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Review: Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen M. McManus

Posted on by kellyvincent

Two Can Keep a Secret book coverTwo Can Keep a Secret is the followup (not the sequel, that’s a different book) to McManus’s One of Us Is Lying, which I liked and reviewed on this blog. The two books are a little different, as I feel Two Can Keep a Secret is quieter and less complicated than the first. It was still a good suspense that kept me guessing.

The book’s narrated by two characters: Ellery and Malcom. Ellery and her twin brother Ezra are moving in with their grandmother in Echo Ridge, Vermont while their mother is in rehab. Malcolm is the younger brother of the guy everyone thinks murdered a girl five years earlier.

Things go wrong for both of them right from the start. When Ellery and Ezra are getting a ride from the airport, they stumble across a body in the road at the edge of town. At a fundraiser for the murdered girl, Ellery finds Malcolm standing with a can of spray paint next to a message sprayed on a wall:

MURDERLAND

THE SEQUEL

COMING SOON

Murderland was the name of the Halloween park where the girl’s body was found. In its new incarnation, it’s called Fright Farm, and Ellery and Ezra get jobs there like most of the other teenagers in town. Ellery also becomes acquainted with the queen bee of the school, Katrin. When meeting her, she thinks,

We all murmur hellos, and it feels like some sort of uncomfortable audition.

Who can’t relate to that? Soon, Ellery’s been sucked under the threat implied by the graffiti Malcolm might have written. But she doesn’t think so. And it’s not long before she’s hanging out with him as well as her brother and Malcom’s friend Mia.

In addition to being the shoe-in for homecoming queen, Katrin is also Malcolm’s step-sister. Malcolm isn’t overly fond of this situation, but there’s not much he can do about it. Plus, he’s got more to worry about: his infamous brother is back in town, and he doesn’t know why or what he’s doing there. The timing is bad with the graffiti, more of which appears later.

With this set up, there are quite a few suspects as well as a real threat against Ellery. I wasn’t blind-sided by the resolution, but there is a small but significant twist at the end that I didn’t at all expect. Additionally, there are several minor twists and reveals along the way that surprised me.

If you enjoyed One of Us Is Lying, or YA suspense in general, you’d probably like this one, too.

Review: Sadie by Courtney Summers

Posted on by kellyvincent

Sadie book coverWhen I first heard about this book, I was sort of freaked out because of similarities it has with my own Sadie Speaks (still unpublished). I’m hoping I don’t have to change the name of my character because of it. Still, it sounded like an interesting book, so I bought it.

Sadie makes an interesting format choice. The book alternates chapters between the character Sadie’s narrative and the transcript (basically) of a serialized podcast called The Girls, narrated by West McCray (an adult man). It opens with the show, which gives Summers an easy and legitimate way to provide the setting and backstory. Thirteen-year-old Mattie was murdered and her older sister, Sadie, disappeared soon afterward. The Girls came about because Sadie and Mattie’s unofficial, stand-in grandmother, their neighbor May Beth, contacted West. Thus began his investigation and the show.

We learn a lot about Sadie from May Beth, but we learn even more about how people never really know the people they care about. Obviously we learn the most from Sadie's own narrative. What we know early on is that she’s heartbroken over Mattie, who she basically raised because their mother was an addict who eventually disappeared, and she knows who killed her. And she’s going to kill him. In the first chapter, we see her clumsily buy a car and learn that she has a significant stutter that makes most of her interactions with people difficult, or at least awkward. Thus begins her quest.

The show and Sadie’s narrative are on two different time lines, but they interact seamlessly, where basically something happens in Sadie’s chapter and afterward West will figure out that part of her journey, just in time for Sadie to describe her next steps. It takes a little while for West to “catch up” to Sadie in terms of the book, but it still works very well. What’s interesting about it is that despite the fact that we’re with Sadie for her journey, sometimes we learn more about it—in the wider context—from West.

Sadie’s a very interesting character. Even though she’s on a dark path, you eventually figure out why and sympathize with her. Despite that, I had a little trouble connecting with her, but I had no trouble rooting for her. The characters in the show storyline are pretty well drawn given the format. We can see West is credible, and he learns a little more about the darkness of the world and how it impacts him given that he has a young daughter. May Beth also is very believable and she too learns about the dark side of things. The characters that Sadie interacts with for fleeting moments are less developed as they’re seen entirely through her slightly distorted perspective, but the most important of them get revisited with West, which is interesting.

If you’re in the mood for a different kind of thriller, this might be for you. Like a lot of thrillers, it deals with some of the unpleasant aspects of the world, which makes reading it demanding at times. But it’s engaging and unusual and has an ending that will stay with you.

Review: My True Love Gave to Me edited by Stephanie Perkins

Posted on by kellyvincent

My True Love Gave to Me book coverIt’s probably a little odd to be doing a review of a holiday short story collection several weeks after the holidays ended, but since when did I claim to be normal. Besides, I started reading this before Christmas.

This nice collection focused mostly on Christmas experiences, but there were a lot of creative interpretations of that in the twelve stories, many of which came from big names. Rainbow Rowell’s “Midnights” was one I’d read (and loved) before. In it, Mags and Noel meet at a New Years party one year and the story focuses on their friendship over the years by showing us the subsequent New Years parties. It’s a sweet little romance. Next comes Kelly Link’s “The Lady and the Fox.” This was a creative one involving a ghost, but it didn’t really resonate with me (though I know a lot of people who are big fans of Kelly Link, so it’s surely just a matter of personal taste). The next story is “Angels in the Snow” by Matt de la Peña. I quite liked this one. It’s about a down-on-his-luck (i.e., completely and utterly broke) college student house/cat-sitting for a friend who meets a college girl from a very different background. It’s really about how they connect.

In “Polaris Is Where You’ll Find Me” by Jenny Han, a human girl is living amongst Santa’s elves at the North Pole. She has to figure out who she is despite being truly one of a kind in her surrounding. How do you figure out who you are when you’re different from everybody else? Stephanie Perkins’ “It’s a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown” features a video maker and a guy with a great voice. It’s also a sweet little romance—with a bit of angst in it—that I quite liked. In “Your Temporary Santa” by David Levithan, a Jewish boy dresses up as Santa to give his boyfriend’s little sister one more year of believing in Santa. It's sweet.

“Krampuslauf” by Holly Black was kind of strange. Black does that well, though. I suppose it’s about wishing things into being. In the next one, I first have to say, kudos to Gayle Forman for naming her fictional college the University of Bumfuckville, which she does in, “What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth?” It’s a nice story about finding your place among strangers—and not making stupid assumptions about people. “Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus” by Myra McEntire is a funny story about a prankster kid who accidentally burned down a church’s barn, where they stored everything for the annual Christmas pageant, and ends up helping pull said pageant off against all odds—and making a friend in the process.

Kiersten White’s “Welcome to Christmas, CA” wasn’t steeped in Christmas spirit, but it was a nice little story about appreciating and helping the people around you, whether you want to be where you are or not. And also psychic cooking. There’s that too. The next story, “Star of Bethlehem” by Ally Carter, deals with the unexpected consequences of two girls switching identities. Sometimes home can be found in the most unlikely of places. The final story in the collection is “The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer” by Laini Taylor. It’s about believing in yourself to the point that you manifest exactly what you need, with the help of a little magic.

There’s a good variety of stories in here so some should appeal to you. If you’re missing the holidays, pick this up to get back in the spirit.

Review: Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu

Posted on by kellyvincent

Moxie book coverI wish I could remember how I found out about this book, because I’d like to go back and ask for more recommendations, because this was a great read.

Vivian is sick of how girls are treated at her small-town Texas high school, with good reason. The coarse football players can do no wrong. Make overtly sexist comments, wear sexist t-shirts (like GREAT LEGS—WHEN DO THEY OPEN), touch girls without their consent, be general assholes—it’s all cool because football players are kings in Texas. The girls, on the other hand, can’t do anything right. The school holds regular “dress code checks“ where they decide that what girls are wearing is too risqué and they make them put on a giant football jersey to cover up. After all, they can’t be tempting the saintly boys.

Everyone thinks Vivian is a good girl. Her grandparents even call her “dutiful” after she tells them about an incident at school, which gets her hackles up—and which surprises her. She knows she is dutiful, but isn’t sure she wants to be. Because she’s grown up knowing about her mom’s rebellious past. Her mom was a Riot Grrrl in Portland after leaving Texas. Vivian was born there, but her father died in an accident not long afterward and her mom had to move back to Texas so she could get help from Vivian’s grandparents. But Vivian knows about the rebellious times because of a box labeled MY MISSPENT YOUTH, which contains pictures, zines, and other memorabilia from the Riot Grrrl days.

After an incident at school, Vivian’s had it. She makes her own zine called Moxie and secretly distributes it in the girls’ bathrooms before school starts. It points out the unfairness of the school administration and their misdirected punishments, and calls for girls to decorate their hands with stars and hearts on their hands. This is just the beginning of a difficult journey that the girls at her school will take, and it’s fun to watch. Because of course it’s not as simple as that, and the horrible administration is going to fight back with all the misogyny they’ve got (which is a lot).

And while all this is getting started, Vivian meets a cool boy who seems as appalled by the behavior of the boys at the school and the school administration as many of the girls are. I loved her attitude about him:

I decide that Seth Acosta deciding I’m kick-ass is even better than him thinking I’m pretty. Definitely better.

It’s fun—and inspiring—to watch Vivian grow from the dutiful good girl she is at the beginning to a brave and bold girl by the end. The transformation of her friends and the school is mostly believable (maybe a tiny bit idealized, but only a tiny bit). This is a fantastic book about girls both respecting themselves and demanding respect from everyone around them. More teen girls need this message, especially those lost in small towns where misogyny is still par for the course.

I think everyone should read this one because it has some good lessons without being an issue book. I’m looking forward to reading some more of Mathieu’s books, too.

Review: Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks

Posted on by kellyvincent

Pumpkinheads book coverI’m a big Rowell fan because I think she does a fantastic job of capturing the emotional truth of people in her characters. I was new to Hicks, but I quite enjoyed this graphic novel. Hicks’ art was sharp and evocative. It felt like she used an autumn color palette, too, that comes across as seasonal and vivid.

Deja and Josie have worked together every fall at the local but immense and involved pumpkin patch and now it’s their last year there before they go off to college. It has numerous stations, from Pappy’s Apples, the Corn Maize, the S’mores Pit, and the Haunted Hacienda. The two of them have worked at the Succotash Hut every year and they’re very good friends, even if the don’t see each other except in the fall.

Josie is a shy boy who’s harbored a crush on Marcy, a girl who works at the Fudge Shoppe, since he started there. Deja is an outgoing and bold girl who wants to help Josie seize the day and tell Marcy how he feels. They do something that feels wild and crazy to Josie—leave their station and go on a quest to find Marcy, who keeps getting moved from station to station right ahead of them. Along the way they run into many of Deja’s exes—boys and girls—and we learn just how timid Josie really is. He has a lesson to learn about pining for someone from a distance rather than paying attention to what’s in front of his face.

This is a cute fall story, very well-illustrated. Fans of Rowell should like it, and I’d imagine the same can be said of fans of Hicks (I’m planning to check out some of her other stuff).

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: 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.