Ellie Haycock is Totally Normal by Gretchen Schreiber

Ellie Haycock is straddling two worlds and not very successfully. As a teenager with VACTERL syndrome, hospitals and surgeries have become, if not a normal part of her life, then a very common occurrence. When she's not having surgeries to correct the disease's many debilitating effects, she wants to live as normal a life as possible - hanging out with her boyfriend Jack, her friend Brooke, winning speech competitions and dreaming of being an actress. Unfortunately, a mysterious lung ailment has her back in the hospital's Family Home among the typically temporary friendships there, contemplating another scary surgery that may (or may not) be what gets her back to her "real" life. What's more terrifying than another surgery, though, is when Ellie's desperate attempts to keep her two lives separate, sheltering her "normal" friends from the cruel realities of her disability and eagerly leaving behind her "hospital" friends in between surgeries threaten to alienate everyone she loves.

Ellie is a vivid, if occasionally frustrating, narrator. Faced with her "normal" friends during her hospital time, she can't bear to share even the smallest tidbit of what she's going through. Instead, she quickly makes a group of hospital friends, including Caitlin, another teen with VACTERLs, Luis with the "little c" cancer, an overly chipper volunteer named Veronica, and prickly Ryan Kim who changes her perspective and maybe...her heart? The unique setting makes fast friendships and perhaps even some romance more believable than they would otherwise be.

This book gives readers an inside look into the struggle of being a constant patient without ever having the luxury of being able to hope to leave the hospital cured. Ellie's frustration with the constant swing of the pendulum between what she considers her to be her real life and her life in the hospital is palpable. Additionally, her mother is one of those parents who shares her whole life story via a blog, that as she grows older, feels more and more invasive. If you've ever seen a blog/Facebook page/Instagram, etc. featuring a very sick or disabled kid and wondered how weird it would be to be that kid, this book is for you.

Ellie Haycock is Totally Normal is an excellent coming of age book with a welcome unique perspective on disability that mingles tough topics like medical autonomy, not being heard by doctors, and privacy with the more typical page-turning stuff of romance and friendship drama. At times it felt like everything was happening a little too quickly, Ellie was a little too obtuse about reality, and the dialogue had a tendency to reference thoughts that were more implied than actually written which left me feeling occasionally like I'd missed something. In the end, though, I was touched by Ellie's discovery that all her lives add up to just one and that there is healing to be found in letting people in.

Thanks to the publisher for NetGalley review copy.  Book hits shelves March 5th.

The Syrena Legacy Series by Anna Banks

When Emma literally stumbles into a violet-eyed stranger on the boardwalk of a Florida beach, it's definitely not love at first sight, more like humiliation at first sight.  The encounter is quickly forgotten, though, when Emma's beach trip ends in tragedy.  That is, until the handsome stranger shows up again in her New Jersey high school classroom.  

Galen is a Triton royal given leave to live life on land and be a Syrena ambassador to humans.  When he spots Emma using a gift that has disappeared from among his people, he can't believe it, and he really can't believe she doesn't know she even has the gift.  Determined to find out her secret, he follows her home, but he has to admit that it's not the importance of Emma's gift to his people that attracts him to her.

Unbelievable hijinks ensue as Emma and Galen's relationship blossoms from suspicion to love.  Soon Emma is exploring a world she never knew existed and is suddenly plunged into the dramas of mermaid-kind that strike even closer to home than she could ever have imagined.  

When I'm looking for something a little lightweight and fast reading to enjoy, YA romance is what I

reach for.  The premise of Of Poseidon is a little absurd, but Banks sells it and I couldn't pull myself away from Emma and Galen and their star-crossed romance.  The main character's irritating penchant for childish verbal ticks ("ohmysweetgoodness" or "fan-flipping-tastic") tested my patience, but the fast moving plot saved me from putting this down.  The second book, Of Triton, is arguably the better of the two with Emma maturing into her new life and Galen's chapters revealing more of the Syrena world.  

The second book has a satisfying conclusion, while the third, Of Neptune, shoots off in a new direction, a direction with an overprotective love interest and the beginnings of what looked to be an irritating love triangle, not to mention the return of "ohmysweetgoodness."  I decided within 60 pages that while Banks wrote a trilogy, I was happy to leave this series a duology.  

Inside Out by Terry Trueman

In this very short novel, we meet Zach just at the moment the coffee shop he's sitting in is being robbed by two desperate young men.  It quickly becomes apparent that something is not quite right about Zach.  He's not scared, he doesn't seem to know when it's best to keep quiet, he's much more interested in getting a maple bar than in getting out of harm's way, and, honestly, he's not quite sure the situation he's in is even real.  When the police arrive, the robbery escalates to hostage situation.  Over the course of the next few hours, secrets will emerge.  Zach is sick, and he needs his medicine, but the people in the back room of the coffee shop need a hero, and Zach might just be the only guy who can be one.

Inside Out is a fast paced book that grips from the very first page.  In addition to the action and suspense of the coffee shop hostage situation, there's a lot going on in these few pages not the least of which is Zach's struggle against his mental illness.  In Zach's narration and intervening notes from his medical file, a door is opened into living with mental illness.  While the book is intended for a young adult audience, I found Zach's perspective illuminating, giving me a better understanding of his disease.

At the risk of spoiling such a short book, I'll say no more about the plot.  What I will say is that I was impressed with how Trueman brought a plot rich book together with a strong portrayal of a mentally ill character and gave sympathetic eye to all three of his male main characters.  If you're looking for a quick read that packs a punch, give this one a try!

The Dust of 100 Dogs by A.S. King

In the 1600s, Emer Morrissey was a frightful pirate marauding the Caribbean seas in search of treasure to steal and hoping to once again meet her long-lost love.   That is, until the night she is cursed to one hundred lives as a dog.  One hundred dog lifetimes later, Emer is back in the body of Saffron Adams, the hope of her lower middle-class family.  Unfortunately for the Adams family, Emer has no interest in lifting the family out of poverty through higher education, but she may just know where to find the buried treasure she left behind.

I really thought that The Dust of a 100 Dogs had a really fun concept that I would enjoy, but nearly the whole thing didn’t work for me.  The characters are woefully one dimensional.  The good characters are too good, the evil characters too evil, the conflicts too easily begun and resolved, and the reincarnation portrayed poorly.  At the beginning of the novel, Saffron’s thoughts and actions are nearly entirely Emer’s.  If they are not the same person, then Saffron is utterly controlled by Emer, driven by Emer’s desire to have back the treasure denied to her and filled with Emer’s violent pirate thoughts.  By the end of the book, however, it was like King made a last-minute decision that Saffron ought to have a voice too, but it was too little too late to be anything short of a tack on.  

Flashbacks to Emer’s early life in an Ireland being destroyed by Oliver Cromwell’s armies are the best and most compelling part of this book, perhaps because it’s the only part that feels genuine.   Once Emer flees the husband her uncle has sold her to in the aftermath of the war, Emer, desperate, decides she’ll board a ship bound for the Caribbean, where other men are looking for wives or worse.  This is where things fell apart for me.  For one, if you ran away from a lousy, rotten husband to be impoverished on the streets of Paris, why would you think you’d make out any better rolling the dice on a mystery husband in the Caribbean?  For two, I just never really managed to buy Emer as a proper pirate.  She kind of dithers her way into the whole thing after fleeing the next d-bag husband in line, and using her pent-up loathing for all the men who took what wasn’t theirs in a battle.  All the sudden, she’s a sea captain with pirate fleet robbing Spanish treasure ships.  There doesn’t seem to be any real reason for it other than she doesn’t want to get married to a French d-bag and she need something to do while she moons over the lost love her of her Irish youth that she hopes against hope to meet again.  She’s supposed to be this feared killer, but it all seems to be a bit of an act, and a poor one.

Maybe I’m expecting too much.  This is, after all, a swashbuckling YA tale of reincarnation and piracy.  I’m probably not supposed to read so much into it.  I’m supposed to appreciate Emer as a strong female character and enjoy her adventures at sea.  However, despite her murderous abilities, she somehow never stopped seeming like victim to me, and The Dust of a 100 Dogs, with its many lifetimes’ worth of stories to tell never came together into the more multi-dimensional story I was hoping for.

Starters by Lissa Price

Callie Woodland and her younger brother, Tyler, are vaccinated survivors of the Spore Wars.  The Spore Wars wiped out the middle-aged generation leaving behind a class of mostly orphaned youngsters (Starters) struggling to survive and class of wealthy and privileged elderly (Enders) who have become the ruling class of Price’s dystopian world.  In a world where she’s not allowed to have a job or own a home, Callie’s only option to care for her sick younger brother is to go to work for Prime Destinations, a body bank where the wealthiest Enders can rent the body of Starter and relive their youth.  For Callie, it’s a simple matter of going to sleep while her body goes on its own adventure, that is, until she wakes up in the middle of one of her rentals and finds herself tangled in her renter’s web of intrigue.  Who can she trust and why is the voice in her head begging her not to return to Prime Destinations?

Starters is a fast-paced dystopian thriller with no shortage of secrets and plot twists.  Price conjures a main character whose first-person narration is realistic and relatable.  Callie’s desperation to provide for her brother, and her conflict between caring for her brother and uncovering the evil motives at Prime Destinations is palpable.  There are evil villains, unwitting accomplices, and, of course, unexpected love interests which Price weaves together into a compelling story.

Unfortunately, where Starters fails is in its world building.  The Spore Wars are barely explained.  Reasons for why the young generation is so widely loathed and exploited by the privileged class of Enders are never discussed.  Readers are left to wonder why the elderly are not only so without compassion for the younger generation but also often downright evil.  The mystery of the book was enough to overcome these failings and keep me reading, but the lack of depth to Price’s world left me just the slightest bit unsatisfied.

My Life After Now by Jessica Verdi

I've done a strange thing this year.  I've finished a book already.  Now I'm going to make it even stranger and try to review it as if I were a functioning book blogger and human.  Look at me go!  What madness does the new year bring?

Anyhow, the first book of the year, well, it's not really anything special.  This is to say, I didn't really pick it for any special reason, like people do.  It's a book the randomizer chose from the thundering neglected hordes on my Kindle.  So yeah, the randomizer followed me right into 2018.  The simple changing of the year didn't transform me into a capable decision-maker.  The foundations of the world?  We won't shake them too hard just yet.

Anyway, the first book of 2018.  It's My Life After Now by Jessica Verdi.

As she enters her junior year of high school, Lucy Moore thinks she's got it made.  As the best actress in her school's drama club, she's sure she's about to land the role of Juliet in the fall production of Romeo and Juliet.  Naturally she'll be playing the role opposite her boyfriend, Ty, the golden boy of drama club.  She's got a pair of supportive best friends - Max and Courtney, and a pair of dads who couldn't love her more. 

In a space of the week, Lucy's world crumbles - the role and the boy both go to theater-camp competitor and high school interloper, Elyse.  When her undependable biological mother shows up at her house trying to make yet another new start, that's Lucy's final straw.  One foolish night of fleeing her problems for an uncharacteristic night of clubbing in NYC is all it takes to change Lucy's life forever.  Now Lucy has a deadly secret she can't tell anyone, and the one person she does tell validates her worst fears.

My feelings about My Life After Now were tremendously mixed.  The beginning of the story seemed wildly exaggerated.  I understand that this almost absurdly bad week had to happen to drive the rest of the plot, but the speed with which things come undone was blatantly unrealistic.  The end, as well, fails in realism, with resolutions that seem to come together far to easily and with too few questions asked.

In the middle, though, My Life After Now really shined. Lucy's terror and shame at what she has done and the diagnosis she receives is expertly rendered.  Her unwillingness to open up to her parents and her friends about what happened and the consequences, for fear of their judgement, disappointment, disbelief, or fear is entirely convincing.  When the truth does have to come out, as the truth always does, Lucy has become so isolated and afraid that her relief is palpable.  Her coming to terms with living her new life is expertly handled.  While My Life After Now suffers a little from a certain YA tendency to wrap things up too nicely and easily, it's ultimately an addictive read about a relatable narrator facing a different diagnosis than is tackled in any of those other YA "sick kid" novels you may have read, which makes it a welcome addition to the genre and well worth a read.

"If you test positive, how do you think you will react?" she rephrased. 

What kind of a question was that? How would anyone know how they would react until actually put in that situation? That was like asking what you would do if you woke up to find your house was on fire. Would you run out immediately? Stop to call 911? Look for your cat? Put on your shoes? Dash around collecting valuables? Until you’re actually in that burning building, flames scorching your skin, there’s no way to know for sure.

Love Is the Higher Law by David Levithan

"One review a week, that's manageable, right?" Said the absentee blogger.

In a Nutshell: Claire, Jasper and Peter are teenagers in New York City on 9/11.  Confusion, grief, mourning, and learning to live and love again follow.

The Good:  Getting 9/11 from an insider perspective.  I never thought about two building’s-worth of paperwork fluttering into Brooklyn, re-lighting candles in the park in the rain, not being allowed to return to your downtown home.  There’s a great scene where Jasper and Claire are at MSG that October for a U2 concert that showcases music’s power to unite and heal.  It’s very cathartic.

The Bad: Levithan’s writing style.  I sometimes find it hard to take.  It’s like a breathless torrent of teenage “deep thoughts” mixed with over-jaded adolescent angst.  His teenagers seem too old and too young at the same time.  It may be wildly realistic, too, which is why most teenagers frighten me ever so slightly.  Also, there is a love story aspect that left me cold.

The Verdict:  I had high expectations going into this one, which is probably part of my problem with it.  I loved the parts from Claire’s perspective that seemed to focus more on the events and aftermath of 9/11 and disliked the ones from Jasper’s more confused, disconnected perspective.  I wanted more emotional kick from this and maybe for Levithan to spread out all the teenage profundities his characters’ internal narratives were constantly spewing.  Short answer: I wanted this book to make me cry.  Instead, all the words got in the way. 

My copy purchased from a store or someplace.

The Fill-In Boyfriend by Kasie West

Once upon a time I requested some book that I now forget the title of from William Morrow Paperbacks blogger blast.  Ok, two books, I requested two books.  There was some sort of mix-up at the book publishing factory or shipping center or whoever shuffles off the finished copies when they run out of ARCs, and I ended up with one of the books I requested and one shiny new copy of The Fill-In Boyfriend by Kasie West instead of the other book I requested.  Happily, I've been known to enjoy some YA contemporary romance on occasion, so I didn't miss that other book for long and ended up with some top-notch summer reading to enjoy.

Gia Montgomery is obsessed with what people think of her and her perfect image, and she doesn't even realize it.  That is, she doesn't begin to realize it until her boyfriend Bradley breaks up with her just before they were to enter the prom and prove to Gia's friends that Bradley isn't a figment of her imagination.  As senior year draws to a close, the thought of having to face her friends, including frenemy Jules who seems to determined to dislodge Gia from their group, dateless at the prom is beyond the pale. Desperate to avoid looking like a liar in front of her friends, Gia enlists the help of a guy dropping his sister off for the night to pose as Bradley.  With one fake date, Gia starts to get tangled up in a web of lies that pave the way for her to learn the truth about herself.


The Fill-In Boyfriend is perfect summer reading, easy to read with a main character who becomes more and more sympathetic as the book wears on and, naturally, a love interest that readers won't find it hard to fall for.  Gia, at the start, is benignly reprehensible, choosing to be a liar in order to not look like a liar, obsessed with her image and portraying a perfect, put-together version of herself even when she's starting to come apart at the seams.  Happily, her nemesis in the book, Jules, is just enough worse that even Gia at her least lovable looks better.  The benefit from starting out so bad is that Gia has plenty of room to grow, and grow she does, discovering that she hardly knows herself beneath the perfect exterior she presents.


There's something Sarah Dessen-esque about The Fill-In Boyfriend, a sort of formula that pairs up a perfect always-fine girl with a guy who is unexpectedly dashing and self-aware, who helps peel back the layers of artifice to reveal the decent human being inside all that fakey perfection.  As we've probably established a few times already as I've fallen hard for a few Sarah Dessen books, that formula is one of my most beloved "guilty pleasures."  The Fill-In Boyfriend is fast read that brings back all those high school feelings, good and bad. It's definitely a great entry into the YA contemporary romance genre that satisfies without wrapping things up too easily, making it that much more enjoyable for its authenticity.


(Thanks to the publisher, for, uh, accidentally shipping me the wrong book?  In exchange for review consideration?  Or something?)

Series Worth Reading: Monument 14 by Emmy Laybourne

I made a choice not too long ago to only read series when they were completed, and I had all the books in my possession.  What a good choice.  Instead of reading one book and then forgetting it and trying to get back into the series a year later, I can read them all within weeks of each other.  I usually intersperse standalones between books but not so many that I lose track of the series.  This has turned series reading into a welcome event instead of an exercise in frustration.  Happily, there are oodles and tons of complete YA series that are out there ripe for the reading (and reviewing...with only light spoilers!).

Monument 14 is one such series.  I'm an easy target for a good post-apocalyptic/dystopian series, and this one was great.

Book one wastes no time getting right into the nitty gritty of the apocalypse.  Dean and his brother Alex are running to catch their school buses little knowing that their lives as they knew them are about to be over.  Between home and school the buses are caught in a treacherous hail storm.  Dean's bus wrecks, but, quick thinker Mrs. Wooly, the elementary school bus driver plows her bus into a Greenway super store.  Unfortunately, the hail storm is only the beginning, and soon the group of unsupervised kids has taken more permanent shelter inside the store while the world outside endures catastrophe after catastrophe.

Monument 14 is cleverly conceived as both a post-apocalyptic thriller and a sort of social experiment that brings together average, slightly nerdy Dean with Jake the jock and Niko, a boy scout always prepared type, and a herd of scared and/or bratty elementary school kids.  While the world outside is crumbling under freak weather events and the release of a military grade toxin that interacts with certain blood types to produce dangerous effects, a motley assortment of grade schoolers is learning to rely on each other to survive.  It's interesting to see how long the normal high school social construct holds up before it becomes apparent that it's becoming a thing of the past.

The three books follow the group of kids from their safe haven in the super store out into the destroyed world, starting with Dean as the narrator and branching out to other points of view as circumstances change.  The post-apocalyptic world Laybourne presents is terrifying, filled with people desperate to get by and people who are wreaking havoc unaware thanks to the chemical weapon leak.  The pace is quick, with the kids dodging near disasters of all kinds as they seek a more permanent kind of safety than the Greenway has to offer.  Despite the abundance of characters presented, Laybourne doesn't scrimp on the character development, and each kid young and old(er) has a personality all their own.

The Monument 14 books are can't-put-them-down thrillers that read fast and have you longing for a happy ending for the "family" of kids who were unexpectedly thrown together in the Greenway on one fateful day.  

For the Record by Charlotte Huang

I really need to stop downloading "read now" books from Net Galley.  Alas, it's one of my great hobbies to cruise the read now pages for potential hits, and that's how I came by For the Record.  Now, there's nothing wrong with For the Record, but, well, you get what you pay for.

When punk rock band Melbourne's lead singer jumps ship to live a normal life, if the band of prep school punks wants to stay together they have to find a new lead singer.  Enter our narrator, Chelsea.  A runner up on a "Who wants to be a pop star?" sort of reality show, Chelsea gets the chance of lifetime when she is asked to go on tour fronting a band that she used to simply be a fan of.  Eager to leave her hometown where a scrape with an ex-boyfriend has left her on the outs, Chelsea jumps at the chance.  Unfortunately, getting in with the band isn't as easy as being their lead singer, and as Chelsea tries to make a place for herself on tour, her relationship with a movie star who is every girl's dream and forays into ill-conceived advertising threaten to tear what remains of the band apart.

For the Record is, essentially, fan fiction for a fictional band.  Chelsea may be a little big and a lot insecure, but she is, for most of the book at least, the quintessential Mary Sue, arriving on the scene to save a band in crisis with her vocal stylings, happening to fall in love with movie superstar Lucas Rivers, and even using her very limited capital to bring her best friend on tour as the merch girl.   Obviously, there is a love triangle with a band mate, an "artistic" feud with another band mate, and a crop of unexpected betrayals all around. 

For me, this book was entirely brain candy.  It was predictable enough that I might not have finished it but for the fact that I needed a breather after finishing a dense, slow read of a book.  For the Record, despite its flaws, is a fun romp with a band on tour, full of drama and with a fast reading first person narration.  While it's unlikely to make my best reads of the year list, I can't deny that I got what I came for, a fun, quick-reading "brain break."

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

I've been reading young this fall.  It seems that the randomizer by which I lazily choose my reading has been skewing toward YA surprisingly often this year, and I've rather been enjoying having my reading seasoned with YA again.  It helps too, that I finally did Dewey's Readathon again this October, which lends itself to YA reading.

The Readathon was a golden opportunity to finally dig into Linda Sue Park's A Long Walk to Water.  This one slipped into my collection on the occasion of my very first BEA and has been woefully neglected ever since.  A Long Walk to Water is a mere 115 pages (making it an ideal Readathon book), but it packs a punch.

Park tells, side by side, the stories of two young characters, Salva, a young boy in 1980s Southern Sudan, forced to run for his life when the war against the northern government comes to his village, and Nya, a young girl in nearly present day Sudan whose life is defined by her endless walks to and from a distant pond to supply her family with precious and hard to come by water.  When gunshots ring out near Salva's school, his teacher rushes the kids out the door insisting that they must not return to their villages and potential slaughter but flee into the bush alone.  What follows is Salva's perilous journey among strangers across dangerous terrain to the safety of an Ethiopian refugee camp.  Nya's village struggles to find fresh water that won't sicken people, but it's becoming more and more difficult, until strangers arrive in her village with an unexpected gift.

A Long Walk to Water is a short book, but a weighty one based on the true story of Salva Dut's terrifying childhood in his war-torn native country.  It digs into the harsh realities of war in Sudan caused by both rebellion against the northern government that wants to force its Islamic beliefs on the whole nation and the dangerous animosity between the rival tribes of the south.  Salva's story is both heartbreaking and often hopeless, but his refusal to give up and his coming of age under impossible circumstances are ultimately inspirational.   Nya's story seems almost out of place, at first, highlighting the practical implications of living in an area where struggling to survive is forced to be the top priority, but the dual stories come together to offer a touching and pitch perfect ending.

What's a short book that you have read that has had a big impact?

The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma

So, yeah, book reviewing, I should get back on that. I've been reading a bunch of a winners lately, not exactly anything 5 star knock my socks off awesome, but a few that have had my socks only hanging on by a toe.  ;-)

I think I'd like to start with The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma today, but I'm not sure of my approach because I think the reason I loved this book as much as I did was that I had really no idea what to expect.  I mean, I read the synopsis on the back and everything, but somehow when I actually got into the meat of the book, it was nothing like I expected.

Orianna "Ori" Speerling is a teenage ballet dancer from the wrong side of the tracks.  Her mom left when she was a kid leaving her the daughter of a single dad.  Despite her circumstances, she is unarguably the most captivating dancer in her dance school, possessing a natural talent and flair that cast everyone else in shadow, including her best friend Violet "Vee" Dumont who has the upper class trappings Ori will never have, but can't quite keep up with her friend in sheer talent.  Ori is a more loyal friend than Vee deserves, always holding herself back so her friend can keep up.  The two share everything.  Ori practically lives at Vee's house.  That is, until something happens, something that finds Ori in the Aurora Hills Secure Juvenile Detention Center while Vee dances her last high school recital and prepares to leave for Julliard.  The rest of the story comes via Ori's cell mate Amber, a presumed innocent victim of the justice system, who has found an unexpected place to belong among the inmates of Aurora Hills.

Without saying too much, let me just say how perfect The Walls Around Us ended up being for this autumn time of year.  The story it tells wanders from guilt and crime and grief into the downright eerie, and I loved it.  The Walls Around Us is one of those books that, if the "Young Readers" wasn't attached to its publisher's name, it would be difficult to peg as a YA book.  Suma doesn't sacrifice complexity or artful prose upon the altar of the book's would-be target audience, something I always appreciate in a well written YA book.  Each of her characters are fully actualized from free-spirit Ori, to angry, insecure Violet, to the mild-mannered Amber who brings out the unexpected camaraderie she's found among the fellow inmates of Aurora Hills by narrating her bits with "we" instead of "I."

The Walls Around Us is a beautifully composed, disturbingly rendered picture of the disturbing truth behind a pair of "perfect" ballerinas that goes beyond guilt and innocence to explore the natural and the supernatural.  It easily weaves between past and present, knitting together a story that is otherworldly and unexpected keeping readers on the edges of their seats until the truth is out and justice can finally be served.

(Received my copy in a publisher giveaway.)

In a World Just Right by Jen Brooks

When Jonathan Aubrey was just a young boy, his family was involved in a plane crash that he miraculously survived.  Growing up an orphan in his inattentive Uncle Joey's house, Jonathan discovered he had a power - a power to make worlds from his own imagination, worlds that he could actually travel to and leave the pain of the world he knows behind. 

Smart, beautiful track star Kylie Simms is the girl of Jonathan's dreams, but untouchable in the real world, where Jonathan is all but invisible.  It doesn't matter, though, because Jonathan has created a mirror world of his own, one where Kylie loves him unconditionally, one where he has friends and runs track and lives the "normal" life that he might have had.  Everything is going along okay in Jonathan's worlds until the day he mistakes one world for the other and approaches the real Kylie for a kiss.  All the sudden, everything Jonathan thought he knew about his life and his power is called into question, and maybe none of Jonathan's worlds are quite what they've always seemed.

I really enjoyed In a World Just Right.  It starts out as a sweet, if misguided, romance between a boy who's lost everything and the girl of his imagination.  Then it morphs into a much more intriguing story as the mystery behind Jonathan's power to create parallel worlds for himself is uncoiled and the implications of it for the worlds he manipulates become startlingly clear.  Jonathan is a sympathetic character, wishing to blend in and forget in the real world but desperately wanting to be a hero or the boy he could have been in the worlds he creates.  He's very realistically drawn, not ruined by the tragedy of his life, but always existing with an unspeakable grief just below the surface.

The best part of the book, however, is the end.  I wouldn't for a moment chance spoiling it for anybody, but I will tell you that I was surprised, I ugly cried, and it made a middle of the road romance with magical leanings blossom into something much more profound.  Brooks' debut is everything I'd hoped and more, a pitch perfect novel about love that shows up in many forms and the courage it takes to face every day in the real world.

(Thanks to the author for providing an advance copy for my honest review.)

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

Hola, blog readers!  I have, once again, drifted into absentee bloggerism.  I do this sometimes. 

Sometimes I just get tired or busy or tired and busy or tired of being at the computer in my spare time when I'm at it all the time for work.  Sometimes I become a good reader and read books with reckless abandon to the exclusion of the blogging.  I'd like to think this has been one of those times.  Also, I've been, you know, tired....and busy.

The laws of random reading for the decision-impaired nearly landed me in a reading funk about a month ago.  The randomizer picked and I dutifully began and discarded a couple of books, which is good in the grand scheme of "I have ever so many books and must get rid of some, but also I read at a glacial pace" things, but not so great because after a few in a row, you're like, "Uh oh, do I just not like books right now?  Any books?"  Happily, just as I was reaching my saturation point with not liking books, the randomizer awarded me Just Listen by Sarah Dessen.  I won't say I'm a crazed Sarah Dessen fangirl - honestly I found Dreamland to be kind of a disappointment as far as YA issue novels go, but I had a fantastic experience with The Truth About Forever, so I was happy when Just Listen's number came up.

When I got to my own face, I found myself starting at it, so bright, with dark all around it, like it was someone I didn't recognize.  Like a word on a page that you've printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign, and you feel scared for a second, like you've lost something, even if you're not sure what it is.

Annabel Greene is the girl who has everything, or at least she plays one on TV.  When the commercial she features in starts popping up on TV screens, Annabel feels like she couldn't be less like the smiling girl in the pictures who is having the perfect high school experience.  Instead, something happened during the summer that she can't talk about, that is the talk of the school, that has sent all her best friends packing to avoid becoming a social pariah like Annabel.  Things are no better at home where her mother is struggling with depression, her middle sister is recovering from anorexia, and Annabel has no choice but to maintain the facade to keep her precarious family's boat from rocking.

Instead of letting the truth out, Annabel is limping through her senior year friendless and sick with worry.  That is, of course, until she meets the guy.  Owen Armstrong's not exactly a social butterfly either.  He's got kind of a frightening reputation for anger and a habit of always using his headphones to block out the world, but it turns out broody, honest to a fault Owen is the only one who can rescue Annabel from her own act and help her tell the truth, even to herself.

There is definitely something special about a Sarah Dessen book.  It's not that I relate terribly much to her trying-to-be-perfect teenage main characters or expect that an unexpected guy will always come to the rescue when life goes south.  However, Dessen does a great job of turning a "perfect" untouchable girl into a normal person with normal problems whose life isn't as great as it seems.  Annabel's life, in ways, is perfectly typical, filled with sisters who are rivals; loving, if distracted, parents; and a childhood friend or two who got dropped along the way.  It's that true-to-life high school experience that really helps Dessen's characters jump off the page and become truly lovable.

The romance that brings an unlikely couple together is satisfying, but more importantly serves as a way to draw out Annabel's character and her coming of age story.  Admittedly, Dessen books have a bit of a formula to them, but I think it's a great formula, and when Annabel finally comes to terms with her secrets, I was crying right along with her. Just Listen is a touching, satisfying romance with a musical bent and a main character who is learning just how much the truth can set her free.

There comes a time in every life when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart.  So you'd better learn to know the sound of it.  Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying. 

Shatter Me: A Rant With a Surprise Ending

Okay, so December, right?  December, for me and a lot of people I imagine, is not a month rife with excess reading time, ergo, I usually opt for Christmas season YA.  You know, something a little quicker and easier to read to squeeze in among the holiday madness.  This year I decided to start a series that everybody seems to have loved, a dystopian that sounded right up my alley - Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi.  This kind of backfired because, um, I hated this book, that is, until I stopped hating it so much.  If I had spent as much time reading this book as I did contemplating whether or not to finish it, I would have been done twice as fast.  Anyhow, I did actually finish despite my many reservations, so what follows is, in honor of the book, probably the most inarticulate, snarky commentary ever to show its face on my blog.    

Shatter Me is the story of girl, imprisoned in an asylum by the authorities in a dying world, unloved, unappreciated, untouched because, oh right, her touch is lethal.  She lives in darkness, eats formless gruel for every meal, and spends her endless minutes in her cell keeping a journal of her woes filled with the kind of overwrought nonsensical angst that should stay safely locked up in her head.  Then, a second prisoner shows up in her cell and everything changes.  Suddenly, instead of being shunned, Juliette is practically being worshiped by The Reestablishment that seeks to use her as a weapon as they attempt to remake the world and undo the mistakes of the past that wrecked the planet.  I would be more specific, but that's pretty much all the world-building readers are privy to in the early stages of Shatter Me.

So, Shatter Me has a pretty good premise, but oh, oh the execution.  First of all, why are all the YA haters out there so busy (still) whining about Twilight and failing to warn unsuspecting readers about the writing in this book?  I'm just going to lay it all out on the table here, and say that some of the writing in the early stages of Shatter Me is just beyond cringeworthy.  Sure, there's the device that the book takes the form of Juliette's journal, and she tends to cross out a lot of things and revise her thoughts.  That actually didn't bother me at all like it seemed to bother a random smattering of readers.  Rather, I wished that Mafi would have elected to strike through more sentences and spare me this continuous overabundance of overwrought hyperbole that often actually jolted me out of the narrative to either laugh, read it aloud to some poor innocent wandering through my field of vision, or pick up one of my eyeballs after it unceremoniously rolled out of my head.  But wait, how about I'll just show you?

Here's a quick sample of the sort of writing that makes readers like me go, "Wha??"

My heart is a water balloon exploding in my chest.  My lungs are swinging from my rib cage.  I feel as though every fist in the world has decided to punch me in the stomach.

Her heart is a water balloon.  Her lungs are, ouch, swinging from her rib cage.  Gross.  And fists!  Fists are personified and have better decision-making skills than I do.  Wait, I have another!  This one's my favorite, and I now occasionally bleat this at unsuspecting bystanders for my own amusement.

I'd like to cry into his eyes.

You what?  You want to cry into his eyes?  What does that even mean?

Okay, so maybe you're the sort of reader who can overlook the rampant hyperbole, but then you run into the problem of Juliette.  She's a sympathetic character, without a doubt.  I mean, she's a nice girl with a surprisingly fantastic moral compass whose parents essentially decided she was a monster and gave her to the government to do what they will with her.  When she wants to help people, she kills them.  Human companionship is not really available to a girl whose touch is dangerous.  She cares about strangers and loathes herself and the curse that she lives with every day.  However, throughout the course of the book, she reveals herself to be irritatingly reckless, her mouth just goes and goes when it should stay shut.  Her ramblings definitely fail to reveal even the slightest hint of the brave or thoughtful heroine you hope to materialize in a bleak dystopian world.  Indeed, she can't shut up long enough to make sensible decisions about who to trust.  Sure, she's sympathetic, but for someone whose touch can kill she's also a serious wimp.

Now for the surprise ending.  Finally at about the two-thirds mark, Shatter Me takes a turn for the better.  The action picks up and gets Juliette out of her own twisted head for a while to this reader's great relief.  Bravery and strength start to work their way into her character at the last possible moment, and it becomes apparent that she's only just scratched the surface of her power.  Then the book wraps up with a tantalizing plot twist and...well.  Then I, with just the barest hint of shame and self-loathing, pick up the second book in the series hoping against hope that this series will turn out the opposite of Divergent and wow me with the end instead of the beginning.

(No disclaimer, I bought this!)

Slam by Nick Hornby

It's November, I'm back, and I brought books (or, um, book reviews - you know what I mean)!

Nick Hornby's Slam is about Sam, the teenage son of a single mother who had him too young.  Sam, unfortunately, in the course of book, is about to follow in his mother's footsteps.  Sam's a pretty normal teenager, into skating (that's skateboarding for the uninitiated), preparing for the possibility of studying art at college, and, of course, spending all kinds of time with his superhot girlfriend, Alicia.  Everything is going along quite nicely, that is, until Alicia gets pregnant.

Slam's kind of a weird book.  Sam himself is, for the most part, a very normal teenage guy.  When faced with the staggering revelation of his girlfriend's pregnancy, he doesn't really know how to be supportive and kind of irrationally just wants to run away from the whole thing.  In short, he's inarticulate, obsessed with Tony Hawk, and he's kind of irritating - just like you would expect him to be at his age.  Then there's this weird plot thing where he consults with a poster of Tony Hawk for tidbits of life advice, which are tangentially related quips from Tony's book reproduced by Sam's overactive imagination, and the part with the supposed time travel (dreaming?) that reveals to Sam the various courses his life might follow as a too-young dad.

By turns bizarre and painfully realistic, Slam makes for some interesting reading.  Hornby seems to be spot on when he digs into the issues of teenage parenting, how unprepared kids are for the responsibility, how the parents eschew helping for debating over which kid ruined the other's life, as well as how quickly kids can age when they are forced to take on big responsibilities.  I liked these parts.  I liked that even though Sam's very colloquial narration reveals a character that, from a female perspective, is, on the whole, kind of aggravating, Hornby doesn't shy away from a creating a character who has very real and believable reactions to a very real and drastic turn of events in his life.

I could very well have done without all the weird Tony Hawk stuff, but even that, kind of points to Sam's immaturity that obviously doesn't go away just because he's about to become a father.  On the whole, being inside the head of a character I often couldn't decide whether I'd like to give a hug or a shove made it a little difficult to love this book, but Slam is definitely an interesting and rare look inside the male perspective on teenage pregnancy.

(No disclaimer today, friends.  I, like, bought this book - and read it, too!)

Out of the Blue by S.L. Rottman

Stuart Ballantyne is used to moving.  His mother is a colonel in the Air Force, and as the story begins, she's about to take command of the Minot, North Dakota base.  Stuart might be used to moving to follow his mother's career, but this time it's just him and his mom after his brother departs for college and his father has to travel to deal with Stuart's grandmother's health issues. 

What attracted me to Out of the Blue is what it delivered, a different perspective.  I'd never read a story set on a military base, and I was interested to read more about the military families' different way of life.  Stuart, who's practically a pro at being a military migrant of sorts, is a good window onto the scene.  Rottman does an excellent job of portraying the ceremony and pride of country that go along with the setting, and also, the reluctance to meddle in the business of other military families despite their close quarters.

Stuart is a good, if confused and lonely, kid knocked off balance by facing this move alone and dealing with situations beyond his years without the safety net of his father and brother while his mother is off dealing with base business. He's a sympathetic but occasionally bland narrator.  Rottman's story offers an interesting perspective that doesn't seem to crop up in a lot of YA novels and a believable coming-of-age story to boot, but it's plagued by an unfortunate lack of memorability.  Worth a read, but not extraordinary.

(Review copy received from the publisher via NetGalley.)

The Tyrant's Daughter by J.C. Carleson

My brother is the King of Nowhere.

So starts Laila's story.  She's recently been relocated to an apartment with her mother and brother in Washington D.C. suburbia.  Her six-year-old brother is the would-be heir to power of the country they fled shortly after Laila's father was killed, and his brother assumed power by force.  Now, instead of living ensconced in a Middle Eastern palace, Laila is struggling to understand her new life and new culture as she attends her new American school.  As if that's not hard enough, her eyes are being opened to the many horrors that occurred under her father's rule, and trying to reconcile those with the loving father she knew is no easy task.  Laila is amazed at the freedom her new life affords her; a life without veils, a culture where casual kissing isn't forbidden.  At the same, though, she feels the pull of her home country, hates the treachery of her despotic uncle, and can't shake the feeling that something has to be done to discover and rectify the secrets that are buried deep in her homeland.

The Tyrant's Daughter is a story headed in two different directions, mostly because Laila herself is headed in two different directions.  There's the Laila who is striving to make friends, understand a culture that mystifies her and fit in with people whose biggest problem is a nasty break-up.  This Laila is learning to cut loose at the school dance and what it feels like to fall in love with a guy that's not chosen for her.  The other Laila is still deeply embroiled in the struggles of her home country.  A CIA agent keeps lurking around her new home, and some expatriates from her country that her family never would have associated with in her old life are visiting frequently.  She knows her devious mother is up to something, and a lot hinges on what Laila, her family's "Invisible Queen," can find out and act upon.

I loved the premise of this story but felt that the execution left a lot to be desired.  It's not difficult to imagine this scenario happening.  Laila's country is an amalgamation of several Middle Eastern nations and it's not much of leap to imagine the high-stakes politicking Laila's family becomes embroiled in.  Laila's discovery of the atrocities happening in her country and her discovery of the power her family wields even at a distance are the high points of this story.

My country makes shameful lists:  Worst countries for women.  Worst countries for human rights.  Worst countries for press freedom.  It's never at the top, but it's often close -- it's the runner-up in a devil's beauty pageant.

However, Laila's interactions with her new American culture and struggle to fit in seemed to me to be woefully inauthentic. I never quite bought Laila's romance with Ian of the leonine eyes, and her bubbly friend Emmy seemed to be a caricature of a typical happy mostly problem-free American teenager created mostly to stand in stark relief against Laila's overburdened worldliness.  When Laila in her first person narration tosses off observations about her new culture relative to her old one, it's more like hearing Carleson's voice, not Laila's, and that voice occasionally feels just the slightest bit condescending (Like, how could you silly, pampered Americans with your #firstworldproblems possibly understand the magnitude of Laila's struggles?).  All in all, the first person narration itself wasn't quite successful.  The short chapters and the Carleson's tendency to tell much more than show left me feeling disengaged from Laila for much of the book.

The Tyrant's Daughter might prove to be a good starter book for young adults to gain a better and more meaningful understanding of the Middle East and the struggles it faces through Laila's story.  However, if you're a little older and a little more well-read on the issues and cultures of the Middle East, you might find this book to ring a little hollow, as it did for me.  Perhaps part of the problem is, yet again, that I'm reading a book that's just a little too Y for my A.

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.)

Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern

How excited was I when a copy of Say What You Will landed in my mailbox?  Very excited, I'd say.  It would have been extremely excited except for the cool cover art didn't make it onto the ARC.  Just the same, I'd heard the comparisons to Rainbow Rowell's books that are so very popular right now and seen the cool cover art online, and I was very excited to crack the cover on this one.  So excited, in fact, it didn't even make it to the purgatory of the middling size pile of books I need to review, I just started reading it straight away during the Bout of Books.  Bottom line?  It was good, but I came away a bit disappointed.  Cue unpopular opinions of a dissident blogger! (There are some very light spoilers in the following review, so beware.)

Amy has cerebral palsy.  She can't walk without a walker, can't speak in a way that people can understand, and struggles to feed herself without making an embarrassing mess.  Despite appearances Amy is smart, has a knack for writing, and an optimism about her life that verges on the unbelievable.  Matthew has had classes with Amy since they were kids and one day he blurts out the truth, as he sees it, that Amy has no friends and the messages she's sending about her life aren't quite true.  Amy's encounter with Matthew changes her whole perspective and she decides that in order to be ready for college, it's time for her to make friends her own age, so for her senior year, her parents hire a flock of student aides to help her at school.  Matthew's hired to help Amy, but he's dealing with a disability of his own.  As the unlikely pair becomes friends, Amy realizes that she can help Matthew, too, and they both realize that they might want to be more than just friends.

Say What You Will is a quick read with a pair of different, interesting, and lovable characters.  For the first half of the book I was enchanted by Amy and Matthew's budding friendship and their slow realization that maybe they could have something more regardless of their respective disabilities.  Each challenges and helps the other to step outside of a life defined by disability, and it was touching to see them discover that when you love somebody, they become beautiful to you despite and sometimes even because of the failings of their bodies.  

After that, a strange thing happened: Amy couldn't stop her expectations from rising.  She imagined herself transformed and beautiful, like Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, with her homemade dress and mysterious lace boots.  She pictured her hair in an upsweep of loose curls.  In the fantasy, her prom face looked like the one she only wore asleep, loose and relaxed.  She imagined a photographer asking her to smile and, for the first time in her life, being able to do it.  

I felt like I saw where McGovern was headed with her story and liked it, but then came the prom and the whole thing just started coming off the rails for me.  What started out as a pleasing slow steady climb of a story quickly took a sudden turn down a roller coaster hill.  After a build-up, prom is come and gone within only a chapter bringing with it all kinds of plot points that could have been dug into, but were instead quickly glossed over.  Characters started acting, well, out of a character, and what should have been a major plot event zipped by quickly, without the attention it seemed the warrant. 

And then, wow.  Then there's a plot twist that really came out of left field, and left me feeling pretty disappointed.  It's as if, instead of letting the book follow the good and natural progression that she'd started, the author decided that something major had to happen to keep readers turning pages, and that something turned a sweet romance on its head and sent it tumbling into after-school special territory. I wanted to love this book, and the beginning showed all the potential I'd hoped for, but the unnecessary theatrics caused me to disengage from the characters just enough that by the time the payoff came that I'd been waiting for through the whole book, there was no way it could deliver. 

(Thanks to HarperTeen for sending me a copy for review.)

Armchair BEA: YA and I

YA is Armchair BEA's prompt of the day.

I almost missed YA.  Seriously, when I was in high school the first couple Harry Potter books were taking the world by storm, but I was beyond this young witches and wizards stuff by then.  I had started to trod the hallowed halls of high school (Ha!), and with those days came carte blanche to finally read whatever I wanted.  I considered myself a Reader with a capital "R," and I was ready to eschew all this "stupid kid stuff" to spend my long, hot summer days with frightfests by Stephen King and Dean Koontz.  Digging into John Grisham's legal thrillers and the freshly minted Oprah's Book Club titles was way more enticing to me than reading about high school horrors and romances among kids that reminded me of the annoying teenagers I walked the halls with every day.  I couldn't wait to be out of high school, and I certainly didn't want to spend my free time reading about it.

Luckily, my life and times on the interwebz wouldn't let me put this whole wealth of YA in the rearview.  Rather, day by day friendly Bookcrossers and then bloggers convinced me of the merit of this body of work I was so eager to leave behind.  By the time I was in college, I was already backing away from Dean Koontz's laughable metaphors (sorry Dean, but I think even you make fun of your metaphors now) and James Patterson's two page chapters (and I thought YA might talk down to me??) in favor of the very Harry Potter books I was "too good for" in high school.  I loved them so much that they may have, on occasion, actually made me late for work at my summer job slinging dishes in a nursing home dietary department (no great loss there).

Since then, I've lost myself in numerous YA books of the highest quality like...

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Did I even need to say it?)
Sparrow Road by Sheila O'Connor
Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger
Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Open Wounds by Joseph Lunievicz
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

....and so very many more excellent reads. 

Truly, truly I owe Bookcrossers and bloggers a great debt of gratitude for bringing me back to what has become one of my favorite categories of books.  A category that can hardly be called a genre because it seems to cover all genres.  Now I read YA when I'm looking for a break from the occasional slog of interpreting literary/contemporary fiction because I know I can count on YA for solid reads that dabble in any of a few genres with relate-able characters that won't ask me to leave my brain at the cover to enjoy them.  Great YA authors today are writing books that ask important questions that will give young adults (and the crusty old grown-ups who read their books) food for thought all delivered with quick pacing and fantastic characters that render those books completely unputdownable. 

My bookshelves and my Kindle are both loaded down with YA, and I couldn't be happier to be young again, if only in the books that I read.  How about you?