Tag Archives: mature teen

If He Had Been With Me – Laura Nowlin

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Several of the female students in my Young Adult Lit class have read and raved about Laura Nowlin’s debut novel If He Had Been With Me. They all told me that they bawled their eyes out and I do love a good tear-jerker, so I decided to give it a go.

Autumn and Finny have been best friends forever. Partly it has to do with the fact that their mothers are best friends, practically sisters. (In fact, the kids call each other’s mother aunt.) Partly it has to do with proximity; they live next door to each other.

Then, at the end of middle school the two, for reasons that are not really clear – but probably make sense to 12 years olds – the two stop speaking. In high school, Finny morphs into the most popular and beautiful guy in school and Autumn, ousted by the cheerleaders, finds herself sitting on the steps to nowhere with a group of outliers, one of whom, Jamie, ” a dark-haired Adonis, a Gothic prince” becomes her boyfriend.

The novel follows this cast of characters for all four years of high school, which seems like a bit much since they don’t really do anything. Jamie tries to convince Autumn to do the deed, but she puts him off. Her parents’ marriage falls apart. She and her mom continue to spend time with Finny and his mom even though it is AWKWARD. Finny starts dating Sylvie, a super popular girl. It’s all pretty melodramatic – kind of just like high school is.

We know from the very beginning that there is some sort of catastrophic accident and so we are hurtling (well, not really hurtling because this book is L-O-N-G) towards this event. I guess I can see how teenagers would find this story and this relationship between Finny and Autumn romantic and heart-breaking.

Sadly, it didn’t work for me. The book needed a really good editor, someone to tell Nowlin to strip away all the repetition. The main characters are tropey to the max: the manic pixie dream girl and the hot soccer star who shouldn’t love each other, but do love each other, but despite the fact that they have known each other their whole lives, can’t find the words to have a meaningful conversation. I didn’t particularly like Autumn, if I am being honest. Finny was a non-entity. Other characters were interchangeable and one-dimensional.

Apparently there’s a sequel where we see this whole story play out from other points of view. Why?

No tears were shed.

Save Me – Mona Kasten

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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.

Everything We Never Said – Sloan Harlow

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Ella’s senior year of high school is complicated. For one thing, she has to make her way through the days without her bestie, Hayley, by her side. Hayley died in a car accident and Ella is still trying to process her grief and her guilt -she was at the wheel when the car crashed, although she remembers virtually nothing about the accident.

Then there’s the problem of Sawyer, Hayley’s over-the-top hot boyfriend. The three had always been together, but since Hayley’s death she can feel the waves of anger and hate coming off Sawyer and she knows it’s all directed at her. And yet – there’s something else smoldering underneath and pretty soon Ella and Sawyer can’t keep their hands off each other. Of course, they are both aware of the optics of this development, and the fact that they are meeting secretly only heightens their feelings for each other.

But then, plot twist, Hayley’s mother asks Ella to come clean out Hayley’s room – a task she can’t bear to do. It is there she finds Hayley’s diary and although she does deliberate about whether or not she is doing the right thing, Ella gives in to her curiosity and starts to read. What she discovers throws another wrench into her growing feelings for Sawyer and also puts her in danger.

Sloan Harlow’s debut novel Everything We Never Said attempts a lot and succeeds on many levels. I thought I had it figured out early on; there are plenty of red herrings. The book does make some attempt at tackling the topic of domestic violence. It also looks at grief and friendship. Sometimes the characters seem a bit shrill and other times way too passive. I found the sex scenes a bit much – not that I don’t believe that seventeen-year-olds are intimate, but I found some of the dialogue a little cringe-y. The last third moves at a quick pace, with one or two surprises in store.

It’s a solid debut.

Wilder – Andrew Simonet

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Jason Wilder is a high school senior who doesn’t actually attend classes. Instead, he spends his time in the Rubber Room…for his own protection.

Officially, it was In-School Suspension, but kids called it the Rubber Room. It wasn’t covered in rubber, but it was delinquent proof. […] The Rubber Room was set up to prevent tragedies like school shootings, or at least to make it look like you could prevent them.

Jason set a fire that hurt someone and now he’s a target. The thing about Jason is that he’s big and tough and, according to Meili, “a danger because [he] wants to be.”

Meili is in the Rubber Room because, according to the story that’s been passed around and likely exaggerated, she broke someone’s finger. She’s not afraid of Jason or his reputation for violence; she is fearless, mysterious, and just a tad crazy.

These are the characters in Andrew Simonet’s debut YA novel,Wilder.

Despite his propensity for violence, Jason is a sympathetic character. He has a distinctive voice and a troubling backstory. He lives alone; his mother and her boyfriend, Al, have moved to Florida, apparently to dry out. He lives in their crappy house existing on the little bit of money they send home to him. Because he is on probation for setting the fire, he can’t let anyone know that he lives alone. It’s not that hard to keep it a secret; Jason doesn’t really have any friends. Until Meili.

It is clear from early on in the story that something happens to Jason and Meili. Jason informs us

I have lots of time now to think about what happened. I’m straightening out how one thing led to the next, how I got drawn in, how things became inevitable.

Other people have their ideas, what should have happened, what I did and didn’t do. Meili has her version. This is my story, what it’s like inside my skin.

It is no wonder Jason and Meili are drawn to each other. It is also no wonder why things end up going horribly wrong.

I never want Meili – or anyone – to be so betrayed and broken. But if we’re gonna live in a world where that happens, I want this. I want her thrashing sobs and gut screams. I want to clench my body to hers and tumble. I want this velocity. I want my share.

Wilder is full of forward momentum. I found it a compelling read, but it’s definitely for mature readers. There is violence, lots of swearing and some fairly explicit sex.

Dear Life, You Suck – Scott Blagden

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I can’t remember the last time I read a book with a protagonist as distinctive as Cricket Cherpin, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Scott Blagden’s debut YA novel Dear Life, You Suck. Some reviewers have compared Cricket to Holden (Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye) and I guess I can see it, but I found Cricket less navel-gazey and more sympathetic than Holden, although I guess that might just be a function of context.

Cricket has lived at the Naskeag Home for Boys in Maine since he was eight. The way Cricket describes it, “It was a minimum-security facility, so the joint looks more like a mansion than a penitentiary, but you’ll never catch me calling this jailhouse home.” More often than not, Cricket refers to it as “Prison.” The Home is run by Mother Mary, a formidable figure; “She’s a presence. A planet. She has her own gravity.” Cricket has a million names for Mother Mary: Mother Mary Mockery. Mother Mary Mushroom Cloud. Mother Mary Mafia. You get the picture.

Cricket’s mouth often gets him into trouble. So do his fists. Caretaker, the actual caretaker at the home, has been teaching Cricket to box for years, but he only uses his fists to protect the Little Ones — the younger boys who live at the home — and the weaker students at school. Cricket won’t start a fight, but he is certainly capable of ending it.

There are clues that Cricket has had it tough. When his flakey English teacher, Moxie Lord, asks her students to write a letter to anyone they “have beef with but ain’t ever had the nads to tell”, Cricket writes a letter to life. When Ms. Lord actually takes Cricket’s letter seriously, it compels him to dig a little deeper and in doing so he starts to unearth his trauma.

What are the prospects for a foul-mouthed, quick-tempered, irreverent teenager? Cricket might not think he has much going for him or much to look forward to beyond taking a more active role in his BFF’s drug business, but there are more people in Cricket’s corner than he realizes.

Sure, the story isn’t new, but Cricket’s distinctive voice, and good heart make Dear Life, You Suck, a total winner in my book.

I’m the Girl – Courtney Summers

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Canadian author Courtney Summers is an auto-buy for me. I know that I am guaranteed a terrific story with compelling, albeit often prickly, characters and excellent writing. I’m the Girl is Summers’ latest novel and the story treads somewhat familiar ground, but as always Summers scratches beneath the surface offering up a timely story about power, abuse, and privilege.

Sixteen-year-old Georgia Avis is untethered. She lives with her brother Tyler in a rinky-dink town called Ketchum. Their mother has died of cancer and Tyler, 30, has moved home to take care of her.

At the beginning of the novel, Georgia is hit by a car. When she comes to, her eye catches a flash of pink in the field beside her. It’s the body of 13-year-old Ashley James, daughter of a local deputy sheriff. “At first I wonder if we both got hit by the same car.” But it is clear that something much worse has happened to Ashley.

The accident happens out near Aspera, a private members-only club. It is actually Cleo Hayes, owner with her husband Matthew, who finds her on the side of the road. For as long as Georgia can remember, she’s wanted to be an Aspera girl, “moving through the resort, turning heads like I was meant to”. Instead, when the Hayes’ agree to hire Georgia, despite the fact that her mother, who had worked at Aspera before her death, had betrayed them, she discovers that she is going to be nothing more than a “glorified fetch.”

Aspera values beauty and Georgia is beautiful, but she doesn’t quite believe it. That makes her a target. There is something decidedly unsavoury, sinister even, about Aspera, although Georgia doesn’t see it as quickly as readers will.

As Georgia tries to navigate her new reality at Aspera, she begins a tentative friendship with Ashley’s older sister, Nora. Nora is determined to find out who killed her little sister and all the clues seem to point back to Aspera.

I’m the Girl is a thriller, for sure, because you’ll certainly turn the pages in an effort to discover who killed Ashley. But this is also a book that explores our relationships to our bodies and image. Georgia comes to understand that she is beautiful enough to wield a certain power over the men she encounters even though, as she tells Matthew, “I like girls.” But Georgia is too young not to realize when she is being manipulated and the consequences of her naiveté are often brutal and heartbreaking.

Highly recommended.

Other books by Courtney Summers: This is Not a Test, Cracked Up to Be, The Project, Sadie, Fall For Anything, All the Rage, Some Girls Are

All the Beautiful Strangers – Elizabeth Klehfoth

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There’s lots of things to like about Elizabeth Klehfoth’s debut novel All the Beautiful Strangers. The story follows two timelines separated by a decade. In 2007 Grace Calloway, wife to Manhattan real estate mogul Alistair Calloway, has vanished without a trace. In 2017, Grace’s eldest daughter, Charlie, is in her final year at Knollwood Prep, a prestigious school where her father was once a revered student.

Charlie thinks she wants to be part of the only group that matters, the super secret A’s. But to become a part of that group is to participate in some extremely problematic initiation rituals. No matter: Knollwood is her life and the A’s offer an opportunity to belong in a way Charlie has never felt she has.

The thing is, Charlie is being chased by ghosts in the form of her mother’s mysterious disappearance. Then, she gets a message from her Uncle Hank, her mother’s brother.

I hadn’t seen Uncle Hank in years – since I was ten, and my father issued the restraining order.

…

No one besides Dr. Malby ever talked to me about my mother. But he wanted to know. What had that last month been like with her? Had she seemed different in any way? Who came and went at the house? How had things been between her and my father? And that night that she disappeared – what had I heard? What had I seen?

When Hank shows up with some photographs taken around the time his sister went missing, it sends Charlie back into her past, asking the questions she never knew to ask.

All the Beautiful Strangers is a layered story about family secrets, loyalties and the lengths people go to to protect those they love. Charlie is a tenacious, intelligent character who is determined, once and for all, to find out what happened to her mother. Although it’s not specifically YA, I think it would certainly appeal to patient YA readers. It makes for compelling reading, although at times it moved just a teensy bit too slowly. The two time lines are handled deftly, and the writing is terrific, so Klehfoth is definitely one to watch.

Our Chemical Hearts – Krystal Sutherland

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“I always thought the moment you met the great love of your life would be more like the movies,” Henry Page, the protagonist of Krystal Sutherland’s YA novel Our Chemical Hearts announces. Henry, a high school senior, is a romantic at heart and when he imagines falling in love, it’s not with someone like Grace Town, the new girl at school. Grace wears boy’s clothes, walks with a cane and seems neither clean nor healthy.

When Henry and Grace are picked to co-edit the school’s newspaper and are forced to spend time together, Henry finds himself drawn to Grace’s quirks because he has some of his own. Then he discovers that before moving to Henry’s town and school, Grace was “a girl in a red dress with red lipstick and loose curls in her honey-blond hair. She was smiling brilliantly…” Henry wants to know more and the more he knows the more he falls, until Grace’s secret is revealed and his life implodes.

Our Chemical Hearts is not a fluffy YA romance. It deals with some serious real-life issues and treats its characters like the almost-adults that they are. Henry, for example, has long admired the “perfect” relationship his parents have and yearns for the same sort of fairy-tale love. It’s not until his much older sister, Sadie, shares some things about his family that he may not know that he starts to understand that relationships, and the people who inhabit them, are complicated.

Grace is truly messed up. She starts to reveal herself, bit by bit, to Henry and his optimism is the seemingly perfect antidote to her pessimism – the ying to his yang.

…tell me you believe that our lives are anything more than a ridiculous cascade of random chances. A cloud of dust and gas forms our planet, a chemical reaction creates life, and then all of our cavemen ancestors live long enough to bone each other before they die awful deaths. The universe is not the magical place people like to paint it as. It’s excruciatingly beautiful, but there’s no magic there, just science.

Ouch.

Henry and Grace bond over music, literature, even their co-editing gig provides them with common ground, and their story is as true a depiction of a high school romance as you’re likely to find.

Highly recommended.

All the Things We Do in the Dark – Saundra Mitchell

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One hot summer when nine-year-old Ava is outside riding her bike around the apartment complex where she lives, a man tells her “I have something that will keep you cool…” He leads Ava down a lane between the apartments and the trees and assaults her. This is the beginning of Saundra Mitchell’s YA novel All the Things We Do in the Dark.

Flash forward and Ava is now seventeen. Her parents are divorced. She has one best friend, Syd. She tries to be as invisible as possible, although she lives in small-town Maine where everyone knows who she is and what happened to her and if they didn’t, the scar the man left down the side of her face would certainly be cause for curiosity.

Ava has never really dealt with the trauma of her assault. Her mother keeps close tabs on her, but even she doesn’t know everything and Ava is prone to keeping secrets. This becomes evident when one day, walking home through the woods, she stumbles upon the body of a young girl.

She’s twisted like a Barbie doll at the waist. Her top half points forward, baring her face, her chest, those Vs. It takes me a minute to realize they’re stab wounds. Her bottom half faces down. Somehow both her breasts and her butt are exposed at the same time.

…

Human people, alive people, they don’t make that shape.

Ava makes a decision: she doesn’t tell anyone about the body. Chalk it up to shock or her own bad experience post-assault, but she decides to protect her. It’s a ridiculous decision to make — readers will know that — but Ava hasn’t ever really recovered from her own post-assault experience.

When Ava returns to the scene of the crime, she discovers someone else there, and convinced that she has stumbled upon the murderer, she gives chase. That’s where Mitchell’s book morphs from an examination of the trauma of assault to a straight-up mystery. I think I found this part of the book a little less successful, mostly because some of the decisions Ava makes (even though I could sort of understand why she was making them) seemed a little unrealistic.

Mitchell does do a wonderful job of crafting a character who has been through something horrific, something she still struggles with many years later as she tries to navigate relationships (with her bestie and a new friend, Hailey) and her own complicated feelings about her body and sexuality.

While I found the writing a bit choppy, a students in my class (who recommended the book) said that she liked the writing, that it felt like a conversation with her friends and that she related to some of the relationships in the book. That’s the true test of a YA book, I think: does it speak to its intended audience?

Odd One Out – Nic Stone

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One of the topics the students in my Young Adult Literature class discussed this semester was the importance of diversity in fiction. Nic Stone wrote a wonderful opinion piece called “Don’t Just Read About Racism—Read Stories About Black People Living” where she expressed her own experiences with books featuring Black characters and the problem of having every single ‘diverse’ text tackle issues of police brutality and racism or simply featuring characters she didn’t recognize. Tokens or sidekicks.

“I met three African-American characters in books between 8th and 12th grade,” she writes. “The first was a Black man falsely accused of a horrific crime—literally because of #WhiteWomanTears—who despite his innocence suffers a horrific fate (Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird). The second was a Black man with a role so minor, most people don’t remember he was Black or don’t remember him at all (Crooks from Of Mice and Men). And the third was an escaped Black slave written (by a white man) in vernacular so dense that half the time, I had zero idea what homie was trying to tell me (Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn).

I hated all of it.”

Why was it, Stone wonders, that growing up she never read about Black kids going on adventures, solving mysteries, falling in love? “What if we’d seen Black people in books just being human?” she writes.

Cue her 2018 YA novel Odd One Out, the story of seventeen-year-old besties Courtney “Coop” Cooper and Jupiter “Jupe” Charity-Sanchez. Coop has been in love with Jupe for as long as he can remember, but Jupe likes girls. At least she’s pretty sure she likes girls. She hasn’t really had any experience with them. Then Rae Chin moves to town. Suddenly Jupe and Coop find themselves part of a very complicated triangle.

This is exactly the sort of book Stone was talking about when she described the sort of stories that were unavailable to her when she was growing up. The characters in Odd One Out are just trying to navigate family stuff (Jupe has two dads; Coop’s father was killed in a car accident; Rae’s mom took off, but all the parents in this book are professional, loving, sane parents — not a gang banger among them), school and what turns out to be very complicated feelings for each other.

All three main characters get a turn to tell their story (Coop was my favourite; I found him funny, loyal, and charming) and I loved every second I spent with them. The drama is all self-made, but these smart and sensitive teens are trying to figure it out and that sometimes makes for hurt feelings, which Stone doesn’t shy away from. Odd One Out is a coming-of-age story which will appeal to any teen who has ever been in love or questioned their sexuality. The fact that I adored this book proves Stone’s point that “the more we see Black people living—loving and doing and being and feeling and going on adventures and solving mysteries and being the heroes—the more we come to recognize our shared humanity.”

Amen.

Highly recommended.