Month: March 2024

The History of Jane Doe – Michael Belanger

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Raymond Green and his best friend Simon Blackburn aren’t really part of the in crowd at their Connecticut high school. In fact, they’re not really part of any crowd at all. Ray is a history nerd and Simon’s “not really a nerd at all. […] His nerdiest attribute would have to be his love of vampire fiction.” Ray and Simon have been best friends since middle school and their lives have been pretty closed off from the rest of the world that is until Jane Doe moves to their hometown from Brooklyn.

Michael Belanger’s debut YA novel The History of Jane Doe is Ray’s story of his junior year and how Jane’s arrival changes his life forever.

…I should tell you that everything I am about to write is true. It’s not one of those made-up stories that has morals and plot devices and well-crafted metaphors. History doesn’t have room for all that. Facts are facts, whether you like them or not. I’m only changing one name: hers. It just didn’t feel right to use her real name, so I’m calling her Jane, as in Jane Doe.

Ray’s story focuses on the “Before” and “After” and it won’t be difficult for readers to figure out the event to which the “After” is referring. The joy in this story comes from the characters themselves. Watching Ray try to connect with Jane because he’d “always operated under the assumption that the less [he] spoke, the better” when it came to talking to girls is a delight. In fact, across the board the dialogue in this book is terrific. I often laughed out loud or snickered. The book is reminiscent of John Green’s Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska – and I mean that as a compliment.

This is also a book that tackles some pretty weighty subjects including mental health issues and depression, the breakdown of a family (Ray’s father has buggered off to Florida) and social isolation. Anyone who has ever experienced life’s trials would certainly recognize themselves in these pages.

I loved spending time with these characters and highly recommend this book.

Rovers – Richard Lange

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Stephen King called Richard Lange’s novel Rovers, “The best vampire novel [he’d] read since Let the Right One In.” I don’t usually go in for author endorsements except I know that King is a voracious reader and when it comes to things that go bump in the night, you could do way worse that King when he’s at the top of his game (and let’s face it, he usually is.)

Lange’s novel tells the story of brothers Jesse and Edgar (think George and Lennie from Of Mice and Men if they were bloodsuckers). They’ve been vampires–or Rovers as they’re called in Lange’s universe– for seventy-five years, Jesse first and then, at his mother’s behest, Edgar. They travel together, stay away from other people (except for that time when Jesse fell in love with Claudine) and feed only when they have to, usually about once a month. As far as vampires go, they’re relatively benign.

The Fiends, on the other hand, are not. They’re a motorcycle gang, led by bookworm Antonia and her lover, Elijah. For the right price, they’ll do a job and the job at hand involves a lot of money and a baby. When two of the gang take the baby to a remote location to feed, Jesse, Edgar, and a human woman they’ve just met– and to whom Jesse has taken a shine because she reminds him of Claudine–just happen to be nearby. Right place wrong time or wrong place right time – take your pick, but either way, now the three are on the run because the Fiends will stop at nothing to find them.

Then there’s Charles, a man who has been bouncing from city to city, hunting for the person responsible for the death of his son, Benny. When he meets Czarnecki a grizzled old man on a similar mission – to rid the world of Rovers- Charles’ understanding of the world is forever altered.

Rovers is a straightforward, action packed, novel where I found myself feeling tremendous sympathy for some of these characters, even though I clearly should not. Lange leans into some of the vampire tropes: sunlight kills, behead the vampire and they turn to dust. Other things are slightly different: no fangs, instead a nick to the jugular and it’s an all you can drink buffet and just about any injury will heal given time. These vampires eat a lot of people food, too.

This is a violent, often gory, fun novel – if vampires are your thing.

The Realm of Possibility – David Levithan

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It won’t really be possible to review the “story” found in David Levithan’s (Every Day) novel-in-verse The Realm of Possibility because this isn’t really a straightforward, linear narrative. Instead it captures the voices of twenty different students who attend the same high school. Some of the poems tell stories which overlap, some recount the same incident from different perspectives. These are stories of friendship, unrequited love, isolation and family, eating disorders and sex. You know – the sorts of things that occupy high school students and will likely be relatable.

Personally, I had a hard time trying to connect the dots until I figured out that it didn’t really matter if I knew who was who and how or even if they were connected to the other narratives. Some of the poems definitely worked a little bit better for me. I really enjoyed “Tinder Hearts” which is the story of one girl’s relationship with food and her boyfriend.

at the mall
elizabeth says
is that all
you’re eating?
and i tell her
i’m having dinner
later and she says,
mary, it’s nine,
and i tell her
i’m okay and
she says that
wasn’t my
question and
i say you know
it was and she
says that’s true.
i just wanted
to see if you
knew it,
too.

I was also pretty invested in Jed and Daniel’s relationship, which bookend all the other poems and where Jed admits that “You think you know your possibilities,/ Then other people come into your life/ and suddenly there are so many more.”

I do think that thoughtful young adults will recognize many of these characters and care a lot less about trying to put these poems into some sort of coherent order. I don’t think it matters all that much to understand who is who and how or even if they are connected. Adolescence is a messy, fraught and occasionally magnificent period on our lives and Levithan’s book captures that beautifully.

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls – Anton DiSclafani

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From a vantage point some time in the future, Thea Atwell looks back at the year she was fifteen in Anton DiSclafani’s debut novel The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. It is only with this hindsight that Thea is able to make sense of the events which led up to her parents banishing her to North Carolina. She has only ever known her home in rural Florida, where her father is the only doctor for miles and the family’s wealth is buoyed by citrus. There, she and her twin brother Sam spend their days doing exactly what they want: for Thea this means riding her horse, Sasi; for Sam it means examining the natural world. The outside world consists of her aunt and uncle and her two-years-older cousin, Georgie, but they live in Gainesville.

Thea hints at the reasons why she has been sent away. She says early on that her parents were sending her to Yonahlossee so they “wouldn’t have to see me.” When she thinks of home she “wanted to weep, but I would not let myself. I had wept enough for a lifetime. Two lifetimes. Three.”

It doesn’t take her long to settle in to life at Yonahlossee, partly because one of the camp’s more popular girls, Sissy, befriends her and partly because Thea is an exceptional horsewoman. Life here is so different from life back home and the people back home seem to have forgotten her; her parents take turns writing and she hears nothing from Sam, once her closest companion.

The novel moves seamlessly between days at Yonahlossee and the days leading up to the “event” which caused her exile. In the meantime, she begins to understand her power when begins a relationship with an adult at the camp.

One of the students in my Young Adult Literature class read this book and called it “disgusting.” I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a coming-of-age story featuring a young woman trying to figure out what society and her parents expect from her and what she wants for herself. The fact that the novel is set in 1930 makes this all the more problematic. Thea has been sheltered by her parents’ money, but out in the world she comes to understand that everyone has not lived as she has. She is often selfish and petty, but she is also smart and free-spirited. Does she make some bad choices? Certainly. Are her choices “disgusting”? Certainly not.

At Yonahlossee I learned the lesson I had started to teach myself at home: my life was mine. And I had to lay claim to it.

This is a fabulous debut.

The World Cannot Give – Tara Isabella Burton

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Sixteen-year-old Laura Stearns has left her home in Las Vegas to attend St. Dunstan’s Academy, a ritzy private school in Maine. Laura feels things deeply and cries easily and she is drawn to St. Dunstan’s because of its connection to Sebastian Oliver Webster, author of a singular novel called All Before Them.

He understood about angels, about heroes, about lattices of voices. He understood about beauty and meaning, and about World-History, which he always capitalizes. He understood about green morning light, and also about slant rhymes […] She doesn’t know who she is, not loving him.

The main character in Webster’s novel–a character based on Webster himself– attended St. Dunstan’s and Laura is anxious to walk in his footsteps. She is sure she will meet like-minded students and she does: Virginia Strauss and the band of five boys who make up the school’s choir. Virginia is clearly ‘other’ and “Laura has never seen anyone more beautiful in her life.”

Virginia rules the choir with an iron will.

The choirboys–all handsome; all ebullient; all terrifying–are always with her. She holds court at the head of the table, or at the center of the picnic blanket. Her eyes are always sharp. She rarely smiles.

But you know what they say about power? Yeah, there’s that because as she draws Laura into the choir’s orbit we earn, as Laura does, that Virginia has a black core of narcissism. She demands moral perfection and complete loyalty and when she does not get it, things go sideways.

Luce [is reading] wrote a pretty scathing review of The World Cannot Give and it’s worth a read. That said, I enjoyed this book. I think the pretentiousness of these characters and their desire to achieve what Webster calls the “shipwreck of the soul” suits the isolated setting and lack of (living) adult role models. The one person who might have had a positive influence, Reverend Tipton, struggles to control Virginia and actually seems more interested in one-upping her than in restoring or maintaining balance.

The World Cannot Give is a book that falls into the dark academia category and it has the requisite characteristics. It’s a slow burn novel and I will agree that not much happens with the exception of a lot of banal conversations and posing, but I enjoyed the book nonetheless.

You’d Be Mine – Erin Hahn

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Eighteen-year-old Clay Coolidge is country music’s biggest star. He’s also country music’s biggest asshole. Annie Mathers’ parents were country music royalty and she’s pretty talented in her own right. When Clay gets himself into another mess, his record label insists that he convince Annie and her band (cousin Kacey and best friend Jason) to join Clay on his tour. The record label wants Annie bad and they figure Clay is their best chance to get her. Not 100% sure why.

Anyway, that’s the set up of Erin Hahn’s YA (or is it New Adult – nah, not spicy enough for that) novel You’d Be Mine. Annie knows who Clay is, of course. There’s not a teenage girl in America who doesn’t know who he is and Annie herself had seen him in concert when she was fifteen and his “honey accent and swooping hair” had left its mark not just on her but “on every teenage girl in the audience.”

In real life, though, Clay is a bit of a jerk. Not always, of course because we’re supposed to root for these two crazy kids to get together. The thing is, they both have tragic backstories: Clay lost his older brother and grandfather and he hasn’t really had the time or inclination to process the loss and Annie’s parents have left her with a legacy she hasn’t quite figured out how to live with. She asks Clay

“Did you know the Late Night duet with my mom was the most-viewed episode of all time? I was six. I thought Willie Nelson was my grandpa until I was ten. I knew the words to “Coal Miner’s Daughter” before I learned my alphabet. My freaking birth announcement was on the cover of People magazine’s country music issue.”

These two talented young adults are damaged, for sure. They also have crazy chemistry which their fans see and they can’t really ignore, try as they might. Clay does things to Annie’s “lady parts” that are hard for her to ignore even though she has zero real experience in this department. I know, eh? Likewise, Clay is smitten with Annie’s undeniable talent and kindness and beauty.

They’re a match made in heaven, but first they have to navigate the troubled waters of their pasts and figure out how to be happy in their own skins. Sounds like a great country song.

How to Sell a Haunted House – Grady Hendrix

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Louise and Mark are estranged siblings who are forced to find a way to work together in an effort to clean out their parents’ house. That’s the starting point for Grady Hendrix’s novel How to Sell a Haunted House.

Louise and Mark squabble over everything, including how they should deal with the contents of the house: Mark calls it “junk”; Louise is more sentimental. It isn’t until things start to get, well, weird, that the siblings discover they have more in common than they realized.

When Louise arrives in Charleston, she discovers that Mark has already arranged for Agutter Clutter to come and cart away all the stuff their parents, Nancy and Eric, have accumulated over the years–and it’s a lot of stuff. Well, it’s a lot of puppets and dolls. That’s because Nancy was a puppeteer with “a Christian puppet ministry”. Neither of the siblings is really a fan and one puppet in particular makes “Louise’s skin crawl.”

Pupkin was a red-and-yellow glove puppet with two stumpy fabric legs dangling down from his front and two little nubbin arms. His chalk-white plastic face had a big smiling mouth and a little pug nose, and he looked out of the corners of his wide eyes like he was up to some kind of mischief. His moth and eyes were outlined in thick black lines and he wore a bloodred bodysuit with a pointed hood and a yellow stomach […]he looked like he’d crawled straight out of a nightmare.

How to Sell a Haunted House is often funny, and also violent and creepy (and this will be especially true if dolls and puppets make you uneasy). And, then, like in the other Hendrix books I have read (My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires), it also offers a deeper look at something more meaningful and real than just straight-up scares. (I didn’t find this book particularly scary, although it did, on occasion, make me squirm.)

This book tracks the emotions attached with grief (each section of the book is named after one of the five stages), the unresolved feelings you’re left with when you lose someone unexpectedly, and the notion that when your loved one is gone, all you have left –if you are lucky — are the people you have shared the journey with. If you are really lucky, that is a sibling.

Super enjoyable read.