot of people have someone in their life who has had cancer. This book explores the impact a cancer diagnosis has on an entire family. It focuses on Tess, who’s a studious, artistic, shy, and slightly fashion-averse freshman. She’s constantly in the shadow of her older sister, Kristina, a social butterfly who’s also a star volleyball player. At school, no one knows who Tess is, except for her one friend. Even her mom seems to prefer Kristina.

The book opens with Tess at a party her sister has dragged her to. She’s desperate to leave but can’t convince Kristina. Kristina come across very effectively as a specific kind of girl at the party:

Kristina continues to grind and sake to the music in her skinny jeans and tank top seriously helped along by a push-up bra. She gets off on crowd approval, like I get off on watching the guys on MythBusters blow up things.

I’m with Tess on that. I’m also with her on this:

… all Kristina’s friends do is giggle a lot and screech OHMYGOD and talk about boys. And take pictures of each other, usually in skimpy clothes. And then post the pictures online.

So I’m sort of predisposed to not particularly sympathize with Kristina, but man, does the book put her through the wringer. Besides, I’m also sort of with Tess when she says, “Kristina doesn’t know what I would give to be like her. So outgoing and likable. Not to mention beautiful.” Not everyone can become that way, even if they try.

Anyway, the day after the party, Kristina gets diagnosed with cancer in her knee. And it shakes everything up. Because Kristina stops going to school, suddenly everyone knows who Tess is because they want to ask her about her sister. Where is she? When will she be back? etc. Tess’s only friend, Melissa, reacts weirdly—she’s not remotely sympathetic and instead seems almost glad that something bad has happened to Kristina. It seems that she and Tess had a mutual dislike of people like Kristina. Seeing her sister vulnerable changes things for Tess, but not Melissa.

Then, Tess’s parents both stop functioning well—her dad detaches and might be having an affair; her mom checks out a bit too, though she at least is around some. Still, Tess has to be the reasonable one, and she finds a new closeness with her sister, providing more support than either of their parents does.

On top of being her sister’s rock and dealing with her newfound visibility to the It people at school, Tess is working on entering a prestigious art contest, the one thing she does to try to keep herself sane. Although she’d been entirely focused on making it into the honor society, she all but gives up on that by missing school and tests to be with Kristina during treatments.

The book does a good job of showing the havoc that a cancer diagnosis can wreak, and it’s nice to see Tess grow. She doesn’t become her sister, but instead changes in ways that are distinctly her, which I appreciated. The secondary characters were pretty good, though at times I did feel some were a little stereotypical. But Tess and Kristina were both very well-drawn.

Review: Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler

Twenty Boy Summer book coverThis book has been out a few years but I only just now discovered (thanks, Amazon recommendations). I’m glad I found it because it’s really good. Ockler writes beautifully, with description that really sets the scene and really gives you a sense of the emotions at play here. Most of the book takes place at the beach and the atmosphere is really powerful. When the characters discuss the majesty of the sea, I could really see and feel it, for instance.

This book is about dealing with the death of a loved one, but for Anna, it’s more complicated than that. Because the loved one who died (Matt) was both one of her two best friends, but also her brand new, secret boyfriend (or something). And, he was the older brother of the other best friend, Frankie. Before he died, he promised to tell Frankie about him and Anna himself and made Anna promise not to tell her. So Anna’s kept the secret all to herself and suffered basically alone because nobody else knows what she’s mourning. But one thing that is incredibly important to her is not forgetting Matt and what kissing him felt like.

In the year since his death, Frankie has changed a lot. She’s become a bit boy and appearance crazy and is trying to get Anna on board with her. And now Anna is going to go with Frankie and her parents on their first vacation since Matt died, to their regular summer stomping grounds on the California coast. Anna wants to see all the things Matt always told her about in order to maybe feel closer to him. But Frankie’s main goal is for the two of them to meet twenty boys so they can have fun and Anna can have her first romance.

And it goes sort of as planned. They don’t get to twenty, but instead stall out on two guys, Jack and Sam. And soon Anna and Sam are getting close and she’s struggling with her feelings for him versus her memories of Matt. There’s a lovely passage that really sums up the emotions she’s dealing with:

I can’t stop thinking about what [Sam] felt like against my body, against my lips. I can’t remember anything else, anything before that. And I realize in this moment that I’ve finally done it. That horrible, awful thing I swore I would never do.

The frosting. The cigarettes. The blue glass triangle. The shooting stars. The taste of [Matt’s] mouth on mine in the hall closet.

Gone.

All I can think about is Sam. Matt is—erased.

My whole body is warm and buzzing.

Sam is smiling next to me, because of me.

And I’ve never felt so lonely in all my life.

It’s rather heartbreaking.

Even though Anna does often feel a little older and wiser than an average sixteen-year-old, Ockler really captures her emotional journey. And what she ultimately realizes is that the reason she struggled so much to move beyond Matt’s death is that she didn’t know what she lost, exactly. A friend, yes. A boyfriend? Maybe.

I have to say, I never really cared for Frankie. I wouldn’t have been interested in being friends with her if we’d been in school together. When it turns out she’s been lying about something major and tricks Anna, I liked her less. Despite this, she’s a good character—real and even relatable, to a degree. Additionally, throughout the book, she clearly grows and we come to understand her a bit more. I loved Anna and both Matt and Sam were good guys who were still believable and fairly deep secondary characters.

Review: Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A.S. King

Please Ignore Vera Dietz book coverI listened to the audiobook version of A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers and a friend recommended another of her books, so when I was at Powell’s* when I was in Portland (Oregon) last weekend and spotted this book, I picked it up.

Like Ask the Passengers, this book has a little bit of magic in it, but it’s still solidly contemporary in my mind. It features Vera Dietz, an 18-year-old high school senior who also delivers pizza full-time because her dad thinks it’s good for her. First, I have to mention that the details about pizza delivery are spot-on. I “drove pizzas” for about 6 years, so I’d know if the author hadn’t done it herself or at least done her research.

The book is a little interesting in structure and in the way the story unfolds. Although the story is clearly Vera’s, we also get short chapters in other POV’s (Vera’s dad, her dead friend Charlie, even the town’s landmark pagoda) and the current story chapters are interspersed with the history of Vera and Charlie’s friendship. Then, King takes the idea that you should reveal to your reader only what they really need to know to an extreme (but not too far). Charlie is dead before the book starts, and we know very little about it other than something is up with his death. We also know that although they had been best friends for almost their whole lives, they’d had a falling-out not long before he died. We find out about a third of the way in that Charlie supposedly did something terrible before he died, but we don’t even find out what that is until about the 80% mark. King’s great at keeping the reader interested but not (quite) frustrated.

The story is really about Vera coming to terms with her family life and forgiving her best friend for A) betraying her, and B) then dying. She’s literally haunted by her knowledge of what actually happened to/with Charlie at the end, seeing thousands of ghosts of him at a time. The mystery of it comes together fairly quickly at the end.

Some people have mentioned that they thought this book was funny. I didn’t really find it so funny, because somehow I just took everything seriously, though there were definitely moments that made me laugh. There’s an ongoing joke about Charlie being a pickle (since “now he’s a series of molecules”) and some of the situations Vera finds herself in are ridiculous.

King is a great writer. The writing itself is very good—good dialogue, evocative descriptions, etc. Also Vera’s one of the most well-drawn characters I’ve read. She’s eighteen but still feels very much like a semi-lost but still college-bound teenager who lives at home, which she is. And Charlie—wow. He’s so unusual and not very appealing to me, but I had no question about what drew Vera to him, and even though he was deeply flawed, I did like him. The other characters in the book are also very believable and real. Her dad is frustrating and weird, but also such a dad. None of the other characters really gets a deep treatment (James, her older sort-of-boyfriend, and Jenny, Charlie’s girlfriend), but they both feel very three-dimensional, anyway.

Overall, it’s a very engrossing book that I’d recommend to anyone looking for something unusual to read.

 

* If you’re ever in Portland, you absolutely must go to Powell’s, a massive bookstore that is several stories and takes up an entire city block. They have over a million books.

Review: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

The Disreputable History of Frankie-Landau Banks book coverFrankie’s such a great character. She’s so 15—new to many things and trying to navigate a world with changing expectations. And she’s smart and notices things (regarding a party she was excited to be invited to, and frustrated to be ignored at: “The party was boring. It was people standing around in the cold.”), even though she doesn’t generally over-analyze. She is going into her sophomore year at an elite boarding school with a new, woman-ified body after spending her freshman year as an awkward girl (over the summer, she “gained four inches and twenty pounds, all in the right places”). And a feminism-inspired sense of right and wrong is blossoming within her, as well, partially because of her Berkeley-bound feminist sister and partially because it’s just who she really is. The last point is the best part to me. She’s not willing to accept the status quo when it’s not fair.

She is ecstatic when she manages to bag a popular and very good-looking boyfriend (Matthew) she’d lusted after all freshman year. She is genuinely happy and really does like him. But things aren’t perfect.

Frankie remembered how Matthew had called her a ‘pretty package,’ how he’d called her mind little, how he’d told her not to change—as if he had some power over her.

She was annoyed by this, but:

most of her simply felt happy that he had put his arm around her and told her he thought she was pretty.

Everyone can get that—the desire to be appealing and loved is so strong in all of us, and women and girls are used to having to sacrifice something to get it. But there is a niggling doubt in Frankie’s mind, which makes her different from most girls, according to the author:

Lots of girls … are so focused on their boyfriends that they don’t remember they had a life at all before their romances, so they don’t necessarily become upset that the boyfriend isn’t interested [in their lives].

Frankie’s sister is the voice of wisdom who calls out the reservations Frankie’s feeling. When Matthew gives her his old Superman t-shirt, Frankie’s touched. But according to her sister, Zada, “‘Nah, it’s like a dog peeing on a hydrant. He’s marking you with his scent.” Frankie doesn’t accept this, but the sentiment stays with her. Later, it becomes clearer what bothers her:

Matthew had called her harmless. Harmless. And being with him made Frankie feel squashed into a box—a box where she was expected to be sweet and sensitive (but not oversensitive); a box for young and pretty girls who were not as bright and powerful as their boyfriends. A box for people who were not forces to be reckoned with.

All this doubt and frustration manifests in Frankie as a desire for a little power of her own. She comes up with an ingenious plan to undermine some of the “old boy” power that Matthew and his friends yield. Her sister doesn’t think it’s necessary. She says:

‘Are you seriously going to tell me you buy into the patriarchal notion that power is localized in institutions created years and years ago by people who were overly proud of themselves for having the male set of genitalia, and most of whom are either dead or drooling over themselves in nursing homes by this point?’

And then she continues when Frankie doesn’t have a good answer:

‘Please, that is so antiquated. The institutions of male supremacy only have real power over you if you buy into that notion. Go found your own club and tell them they can’t join. Or better yet, drop the idea of clubs altogether because they’re exclusionary, and embrace some other, more flexible way of connecting with people.’

I love Zada, though I don’t necessarily agree with her. Still, it’s what drove Frankie to undertake a campaign to earn the respect of Matthew and others. I won’t go into what she does, but it is clever and entertaining.

The voice of this novel is wonderful. It’s a little snarkier than Frankie herself is but somehow it absolutely fits her story. It’s quite funny at times and I was really curious about where Frankie’s antics would take the club once she wielded her power over them. And Frankie’s whole idea of “neglected positives” and “inpeas” is awesome and it’s so funny when she uses them throughout. Take prefixes off words that feel like they’re negating something, and assume it’s a positive instead of a negative. Sometimes these are real words that just aren’t used as much as the negative form (“gruntled” from “disgruntled” (a back-formation)), or they’re really words that mean something other than the positive (“criminate” from “incriminate”, which mean the same thing), or they’re just not words at all (inpeas).  and so on.

This is a solidly feminist book that really delves deep into the ideas without feeling preachy. Everything is expressed as real feelings Frankie’s having in response to real events. It’s really about a girl choosing to navigate her own path while staying true to herself and learning who she really is, without defining herself by the people she associates with. After all, as one of the characters asks,

‘Who wants to be the guy on the path?’

The author says:

Frankie didn’t—but she didn’t want to be the guy whose idea of off-roading was an SUV purchase or a shortcut across the grass, either.

That really sums up the novel.

Review: What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

What I Saw and How I Lied book coverWhat I Saw and How I Lied is an interesting historical, set just after WW II. It features quietly bold 15-year-old Evie, whose mother is a bombshell while Evie herself is a bit plain. And she’s not happy about it. Her stepfather is a charming sort but when he gets frustrated by something, they take off in the car and head from Brooklyn to Palm Beach, Florida. There, Evie learns a lot of surprising and not-so-nice things about the world and her parents. She also meets a man who she falls for, despite the fact that he’s 8 years older. It eventually seems to her that pretty much everything she believed about her parents and their life together was a lie. Then she’s put in a position no one wants to be: she has to betray someone—but will it be her parents or the man she’s fallen in love with? And what about the truth—how important is that compared to family loyalty?

The story is told with a lot of foreshadowing. We know from the beginning that something bad has happened and that Evie is going back to tell us what, with references to the future spread throughout. For instance, in Chapter 1:

They knew who we were; they’d seen our pictures in the paper. We knew they’d be saying, Look at them eating toast—how can they be so heartless?

and

Now I had to look at it again. This time without me in it, wanting things to go my way.

Clearly, Evie imagines herself having grown up in the course of the book, which she definitely does.

But there’s this fantastic line that I think pretty much sums up being a teenager:

I was an adult now, just like her. But feeling grown up? I discovered something right then: It comes and goes. I was still afraid of my mom.

The fact that we know that Evie and her parents are considered guilty of something, even though we don’t know what, makes us pay special attention to them as the story unfolds. Neither is very likable to me and I enjoyed watching Evie’s perspective on her family change over time. Character development of all the major players is very good.

Blundell does a great job of capturing the atmosphere of post-war U.S. with great language and the mindset. As I mentioned, Evie is a little spunky in her way, even though she is a girl of her time. Here’s a line from poem she and her friend memorized:

Your virtue you must never squander

But Evie’s first thought is that her friend has seven siblings, so her mom was clearly squandering her virtue “all over the place.”

This isn’t a long book, but it wasn’t a fast read for me. It was more of a slow burn, which meant I savored the sense of foreboding all the more. For those interested in the horrible aspects of the past that Blundell explores in the book, she includes a short guide to finding out more. Finally, I should mention that the book won the National Book Award. Overall, I recommend it to anyone who likes mid-20th-century stories.