The Secret Year – Jennifer R. Hubbard

Posted on by
Reply

Colten Morrissey has a secret and it’s a big one. For the past year, he and Julia Vernon have been hooking up, but no one knows about it because 1. Julia has a boyfriend and 2. “she lived up on Black Mountain Road, in a house that was five times as big” as Colt’s. Yeah, Colt’s not in Julia’s snack bracket at all. So at school, the two don’t even speak to each other or even acknowledge that they know each other. But outside of school

We’d meet on the banks of the river, clutch at each other in the backseat of her car, steam up her windows and write messages and jokes to each other in the fog on the glass, and argue about whether to turn on the A/C. Sometimes we swam in the river late at night when the water was black and no one could see us.

When Jennifer R. Hubbard’s YA novel The Secret Year opens, we learn that Julia is dead. Colt is trying to process this devastating loss and he has to do it privately. After her death, Julia’s brother, Michael, approaches him in the school cafeteria and as it turns out, he knew about his sister and Colt. Well, he found Julia’s journal and put the clues together. Now he wants Colt to have Julia’s notebook. It is both a blessing and a curse.

The Secret Year is sort of Romeo & Juliet, but without the angst (or the poetry) of the play. Sure, Colt and Julia have vastly different lives but that doesn’t seem to matter when they’re making out. And of course, because Julia is dead when the book opens we only ever see her through the eyes of other people and what she reveals about herself in the journal – which isn’t anything very deep, to be honest. Mostly it’s that she has to break up with her boyfriend and she has to do it soon, no, she’s going to do it this minute, but she never does. Truthfully, it’s hard to see what drew these two together other than hormones.

The Cemetery Boys – Heather Brewer

Posted on by
Reply

Seventeen-year-old Stephen and his father have packed up their lives in Denver and moved to Spencer to live with Stephen’s taciturn grandmother. It’s the summer before Stephen’s senior year and Stephen isn’t happy about – well – anything. First of all, Spencer is a weird backwater, population 813. Secondly, they’ve left Stephen’s mother behind. Well, she’s been institutionalized. Stephen’s father is unemployed. Stephen’s grandmother is expecting a little help around the house in exchange for their room and board.

At the start of Heather Brewer’s YA novel The Cemetery Boys I was sure I was in for a fast-paced thrill ride.

My fingers were going numb, my bound wrists worn raw by the ropes, but I twisted again, hard this time. I pulled until my skin must have split, because I felt my palms grow wet, then sticky, with what I was pretty sure was my blood. The knots were tight, but I had to get loose. Those things were coming for me, I just knew it.

Those things, it turns out, are The Winged Ones, some supernatural entity that demand a human blood sacrifice every so often for the sake of the town’s prosperity. At first it just seems like some made up bull designed to scare newcomers, but when Stephen meets Devon and the other boys who hang out in “The Playground” aka the local cemetery, he discovers that Devon actually believes in The Winged Ones.

Then there’s Cara, Devon’s beautiful twin sister with whom Stephen experiences an insta-love connection. Not entirely believable.

Despite starting with a bang, The Cemetery Boys ends with a whimper. There is certainly something sort of Stepford-esque about the town and its inhabitants, but nothing really goes anywhere and the book is mostly about a bunch of teenaged boys getting together and drinking their asses off. Until it’s late in the day denouement that is relatively anticlimactic.

Just okay for me.

The Hellbound Heart – Clive Barker

Posted on by
Reply

So, apparently British horror writer Clive Barker’s 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart is a classic. It spawned the cult movie Hellraiser, which I have never seen…and am not likely to see after having finished the book.

Frank is tired of the world. In fact, “there was nothing left out there to excite him. No heat. No sweat. No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference.” Then he finds Lemarchand’s box, which offers him an intriguing puzzle to solve and if he does, untold pleasure of the darkest kind.

Of course, you can’t make a fair bargain with the Cenobites. They are tricky entities. Frank soon discovers “There was no pleasure in the air; or at least not as humankind understood it.”

Frank’s brother Rory and his wife Julia have recently moved into Frank and Rory’s childhood home. One of the rooms is damp and creepy and Julia soon discovers the reason why. Some version of Frank inhabits the walls and in order to be made whole he needs blood. Julia, who had a pre-marital tryst with Frank, an event that “had in every regard but the matter of her acquiescence, all the aggression and joylessness of rape”, feels her lust for Frank reunited. despite the abhorrent form he currently takes.

It was human, she saw, or had been. But the body had been ripped apart and sewn together again with most of its pieces either missing or twisted and blacked as if in a furnace. There was an eye, gleaming at her, and the ladder of a spine, the vertebrae stripped of muscle, a few unrecognizable fragments of anatomy. That was it. That such a thing might live beggared reason–

The plot is relatively straightforward – equal parts predictable and revolting. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either.

Wildman – J.C. Geiger

Posted on by
Reply

Eighteen-year-old Lance Hendricks is on his way home after auditioning for a spot at a prestigious music school when his ’93 Buick breaks down. Lance is really anxious to get home to a party where he and his long-time girlfriend, Miriam, are finally going to do the deed, but his car is towed off and it looks like he’s going to be stranded in the middle of nowhere because he is not leaving his car behind. Not the car his father left for him.

J.C. Geiger’s YA novel Wildman is essentially the story of what happens when a person whose life is all figured out discovers that maybe that buttoned-up life isn’t the one he wants after all.

Lance takes a room at the Trainsong – a dumpy roadside motel – and heads over to The Float, the only spot for miles where someone can get something to eat (and drink, even if you are underage). There he meets Mason, Rocco, and Meebs. And Dakota.

She was watching him.

A girl in the darkness. In possession of perfect stillness. Her stillness made him stop, and because he stopped, it came. The feeling he’d been aching for. Toes in ice water. feathers up his calves. A hair-prickling, teeth rattling rush of a shiver so good it made his eyes sting.

As Lance waits for his car, he gets caught up in a world vastly different from his own. Lance was on the fast track to success: valedictorian of his graduating class, a full-ride scholarship, a summer internship at the bank. The future is all mapped out. Until he loses his way or, maybe, finds a different more appealing way.

I enjoyed my time with Lance and the people he meets on this journey. The book is well-written, often laugh-out-loud funny and asks some big questions at a pivotal time in a young person’s life.

We Used to Live Here – Marcus Kliewer

Posted on by
Reply

Years ago, I started to watch the movie The Strangers and I couldn’t make it past the first twenty minutes. Totally creeped me out.

While I eventually did make it through the whole thing, I don’t think I’d ever be looking to repeat the experience. Except maybe in book form.

Marcus Kliewer’s novel We Used to Love Here began its life on Creepypasta. I have only had one other experience with a book with the same starting point: Pen Pal. Like that book, this one started off with a bang and ended with a bit of a whimper.

Eve and Charlie have recently purchased an old fixer-upper in a secluded location with the intent of either renovating or demolishing and rebuilding. Eve is home alone one evening when the doorbell rings. There’s a family on her doorstep and Eve concludes

All in all, they seemed the kind of brood that would cap a Sunday-morning sermon with brunch at Applebee’s. Eve was more than familiar with this crowd.

The father wants to know if he can bring his family in because he used to live in the house. Weird, right?

Eve is reluctant to let them in and so she plays the only card she has: she’ll check with her girlfriend because

The distant alarm bells of her subconscious rang out. She vaguely remembered hearing stories. Stories of strangers showing up at houses, claiming they had lived there once, asking to take a quick look around. Then, when the unsuspecting victims had let down their guard: robbery, torture, murder.

What starts as a relatively straightforward domestic thriller soon morphs into something completely unhinged. The family starts to seem less “off” and Eve starts to feel way more unreliable. And the house, yeah, the house is changing, too. “”The basement’s bigger that you’d think,”” Thomas tells Eve. “”Lots of nooks, crannies, places to hunker down.”” Similarly, the attic is labyrinthine. But this discovery, like the basement, is new to Eve – discovered only after the arrival of the family.

We Used to Live Here was certainly easy to read – but I found it sort of disjointed, especially as things went along. It wasn’t scary, although there were certainly some creepy moments. I didn’t finish it feeling satisfied, mostly because I wasn’t 100% sure I understood exactly what had happened. That may be my own fault rather than the book’s – so your mileage might vary.

The Sealed Letter – Emma Donoghue

Posted on by
Reply

I started reading Emma Donoghue’s 2008 novel The Sealed Letter at the start of September, in anticipation of our book club discussion on Sept 25. I figured it would take me a while because of the many pages (close to 400) and tiny font, so I wanted to leave myself a lot of time. I barely finished in time – and not because of either of the aforementioned reasons. I couldn’t read more than three or four page before I nodded off.

Emily “Fido” Faithfull is a business woman in 1860s London. She runs a printing press where she gives young woman an opportunity to make their own money. True, she hasn’t had any luck in love and is, at 29, a spinster, but she is a woman of independent means.

When the novel opens, she runs into Helen Codrington, a slightly older woman with whom she was once friends. Their friendship lost its way due to miscommunication, but now Helen and her husband, a ranking officer in the navy, are back in London and the two women begin to see each other again.

It isn’t long, though, before Fido is drawn into Helen’s extra-marital intrigue and I would like to say that that speeds things up, but it doesn’t. When Helen’s husband, Harry, a stiff older man, gets wind of his wife’s shenanigans and decides to leave her, Fido suddenly finds herself pulled into a court case (because divorces were settled in court with a jury and witnesses etc) which upends the life she had created for herself.

I would have definitely abandoned this book if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was a book club pick and I hate not finishing those. Although the writing was fine (although not really my cup of tea), I didn’t like Fido or Helen. I really could not have cared less about how things were all going to work out. For someone so smart, Fido sure was blinded by her affection for Helen who was manipulative and duplicitous.

The “sealed letter” of the title comes to play only near the end and is ultimately a disappointment. And while it’s alluded to throughout the novel (and the LAMBDA winning status is on full display), that aspect of the novel feels like a plot point.

If you’re looking for a historical page-turner, I recommend Fingersmith. This one is a no from me.

In the Wild Light – Jeff Zentner

Posted on by
Reply

Well, that’s three 5 star books for Jeff Zentner. There’s just something about the way he writes characters that breaks my heart and Cash Pruitt, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of In the Wild Light now joins the ranks of Dill (The Serpent King) and Carver (Goodbye Days) as one of my all-time favourites.

Cash lives with his Papaw and Mamaw in Sawyer, Tennessee. It’s a backwater town and Cash doesn’t imagine much of a future for himself even though it is a place he loves. His mother died of a drug overdose; he never knew his father, but his grandparents are just salt of the earth people.

Cash’s best friend is Delaney Doyle. They met at a support group for people with family members who are addicts. Delaney is a genius, and that’s not an overstatement. For Cash, trying to understand how her mind works “is like trying to form a coherent thought in a dream.”

When Delaney makes an important scientific discovery, it earns her a full ride at Middleford Academy, a fancy private school in Connecticut. Delaney has no reason to stay in Sawyer – and every reason to go – but she isn’t going without Cash. Cash isn’t sure he wants to leave his grandfather who has end stage emphysema.

Cash agrees to go with Delaney and it is a decision that changes his life. First of all, he makes friends with a Alex, a boy he meets on the rowing team. He develops a crush on Delaney’s roommate, Vi, and he takes a poetry class, and this experience (and the teacher, Dr. Adkins) blow his world wide open. She tells him:

“I have two intuitions about you. The first is that you’ve got in your hear that poetry has to be elaborate, and that’s what’s fueling your hesitancy.

[…]

Number two: that you’re someone who pays attention to the world around him.”

Dr. Adkins is not wrong. Cash notices everything: the way people smell, the way Delaney worries the skin on her thumbs, the way water looks. “Ever since I first became aware that the world contains mysteries and incomprehensible wonders, I’ve tried to live as a witness to them.”

In the Wild Light is a coming-of-age story about a kid who has had to grow up way too fast, who feels out of his depth, but who learns to trust himself. Like every Zentner book I’ve read, this one made me cry on more than one occasion.

Highly recommended.

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth – Andrew Joseph White

Posted on by
Reply

Andrew Joseph White (Hell Followed With Us) has written another amazing YA novel that feels especially timely given what is currently happening in the USA.

Sixteen-year-old Silas Bell, the protagonist in The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, wants to escape his future. In this version of 1883 London, the Speakers take what they want and what they want is to be married to violet-eyed girls. Except Silas isn’t a girl. That’s just biology. What he wants is to find a way to trick the system into giving him a spirit-work seal and then he hopes to slink off, and find a way to study medicine and become a doctor like his older brother, George.

But it all goes horribly wrong, and Silas is taken to Braxton’s Finishing School and Sanitorium, where the Headmaster and his wife turn young girls with “veil sickness” into women men will want to marry. Think conversion therapy, with ghosts. Because Braxton is haunted and as girls born with violet eyes have the ability to reach through the veil, it isn’t long before Silas realizes that something really horrible has been happening at the school.

Silas doesn’t have anyone to trust at Braxton’s, until she gets to know Edward Luckenbill, the young man to whom she is engaged. Is it just possible that Edward is not like the other men Silas has encountered?

You really only come to understand yourself by comparing other’s stories to yours; you find where things are the same, and where they’re not. … Its difficult when the story isn’t one the world wants to hear.

Silas is determined to find out what happened to some of the students that have gone missing, but it isn’t going to be easy and it’s definitely going to get bloody.

White has a remarkable imagination, but this book feels especially timely given the way the rights of marginalized people are being eroded. As Silas seeks to learn the truth about Braxton, he also comes into his own power and it is impossible not to root for him. If you haven’t yet discovered this author, I can highly recommend. You won’t read anything else like it.

The Names – Florence Knapp

Posted on by
3

Cora has never liked the name Gordon. The way it starts with a splintering sound that makes her think of cracked boiled sweets, and then ends with a thud like someone slamming down a sports bag. Gordon. Bu what disturbs her more is that she must now pour the goodness of her son into its mold, hoping he’ll be strong enough to find his own shape within it.

This is Cora’s dilemma after the birth of her second child. She doesn’t want to name the baby after his father, a prominent, beloved doctor who is also a physically and mentally abusive husband. So, on the day that Cora and her daughter Maia, 9, walk to the registry office to officially register the baby’s name, they imagine other names instead of Gordon. Maia is fond of Bear because “It sounds all soft and cuddling and kind.” Cora is partial to Julian, which means “sky father.”

Florence Knapp’s novel The Names imagines the lives of these characters if the baby had been named Bear, Julian or Gordon – skipping forward at seven year intervals for thirty-five years. Who dos this little boy become and how does his name affect the people in his life?

I loved everything about this book, honestly. Although the author has written books previously, The Names is her debut novel and it’s a corker. I loved the glimpses into Bear/Julian/Gordon’s life, loved seeing what things were similar in each iteration an what things were vastly different.

But the novel is not just concerned with his life. We are also privy to Cora’s story, her early courtship with Gordon, her upbringing in Ireland, and what becomes of her in each of these scenarios. Maia, too, gets her story.

What’s in a name? Turns out, quite a lot. Highly recommended.

Save Me – Mona Kasten

Posted on by
Reply

Not gonna lie, the only reason I read Mona Kasten’s novel Save Me (Maxton Hall #1) was because of this

I watched the series on Prime when it first came out and despite the fact that it’s dubbed (from German) it is a swoon worthy masterpiece of teen angst. Damian Hardung (James Beaufort) says more with his eyes than practically any actor I have ever watched.

At the time the first season of the the series came out, the book was not yet available in English. It finally came out this summer and I just finished reading it.

Ruby Bell (played by Harriet Herbig-Matten, also a terrific actor) is a scholarship student at the prestigious private school Maxton Hall. Her dream is to attend Oxford (the story is set in England), and she is smart enough and driven enough to make this happen. She has spent the last two years keeping her head down; she doesn’t really have much in common with most of the uber rich students that attend Maxton Hall anyway.

James Beaufort and his twin sister, Lydia, are part of the upper upper crust. James is heir to the Beaufort company, which makes exclusive menswear and is worth billions. He’s a really good looking jerk. One day, Ruby sees something she wasn’t meant to see and James tries to bribe her to stay quiet. Thus begins their enemies to lovers journey.

I loved every single second of the series. I enjoyed how buttoned down Ruby was – she colour codes her life and is so determined to achieve her dreams. She is principled and kind. James is, on the surface at least, an egotistical jackass who doesn’t have to work hard for anything because of his parents’ money. But there is much more to him than meets the eye, which is why ultimately you root for these two to get together.

The book, sadly, doesn’t add anything to the series. It was nice to picture the characters as they are portrayed on the screen, but I found the book sort of lackluster, tbh. Ruby comes across as sort of ditzy and none of James’s inner turmoil is developed in a meaningful way. The series does a great job of portraying Ruby’s relationship with her family, and that was missing from the book. Some of my favourite scenes in the series are missing from the book.

I didn’t have as many problems with the fact that this is a translation. I often find dialogue stilted, but since this was translated by a British translator, that helped. But where I found so many conversations in the series impossibly angsty and romantic – the book was devoid of this. The one sex scene was kind of insert a into b, whereas on screen it was all the things.

Season 2 comes out on Prime November 7. The second book in the series is out now in English, but I doubt I will be reading it.