A Twosome of Titles from Two Months Ago

I will catch up with my reviews. I will catch up with my reviews. I will catch up with my reviews.

I've got two YA titles left from August, and I'm thinking I can get away with writing more informal mini-reviews of the two of them. Of course, I suck at writing short reviews, so maybe this isn't the best plan, but here it goes anyway.


The first is Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman. Reading Full Tilt reminded me of staying up all night reading some juicy young adult horror novel by someone like R.L. Stine, except with more of a message. One night when Blake and his brother Quinn are at an amusement park, a mysterious worker in a ball-toss game slips him an invitation to ride, and an address. After a terrifying ride on the Kamikaze roller coaster, Blake's had about enough of thrill rides for one night and has no interest in going. When Blake wakes up and something is wrong with his brother, Blake knows he's got no choice but to check out the amusement park.

What he finds is a sinister game where riders have to ride five terrifying, life threatening rides before dawn to escape the black magical amusement park. Failure means being stuck in the park forever. Success is facing all your very worst fears embedded in what, from the outside, look like ordinary amusement park rides. Despite a niggling sense that the facing your fears angle is all a bit too after-school special, Full Tilt is an addicting book. The ride ideas and the way Blake's fears are woven into them are pretty ingenious, so ingenious that it takes a while even for Blake and, by extension, readers to figure out how exactly they relate, but once it's revealed, it makes sense. It's the first book I've read in a while that has demanded that I stay up late to finish because I just had to know what the next ride would be and if Blake would succeed in saving himself and his brother. If you're looking for a fun pageturner of a book with a serious twist, Full Tilt is definitely one to try.


The last unreviewed book of my long ago August of reading is Shade by Jeri Smith-Ready. I didn't dislike Shade, but I had really hoped to like it more than I did, and I really can't peg why I didn't, other than perhaps my summer love affair with paranormal YA was already starting to wear thin as August started to wind down.

Aura lives in a world where ghosts live right alongside the living, and anyone under sixteen can see them. Aura is one of the first, or perhaps the very first person born after the Shift, and anyone born after the Shift can see and talk to ghosts, while everyone born before it can't. The ghosts are mostly harmless, just searching for the absolution they need to cross over. They are limited in their power, can only visit places they've been in life, and are defeated by BlackBox technology that keeps them out of places they aren't wanted, like, the bathroom, for one. Some ghosts are so angry, though, that their anger gives them unusual dark power, turning them to Shades and making them a dangerous menace.

Aura's life is fairly ordinary, for a post-Shifter, that is. She helps her aunt as an interpreter for ghosts in court cases that will help them get justice and cross over. Her boyfriend Logan is in an Irish rock band. She goes to his shows. She knows she loves him, but she worries about whether she's ready to go all the way with him. Then, on his birthday and the day his band gets signed, the day that should be the best of his young life, tragedy strikes, and Logan turns into an angry purple-hued ghost.

I'll stop there for fear of spoilers, but Shade has all the makings of great paranormal YA. It's got a very detailed and well-thought out world, a love triangle (with budding rockstar boyfriend who's a ghost and a guy with a sexy Scottish accent!), mystery, thrills, and a sympathetic narrator to boot. There's no reason people who love paranormal YA won't love this book. All the elements were there, but somehow, when I read it, it just didn't click for me, which makes me think it was just me and my bad timing for reading it, which wouldn't be the first time such a fate has befallen a book and me. I will say, though, that I absolutely love that Smith-Ready compiled a soundtrack for the book on her website. Music is a huge part of the book, and she saved me the trouble of looking up all the songs she mentions (and I totally would have).

In lieu of my ringing endorsement, I give you...other peoples' ringing endorsements (of which, it seems, these are but a small portion)!

S. Krishna's Books
Presenting Lenore
The Story Siren

(If you're listening, FTC, Full Tilt is from my own collection, and I got Shade at an excellent YA Authors Crossing Over panel at Book Expo America.)

Downsiders by Neal Shusterman

It's time to put my nose to the grindstone and close out these 2009 reviews I haven't quite gotten to. Neal Shusterman's Downsiders was my final read of the year, and a fine read it was for the holiday season. YA adventure, very absorbing, but not too challenging for a time of year when challenging reads should just not be on the agenda for me. Especially this year when I found myself reading this book more than once while waiting to be picked up by my dad or tow truck drivers or any would-be rescuers from my numerous car troubles. Argh. But enough about me, on to the book that kept me distracted from my more material hardships!


Downsiders speculates about a scenario that, though fantasy, seems that it could be altogether possible. Shusterman's New York City is populated by "Topsiders," the people you and I can see if we wander the streets of the city. However, it also encompasses a whole civilization of Downsiders, a community of people who dwell in tunnels and cast-off remnants of the top side that exist deep below the surface untouched by the topside for no less than 10 years. Topsiders live in blissful ignorance of the entire world below them, while Downsiders, for the most part, live in fear of the Topside, drawing near to it only to gather necessities and catch "fallers," those whose hope for a life worth living in the Topside has run out. The two civilizations exist happily apart and unknown to each other until the chance meeting of Talon, a Downsider, and Lindsay, a Topsider occurs with unfortunate consequences for both.

Downsiders' two main characters are believable. Both are feeling kind of disengaged from their own worlds opening the way for their encounter. Talon's overwhelming curiosity about the Topside combined with his desperation to find a cure for his little sister's illness drives him to seek medicine in Lindsay's under-renovation home. Lindsay, having just moved to New York to live with her father and step-brother who are virtually unknown to her, has no friends and a suspicion about the city that makes her all too eager to embrace Talon and his world when they have a run in. Unfortunately, the characterization stops with them. The remainder of the people populating Shusterman's story are a variety of stock characters with predictable traits and predictable outcomes to their situations like Lindsay's oh-so-typical stepfather who's so involved in his work he barely notices her and her full of himself scumbag of a stepbrother. You've seen these characters a hundred times, and little is done to set them apart from the rest of their ilk.

Luckily, Downsiders is not intended to be a character driven novel. Shusterman's alternate New York is vividly imagined, complete with its own practices like wearing watches around the ankle because "time is of low importance" as well as a variety of invented directional terms, and a few unexpected ways of surviving and making a living. In Shusterman's hands, this home for the city's once unwanted and forgotten is inventive and oddly realistic. Downsiders is a rollicking, heartfelt adventure about two worlds colliding and a coming of age story about two characters finding themselves in the context of their own worlds and beyond.