Tag Archives: teen

Between Shades of Gray – Ruta Sepetys

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between-shades-of-grayWe all know about the atrocities of the Holocaust, but until I decided to read Ruta Sepetys’ novel Between Shades of Gray with my grade nine class I knew nothing (shamefully) about what happened in Lithuania during the same time period. During that time Stalin’s Soviet Union invaded the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They rounded up doctors, teachers, musicians, artists and government officials and their families – anyone whom they considered a threat – and shipped them off to work camps. Sepetys’ father was the son of a Lithuanian military officer. He and his family managed to escape to a German refugee camp (the irony is not lost on me). It is the author’s personal connection to this devastating blot on human history that inspired her to tackle telling the story. And what a story it is!

Lina is just fifteen when the NKVD (Russian Secret Police) burst into her home and demand that she, her ten-year-old brother, Jonas, and their mother, pack a suitcase and come with them. It is June 14, 1941 and the world Lina has known – one of art and intellect, of safety and family – is forever shattered. Their father is not home.

The first question I asked my students when we started the book was what they would take if they only had twenty minutes to decide. Lina was getting ready for bed and she remarks “They took me in my nightgown.” What is important when you have no time to think?

I put on my sandals and grabbed two books, hair ribbons and my hairbrush. Where was my sketchbook? I took the writing tablet, the case of pens and pencils and the bundle of rubles off my desk and placed them amongst the heap of items we had thrown into my case.

From the minute Between Shades of Gray starts until the final pages, the reader is living in a world that is almost impossible to comprehend. My students have no frame of reference. Even those who do not live privileged lives have never had to face this kind of terror. As I read the book out loud to my rapt students, I often found myself on the verge of tears imagining the fear, pain and plight of these people who were forced from their homes for no reason. What would I be capable of if I had to protect my family?

Lina’s mother, Elena, is a remarkable character. She is an educated woman who speaks Russian, a handy skill in these circumstances. She does whatever she has to do in an effort to keep her family together, trading items she has sewn into her coat in advance (foreshadowing  the events to come) for food, favour and, in one particularly poignant trade, for the life of her son. Her strength of character, her resiliency (which is mirrored in her children) sustains them all through the long, hard days ahead.

Eventually Lina and her family find themselves at a labour camp in Siberia. I can remember joking about Siberian labour camps as a kid. I didn’t know anything about them; I would have just made a throwaway comment about sending someone to Siberia. Sheer ignorance on my part because the conditions are unimaginable.

It was completely uninhabited, not a single bush or tree, just barren dirt to a shore of endless water. We were surrounded by nothing but polar tundra and the Laptev Sea. The wind whipped. Sand blew into my mouth and stung my eyes.

Worse – they have nowhere to live. The only two buildings are for the Soviets. It’s cold and soon it will be dark 24 hours a day.

I can say this about the book: my students loved it. Although I had promised to read it out loud to them, many read on their own, racing to finish. That’s high praise, especially since many of students would identify themselves as reluctant readers. I had several boys finish way before we did.

Sepetys talks about her novel here and it’s worth watching the video before you read the book. Sepetys talked to survivors and some of their stories find their way into this novel. I wish that the ending hadn’t seemed quite so rushed, but that’s a small niggle and may have something to do with the fact that I wasn’t quite ready to say good bye to these remarkable characters. Overall, Between Shades of Gray is a miracle of a book, a life-affirming novel of resiliency and love and a sober reminder of the terrible things we do to each other.

Highly recommended.

Bystander – James Preller

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bystanderJames Preller’s middle grade novel Bystander does a good job of illustrating the school-yard bully.  Wikipedia describes that bystander effect, or bystander apathy, as “a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present.”

When thirteen-year-old Eric moves to a new town with his mother and younger brother Rudy, he meets Griffin, a boy with “soft features … thick lips and long eyelashes…pretty.”  Griffin travels with a pack and when the boys arrive at the basketball court where Eric is practicing foul shots, Eric wonders “if something bad was about to happen.” It doesn’t take him long to figure out that despite Griffin’s alluring charisma, there is something off about him, a fact reinforced when Griffin tells Eric “I’m a good guy to be friends with…but I’m a lousy enemy.”

Truer words. When Eric starts his new school he wants nothing more than to get along. He’s a decent kid, a little sheltered, perhaps (he doesn’t have a cell phone and his mother won’t let him use Instant Messenger). I’ve been the new kid and I know what it’s like to start a new school, so I felt for Eric as he surveyed the cafeteria that first day, wondering where to sit.

In a month, he assured himself, everything would be fine. He’d make new friends, sit with them, eat, joke, laugh. But right now, today, the first day of school, it all kind of sucked. But on another level, none of it really mattered. Eric could smell his meatball sub and he felt hungry. He wanted to eat.

When Griffin stops at his table, chagrined that Eric is alone and invites Eric to eat with him and his friends, Eric accepts. In some ways, it’s a bit like making a date with the devil and we all know what they say about the devil you know, right. It doesn’t take long for Eric, who is a smart kid, to figure out that Griffin just isn’t the kind of friend he wants to have, even if it means that he’s going to suffer for it.

Bystander is a straightforward novel about making choices. Bullying is a hot topic these days and something we talk about even at the high school level. Published in 2009, Bystander doesn’t really address the problem of cyber bullying; Griffin is a garden-variety thug (if you can actually be a thug at 13.) The thing about Griff, though,  is that he’s sort of sympathetic; Preller doesn’t paint him with a simple black stroke.

Despite the fact that the book is intended for a younger audience, I think I have some grade nine students who would enjoy this story. They are not so far removed from middle school that they won’t remember characters just like Griff and his ilk.

What We Lost – Sara Zarr

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whatwelost“The whole world is wilting,” says fifteen-year-old Samara (Sam), the protagonist of Sara Zarr’s YA novel What We Lost.

She means the comment literally because it’s so hot that she wakes up every couple of hours “in a puddle of sweat,” but the observation is also figurative. Sam’s life is full of conflict and chaos. Her father, Charlie,  a pastor at the local church, is distracted and every day Sam wakes up to something “ruined or broken or falling apart.”

Part of the problem is that Sam’s mother is currently residing at the New Beginnings Recovery Center in an effort to get sober. Without her mother there, Sam feels adrift. There’s not enough money and Sam is tired of having to pretend that her mom just isn’t feeling well enough to attend church or other social functions. Things get even more complicated when Jody, a thirteen-year-old member of Sam’s church, goes missing  and Sam’s small town suddenly becomes a lens through which she is able to see all the world’s flaws, including her own.

I’ve read Zarr’s fantastic book Story of a Girl and her novel Roomies, which she co-wrote with Tara Altebrando, and which I also loved. Zarr has a real gift when it comes to creating empathetic characters and Samara is no different. Her fifteenth summer is a perfect storm of angst and confusion, suspicion and alienation.

I wish I understood what happened between then and now. I wish there was a way to put your finger on the map of life and trace backwards, to figure out exactly when things had changed so much…

As the town searches for Jody, Sam’s dad spends time with her family, acting as a sort of spokesperson. During this time, Sam grows closer to Jody’s older brother, Nick. He “could probably be a model” Sam observes, studying him the way “every girl who has ever known Nick has studied him.”

The problem with their blossoming friendship is that Nick is a suspect in the disappearance of his sister and Charlie doesn’t want Sam to hang out with him. Charlie also doesn’t want Sam to be alone; the town no longer feels safe. Sam is shuttled back and forth between her house and her best friend Vanessa’s. Sam has suspicions of her own; she wonders why her dad is spending so much time with Erin, the church’s youth group leader.

Zarr manages all these threads beautifully, allowing Sam her questions  about her faith in God,  suspicions about her dad, loneliness for her mom and feelings for Nick to percolate under the hot summer sun.

Great read.

 

The House – Christina Lauren

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Okay, there’s suspension of disbelief and then there’s, well, just disbelief. I so wanted to like Christina Lauren’s (the co-writing team of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings) YA novel The House, but I didn’t. Actually, my feelings are more conflicted than that: I liked some things about the book and really, really disliked others.

the houseThe good: The writing in The House is actually pretty decent. At least decent enough that I wasn’t groaning over clunky sentences. In particular, the spooky scenes were well-written – propulsive and skin-crawlingly descriptive.

The two main characters, Delilah and Gavin are likeable teens. The story is told in alternating chapters labeled ‘Him’ and ‘Her’ so the reader is privy to the thoughts of both characters. Delilah has recently started high school in her hometown in Kansas after leaving a  school on the east coast. Gavin has lived his whole life in “the House,” an odd patchwork house hidden behind a fence. The two knew each other as children, before Delilah had been sent to live with her grandmother. Now she is intent on rekindling her friendship with Gavin.  It would seem that he is the proverbial bad boy and that Delilah is smitten.

The bad: There is no long burn here, no smolder – which is unfortunate because these stories work so much better when there is. Gavin and Delilah fall pretty much in love almost immediately. Of course, their relationship is not without its problems and that’s the part of the story that was the most problematic for me.

Things inside House can come alive in a way that I don’t think things anywhere else can. When an object is inside House…it can be alive….

*

Things in the house move….They take care of me. They always have. They would never leave….It’s a bit like having a really big family, but no one speaks.

Yep, Gavin’s house is alive. His parents are gone, but House has always taken care of him, anticipating his every desire, making his food, taking care of his needs. He doesn’t see it as particularly strange because, of course, it’s all he’s ever known. For most young adult readers this likely won’t seem like much of an imaginative stretch. They’ve grown up reading books where teens fight to the death, have other-worldly powers and fall in love with vampires and werewolves, but for me, I just found it sort of goofy.

As it turns out, House isn’t all that benevolent when it seems like Delilah might steal Gavin away. The novel gives new meaning to the notion of playing house, that’s for sure.

Fitz – Mick Cochrane

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fitzMick Cochrane’s YA novel, Fitz, is the story of what happens when a boy decides to confront the father he’s never met.

Fitz is a “typical fifteen-year-old boy. A sophomore on the B honor roll. A kid with a messy room, an electric guitar, a notebook full of song lyrics, vague dreams about doing something great some day, a crush on a red-haired girl.”

And like many other teens, Fitz (short for Fitzgerald) lives with his single mom. His father is an unknown entity; his mother doesn’t talk about him and although he supports Fitz financially, Fitz knows nothing about him. That doesn’t mean Fitz doesn’t think about him, though.

When Fitz was a little boy, he liked to imagine that his father was quietly, secretly watching over him, loving him, for his own good and unselfish reasons, from a distance.

Circumstances have changed, though. Fitz has inadvertently discovered his father’s home address and he’s decided to confront his dad, which, sure, that seems plausible enough. What doesn’t seem quite as likely is the fact that Fitz takes a gun with him and pretty much kidnaps his father. It’s a scenario that could go horribly wrong.

Turns out, though, that Fitz’s father, Curtis, is a decent guy – clearly, he’s been paying support all these years. Over the course of the day the two listen to music, hang out at the zoo, have lunch and visit Curtis’s office (he’s an attorney). As the day unfolds, Fitz tries to figure out what it is he really wants to know about his dad and Curtis, it seems, is only too willing to talk, has – in fact – been waiting for fifteen years to have this conversation with his son. It’s kind of sweet, really.

“You were a good baby, a beautiful baby,” that’s how he starts. That’s his once-upon-a-time. He says that Fitz was healthy, bright-eyed, curious. He had amazing blue eyes. It’s just that he didn’t sleep, at least not for long stretches.

Fitz is sensible enough to listen as his father tries to explain the story of his relationship with Fitz’s mother and smart enough to realize that even parents make mistakes because, in their own once-upon-a-time, they were young enough to make them. If the story seems just a tad sentimental, Cochrane can be forgiven because Fitz is a likeable character and, thankfully, the gun is little more than false bravado.

 

If You Find Me – Emily Murdoch

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“Mama says no matter how poor folks are, whether you’re a have, a have-not, or break your mama’s back on the cracks in between, the world gives away the best stuff on the cheap.”

IF-YOU-FIND-METhat’s the first thing fifteen-year-old Carey tells us in Emily Murdoch’s amazing novel If You Find Me. From the moment she speaks, it’s almost impossible not to fall in love with her and as her story unspools, it’ll be even more difficult not to want to want to hug her and her little sister, Jenessa, who is just six.

Carey and Jenessa live in a trailer in  in the middle of Obed Wild and Scenic River National Park or, as the girls call it, “the Hundred Acre Wood.” Their mother, Joelle, is usually gone and has, in fact, been MIA for “over a month, maybe two at this point,” leaving the girls to fend for themselves. Carey does the best she can to look after herself and Jenessa but “when you’re livin’ in the woods…with no runnin’ water or electricity, with Mama gone to town for long stretches of time, leavin’ you in charge of feedin’ a younger sister…with a stomach rumblin’ like a California earthquake” it’s not easy. The girls exist, mostly, on beans fixed in “new and interestin’ ways.”

On this particular day, though, Carey and Jenessa have company. A woman “as thin as chicken bones, her gait uneven as her heels sink into the soft forest floor” and a man stumble into the girls’ campsite.

He hasn’t offered his name, and he isn’t familiar to me. But in that instant, hittin’ like a lightnin’ bolt, I know who he is.

If You Find Me is an amazing story of resilience and family and forgiveness, but it is also a horrific story of abuse and neglect, made all the more powerful because of Carey’s compelling and authentic narration. I fell in love with her the moment she started to tell her story and I know this is fiction, but I also know that children endure atrocities at the hands of their parents and guardians all the time.

Suddenly, Carey finds herself living with a father she doesn’t remember, a new step-mother and a step-sister who clearly resents her, attending school for the first time.  Jenessa seems to thrive in her new surroundings and although Carey contemplates returning to the her life in the woods, her love for her sister prevents her from running. Their journey is one of resilience and hope, but it’s not all smooth sailing.

I loved this book because I loved Carey. I wish the ending hadn’t seemed so rushed, though, because I don’t think Carey’s relationship with Ryan was as fully developed as it might have been and other pieces fell into place just a tad conveniently, but whatever; I haven’t read a YA book with a narrator I’ve loved quite as much as I loved Carey in a long time.

Highly recommended.

Made of Stars – Kelley York

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madeofstarsHalf-siblings Hunter and Ashlin have been friends with Chance since they were kids and first started to spend summers in Maine with their father. Chance is the glue that bonds the three together, despite the fact that Hunter and his sister don’t really know all that much about him.

I knew all the things about Chance that mattered most. Chance was strangeness and whimsy in human form.

Chance was our summer.

We didn’t see him or talk to him through the winter, but when we arrived for summer vacation, the three of us came together like we’d never been apart.

This year things are different, though. Hunter and Ashlin have decided to take a gap year and spend it with their father, who is still recovering from a workplace accident (he’s a cop and was shot; Hunter and his sister were kept with their mothers and away from their dad for a couple years).

So, now they’re back in Maine with their dad and each other…and with no way to contact Chance. When they finally do track him down,  they discover that Chance hasn’t been 100% honest with them.  For one thing, his house “is nothing like what Chance described.”  His parents are clearly not glamorous jetsetters, either. Instead, his mother looks “like she cuts [her own hair], and her face is gaunt and tired. She’s wearing a gray men’s bathrobe over a nightgown and pink slippers that have seen better days.” Chance’s father is “broad-shouldered and stone-faced, with a jaw that hasn’t seen a razor in a few days.”

But Chance is the same. And not the same.

Kelley York’s YA novel Made of Stars captures that time between innocence and experience. These three teens have a shared history made more complicated by an unexpected love triangle. But Made of Stars isn’t a straight-up love story.  When someone turns up dead, Chance is implicated and Hunter and Ashlin set out to prove his innocence. Turns out, even that is more complicated and dangerous than the siblings could have imagined.

Enjoyable read.

The Ruining – Anna Collomore

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ruiningEighteen-year-old Annie Phillips, the first person narrator of Anna Collomore’s YA novel The Ruining,  is desperate to escape her trailer trash world outside of Detroit, Michigan and begin a new life. When she’s offered the opportunity to become a nanny on Belvedere Island, located about six kilometers north of San Francisco, she jumps at a chance. The gig sounds perfect: she’ll care for three-year-old Zoe and baby Jackson and take classes at San Francisco State University.

Libby and Walker Cohen are not like anyone Annie has ever met and it doesn’t take very long before Annie feels “a sudden, desperate urge to please Libby, to do everything right, to be the most exemplary nanny the Cohen family had ever had.”

In the beginning, life seems too good to be true. The Cohen’s house is “more like an estate or a castle” and  Libby seems more like a girlfriend than an employer, offering Annie wine, shared confidences and a chance to raid her closet. It’s heady stuff for Annie, who comes from nothing and is dragging the baggage of a personal tragedy from her past.

The reality of my life in Detroit, a reality I’d spent almost every day wishing to escape, was gone. Disappeared, like I’d never been a part of it at all. And in order to leave it in the past, I couldn’t let myself worry about leaving my mother behind.

It won’t take the reader long to see the cracks, though, even if Annie is a little bit slow on the uptake. I cut her some slack because she’s young and damaged and trying so hard to make something of her life. However, Annie seems determined to ignore the signs that something is not quite right in the Cohen house. Libby is like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: solicitous and kind one day, passive aggressive the next.  Walker is gregarious and friendly, but  mostly absent. There are no grandparents, no extended family — Annie is isolated until she meets Owen, the literal boy next door.

The Ruining races along at a good pace, traversing the line between suspenseful and ridiculous with aplomb. Collomore manages to make it just possible for the reader to believe that Annie might be more damaged from her past than even she realizes; however, there can be no mistaking who the villain of the piece is.

The Ruining was fun to read, well-written and definitely recommendable; I know my students will gobble it up. Can’t say I was a huge fan of the ending, though. For me it was contrived and way too tidy given the complicated nature of Annie’s circumstances.

Jacob Have I Loved – Katherine Paterson

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jacobKatherine Peterson’s novel Jacob Have I Loved was a Newberry Medal winner in 1981. Although this book has been on my radar for many years, I was perhaps just a teensy bit too old for it when it was published in 1980, so I didn’t read it then. It is a pretty famous book though, and I figured I should read it. So I did.

The title of the book comes from the bible, Romans 9:13: “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” The quote refers to the story of siblings Jacob and Esau and the novel tells the story of siblings Sara Louise and her twin sister, Caroline. The girls live on Rass Island, off the coast of Maryland. Their father is a fisherman; their mother a former school teacher. Their crotchety paternal grandmother also lives with them.

Sara Louise, or Wheeze, is the narrator. She is an adult when the novel opens, returning to Rass Island where her mother still lives. “…it is a pure sorrow to me,” she says, “that, once my mother leaves there will be no one left with the name of Bradshaw. But there were only the two of us, my sister, Caroline, and me, and neither of us could stay.”

The bulk of the story takes place in 1941 and the years that follow. Wheeze, 13, and her best friend, Call, 14, spend their days hunting for crabs. Their little island is isolated and days there are marked by routine – fisherman out on the water early and home late, school and church, the occasional ferry trip to the mainland. Paterson deftly creates a world that will be – for most of its young readers –  a place long ago and far away.

While readers may not recognize the time or place, they will most definitely recognize the friction between Wheeze and her sister, the beautiful and musically talented, Caroline. A sickly baby, Wheeze feels that Caroline has been coddled all her life and that in “the story of my sister’s life…I… was allowed a very minor role.”

There is a rare snapshot of the two of us sitting on the front stoop the summer we were a year and a half old. Caroline is tiny and exquisite, her blonde curls framing a face that is glowing with laughter, her arms outstretched to whoever is taking the picture. I am hunched there like a fat dark shadow, my eyes cut sideways toward Caroline, thumb in my mouth…

Wheeze is resentful and jealous, even though Caroline never really seems to give her any reason to be. It’s one of the lovely things about this book, which is remarkable in its stillness. Wheeze isn’t particularly likable, but you grow to love her just the same.

Jacob Have I Loved is without the bells and whistles that marks much of the YA fiction out there today. I would suggest that this is a book better suited to middle school readers, but I think anyone who has ever shared close quarters with a sibling would enjoy this story.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Sáenz

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aristotle_and_dante Aristotle (Ari for short) is a 15-year-old Mexican American living in Texas in 1987. He’s bored and miserable and pretty much hates his life.

Dante is also 15, and also Mexican-American, but he’s “funny and focused and fierce.” Ari says “there wasn’t anything mean about him. I didn’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without some meanness?”

Aristotle and Dante meet at the local pool where Dante offers to teach Ari how to swim. “All that summer, we swam and read comics and read books and argued about them.” It’s the beginning of beautiful friendship, something that Ari seems to desperately need.

Feeling sorry for myself was an art. I think a part of me liked doing that. Maybe it had something to do with my birth order. You know, I think that was part of it. I didn’t like the fact that I was a pseudo only child. I didn’t know how else to think of myself. I was an only child without actually being one. That sucked.

Ari has older twin sisters and an older brother who is in prison. He was born after his father returned from serving in Vietnam.

Sometimes I think my father has all these scars. On his heart. In his head. All over. It’s not such an easy thing to be the son of a man who’s been to war.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is a coming of age story. It’s a story about fathers and sons and mothers and sons. It’s about sacrifice and loyalty. It’s a story about friendship.

I wanted to tell them that I’d never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren’t meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn’t have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. “Dante’s my friend.

It’s a love story.

I was the age of these characters somewhere around 1976. I didn’t know anyone who was gay. Okay, looking back – of course I did, but we didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t acknowledged. As far as I know, they weren’t out. I am profoundly grateful as a teacher and a parent, just as a human being, that books like this exist. Alire Sáenz has written a story about boys who are smart and fragile and flawed. I admit it – I got teary a few times reading this book.

What are the secrets of the universe? As Ari discovers “we all fight our own private wars.”

This is a beautiful book and I highly recommend it.