Tag Archives: teen

Breathless – Jessica Warman

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breathlessA few months back I read Jessica Warman’s novel, Between, and although I didn’t love it straight off it definitely grew on me. A student in my writing class saw Breathless on my bookshelf and told me that I had to read it next. All I can say is that I kept reading for her because there’s really nothing to recommend this book.

Breathless was written when Warman herself was just out of high school and sadly, that’s how it reads. The novel is apparently semi-autobiographical and tells the story of Katie Kitrell, a fifteen-year-old championship swimmer with an alcoholic mother, workaholic father and psychopathic older brother.  When her brother, Will, goes off the deep end again, Katie’s parents make the decision to send her off to boarding school. Breathless ends up cramming every possible teenage trope into its 331 pages: friendship, drinking, religion, sex, drugs, wealth, first love, jealousy, mean girls and damaged girls etc etc.

The characterization is all over the place, too. At the beginning of the novel Katie seems to almost idolize her brother. They spend hours on the roof of their house smoking and talking, but Katie can always sense “his emotional axis shifting a little, off-kilter. It’s something I’ve come to call privately the kaleidoscope pf crazy- shimmering and beautiful in certain lights, paisley and horrifying in others.”

Her parents seem unable to cope. Her father, a doctor, just works more and her mother paints and drinks. In no way is Katie’s family functional.

Once she goes off to school the focus shifts away from her family and we are forced to endure 1) the bitchy pretty girl with whom everyone wants to be friends and her 2) nice but kowtowing friend and 3) Katie’s MIA roommate who suddenly shows up but barely says a word and 4) the most perfect boy in the world who just happens to fall in love with Katie.

Nothing happens, though. This is a coming-of-age story and there are some lovely moments here (it’s clear that Warman has talent) but Breathless  is in desperate need of an editor. It’s biceps not bicep and the glaring error in this sentence almost made me shut the book for good “…all of our hands, white gloves pulled taught  and flawless over out fingers-” Who is editing books these days anyway?

Warman clearly had a story to tell and even at a young age, she had the ability to tell it, but the novel’s uneven characterization and bloodless plot made this a miss for me.

Keep Holding On – Susane Colasanti

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keepholdingonNoelle, the narrator of Susane Colasant’s YA novel Keep Holding On,  is just trying to make it through high school so that she can get the hell out of Dodge. (Dodge isn’t actually the name of the town where she lives; Noelle actually calls it “Middle of Nowhere, USA.” ) Every day Noelle wishes she could “be transported to another school in an alternate universe where required learning doesn’t have to involve this traumatic test of survival skills.” Noelle doesn’t stand out, not really, but nevertheless she’s an outsider. Mostly she’s a target because she’s poor; her lunch and clothes are often cause for ridicule. There’s also some stuff following her from her middle school days – a misunderstanding that was blown out of proportion and hangs over her like a dark cloud. The biggest problem in Noelle’s life, besides the jerks at her school who make her life miserable, is her mother.

This one time last year, she came home really late and woke me up when she slammed the front door. Then she whipped my door open. I could see her glaring at me, the light from the hall illuminating the hate in her eyes. She didn’t say anything. She just slammed my door.

Noelle’s mom isn’t abusive per se, but she is neglectful. Noelle can’t remember a time when her mother really looked at her, but it’s certainly been since her stepfather, her mom’s second husband, died of cancer. This was clearly a traumatic event for mother and daughter and yet it’s hard to feel any empathy for Noelle’s mom; she’s just awful.  “There are plenty of days,” Noelle observes,” when mother says less than ten words to me.” Noelle’s biological father isn’t in the picture at all. Then there’s Matt, the boy Noelle likes who seems to like her back at least enough to make out with her – although the fact that they make out is top-secret. Even though you can see the reason for Matt’s need for secrecy a mile away, it still a believable situation for Noelle. Keep Holding On treads familiar teen ground, but the book separates itself from the pack in part because Noelle is immensely sympathetic. She wants, more than anything, to fit in, but what she eventually figures out is that fitting in isn’t nearly as important as finding your own place to belong.

Friends with Boys – Faith Erin Hicks

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friends I didn’t know that the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Friends with Boys, Faith Erin Hicks, was  from Halifax until I finished the book. I am not going to let the fact that we are practically neighbours (well, by Canadian standards we actually are!) influence my thoughts about Friends with Boys.

…which overall I liked (although I am by no means an authority on graphic novels and have really only started to read them in any number since I started building my classroom library.) I did feel the novel missed some great opportunities and had some structural problems – but, yeah, liked it.

So, Maggie is starting grade nine. This is a pretty big deal because she has been homeschooled her whole life. She’s super nervous about it. When her dad asks how she’s feeling she says  “It’s only my first day of high school. Nothing to be nervous about. I’m not nervous. I’m not.”

Maggie’s three older brothers, twins Lloyd and Zander and Daniel have already made the transition to high school and as Daniel admits to Maggie, he likes being at school better than learning at home. Of course he’s been there a few years, and is well-known and liked.

School isn’t the only thing complicating Maggie’s life – her mother has left home. Her father says “It’s exactly seventeen years since your mom started homeschooling you lot,” to which her brother Zander replies “Yeah and to celebrate she took off.” There is all sorts of unspoken angst in this situation, which is never satisfactorily dealt with.

And she has a ghost. An actual ghost that she met when she was a kid and whom occasionally follows her around. We never quite find out what the deal is there, either.

Then there’s Lucy and Alistair, the brother and sister who befriend Maggie.  At least we learn why Alistair is a social piranha.

That’s a lot of stuff on the plate of a fourteen-year-old and any of it would could have made a rich and compelling story on its own. I was intrigued by the ghost, loved Maggie’s older siblings and wondered what had happened to the mom. Ultimately, though, I felt like Hicks only scratched the surface of all these stories.

 

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs

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peregrineMiss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs is the  unusual story of fifteen-year-old Jake Portman who travels to Wales to find out the truth about his much-loved grandfather.

Growing up, Grandpa Portman was the most fascinating person I knew. He had lived in an orphanage, fought in wars, crossed oceans by steamship and deserts on horseback, performed in circuses, knew everything about guns and self-defense and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three languages that weren’t English.

I had a grandfather like that. Well, at least to me, he seemed like the most exotic person ever. When I was a kid, I believed he’d been to every single country in the world. He’d been a Chief Petty Officer with the Royal Navy in the war and then worked on the tugs with the Coast Guard. He knew sea shanties and dirty jokes (which he only ever told to my brothers) and had tattoos on his arms back when they meant something. I loved being in his company.

Jacob’s grandfather had been born in Poland but shipped to Wales when he was twelve because “the monsters were after him. Poland was simply rotten with them.” It seems obvious that Mr. Portman is talking about the Nazis, and he is – but there are other monsters lurking. In Wales, he comes under the care of Miss Peregrine, a most unusual woman – as it turns out – who was also responsible for the children in Grandpa Portman’s fabulous stories. These children could do amazing things: fly, make fire, turn invisible. Grandpa Portman even had pictures of some of them. These pictures, many of which are included in the book, create a degree verisimilitude for the narrative. (The pictures have actually been culled from private collections)

miss-2But then something horrible happens to Grandpa Portman and Jacob is intent on finding the answers to many of the questions his grandfather leaves behind so he convinces his father to take him to Cairnholm Island, off the coast of Wales.

Nothing could have prepared Jake for what he finds there. The island is caught in time and Jake soon finds himself believing in things he never really thought possible. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a coming-of-age tale, an adventure, a love-story. It’s sad and funny and creepy. And as an allegory for the horrors of  the Holocaust – it works very well indeed.

Tim Burton is directing a movie version of this novel – can’t think of anyone better to capture the novel’s strange and wonderful story.

 

 

 

Where Things Come Back – John Corey Whaley

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wherethingsThe members of the English department at my school decided before Christmas that it might be fun to have a book club to look specifically at Young Adult fiction. There’s so much great fiction for teens…and this will be a no-pressure way to look at some of the titles.

Last night I hosted the first meeting where we discussed John Corey Whaley’s much-lauded debut novel Where Things Come Back. Seriously, this book has won several prizes including two of the biggest: Michael L. Printz and William C. Morris. I’ve learned that prize winners don’t always live up to the hype and I am sad to say that I’d put this book in that category.

It started off okay.

I was seventeen years old when I saw my first dead body. It wasn’t my cousin Oslo’s. It was a woman who looked to have been around fifty or at least in her late forties. She didn’t have any visible bullet holes or scratches, cuts or bruises, so I assumed that she had just died of some disease or something; her body barely hidden by the thin white sheet as it awaited its placement in the lockers. The second dead body I ever saw was my cousin Oslo’s

Intriguing enough. And the character’s voice was distinct and I was interested. But to say that Where Things Come Back fulfilled its early promise would be a lie. And my fellow teachers agreed; not a single one of them liked it either.

The first question I asked at last night’s gathering was whether or not we should hold YA  to the same rigorous standards we hold other literature to. And the answer is – of course. As a teacher I want my students to read the really, really good stuff, but I also know that often times they will read stuff that is below my lofty standards. Geesh – I often read stuff that is below my lofty standards! I have many books on the shelves in my classroom that are just…yuck. But someone will read those books and love them and as long as they are reading I feel like they are walking that path towards better literature.

Once we determined that no one liked the novel, we set about trying to determine why.

“Fiction is driven by character,” said Karen. (Karen is a colleague and has also been one of my dearest friends for the past 30-odd years. Our philosophies are quite similar when it comes to teaching and reading.) “I just didn’t like any of the characters in this book.”

Other teachers had problems with the novel’s narrative structure.

And who cares about the woodpecker? None of us.

Where Things Come Back  is mostly Cullen  Witter’s story. He lives with his parents and younger brother, Gabriel, in Lily, Arkansas. Lily is a backwater little town where nothing ever happens. One day Gabriel just vanishes.  Where Things Come Back is also, superficially at least, the story of Benton Sage, a teenager doing missionary work in Ethiopia who suddenly has a crisis of faith. How Cullen and Benton’s stories connect finally becomes apparent in the novel’s final pages – but by then I didn’t care. And that’s a failing of two things: character and telling. So much of this story is told to the reader.

Perhaps there was just too much story to handle. Cullen’s journey after Gabriel’s disappearance might have made for some riveting reading.  Benton’s story, too, had potential. But the clunky denouement tipped over into melodrama that didn’t serve either character, really.

One teacher had a student who read this book and loved it and I will happily add it to my classroom bookshelf – but I won’t be rushing to recommend it.

 

 

You Against Me – Jenny Downham

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youagainstmeI read Jenny Downham’s first novel Before I Die a few years ago and I really like it a lot. I liked You Against Me, too. Downham certainly isn’t afraid to tackle the big stuff.

Eighteen-year-old Mikey McKenzie’s life is far from perfect. His mother is an alcoholic and he has two younger sisters, Karyn, 15, and Holly, 8, for whom he is responsible. He’s doing the best he can, but he’s all too aware that sometimes it’s just not good enough. Especially now. Karyn was recently raped while at a party and she now won’t leave the house. Mikey figures he can make everything right again if he beats the crap out of the guy who did it, Tom Parker. He and his best friend, Jacko, come up with a plan but everyone knows nothing ever goes to plan.

Sixteen-year-old Ellie Parker is every bit as anxious as her parents for her older brother Tom’s homecoming. He’s spent the last couple of weeks detained after having been accused of rape, but now he’s coming home to await the trial. Ellie’s her brother’s star witness; she was home the night Tom brought a bunch of friends back from the pub, Karyn included.  She’s already told the police that she didn’t hear or see anything much and her parents are convinced that Tom will be found not guilty.

And this might have been nothing more than a he said – she said YA novel except that Mikey and Ellie meet and discover…they like each other. Of course it’s more complicated than that, but once the wires are uncrossed and trust has been earned, Ellie and Mikey really do genuinely fall in love.

Downham does a good job of balancing the story of Ellie and Mikey  with everything else that’s going on including Ellie’s doubts about her brother’s innocence, Mikey’s concern for his sisters and frustration with his mother’s lack of responsibility. The novel moves pretty quickly, allowing the reader plenty of time with both Ellie and Mikey so we get a real sense of who they are and how they’re coping with their complicated circumstances. What started as one thing quickly becomes something else for both of them and as Mikey says to Jacko

When I first saw Ellie, I knew it was her – she was my fantasy. I didn’t want it to be true, but every time I met her it was obvious, and the funny thing was that she was better than the fantasy, like I got more stuff than I’d imagined.

You Against Me is about family and friendship and making choices that have far-reaching consequences. Downham offers careful readers lots to think about and has created two young people worth rooting for.

 

Crazy Beautiful – Lauren Baratz-Logsted

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crazyMy arm rises toward my face and the pincer touch of cold steel rubs against my jaw.

I chose hooks because they were cheaper.

I chose hooks because I wouldn’t outgrow them so quickly.

I chose hooks so that everyone would know I was different, so I would scare even myself.

That’s Lucius Wolfe. He’s 15 and the new kid at school. He and his younger sister, Misty, and his parents had to move because Lucius got in the middle of a bomb making experiment gone wrong and blew himself — and most of his house — up. Now he’s got hooks for hands. Why was Lucius making a bomb, one might ask? Ask away — you’re not going to get any real insight from Lucius other than a vague “I was practicing to do harm, somewhere, sometime, maybe.”

I hear the dog alarm go off in the same instant I become aware of the first morning light in my room. I like rising early, like sleeping with the blinds open, because I’m scared of the dark.

In the dark, almost anything can happen.

That’s Aurora Belle. She’s 15 and also the new kid at the school. She and her father moved because Aurora’s mom had recently died of cancer and her dad thought it was time to change the scenery. Aurora is beautiful and smart and perfect…and immediately popular at school.

On the bus on the first morning  (and what are the chances, eh?) Aurora and Lucius’s eyes meet and wowza. But it’s even more than that for Lucius; he decides to become Aurora’s Gallowglass. It means ‘foreign soldier’ but to Lucius it is “the greatest personal protection service you can think of all rolled into one person.”

Aurora doesn’t really strike me as the person who actually needs protecting. She’s absorbed almost immediately into the school’s who’s who and soon thereafter wins the lead in Grease (which, unbelievably, Lucius has never even heard of).

Still, there is Jessup Tristan (and by now the names are starting to be as irritating as the characters), school douche-bag, and a couple of superficial girls and Nick Greek, the security guard who frisks Lucius after he sets off the alarm going through the school’s metal detector. It’s an embarrassing moment for Nick, but then it’s all made well when the 15 year old boy and the 22 year old security guard become fast friends and Lucius actually helps Nick reconsider his career path. I kid you not.

If Lucius didn’t have hooks for hands and a slightly suspect psyche, Crazy Beautiful would be nothing more than an adequately written YA novel.  Take away those hooks and Lucius’s raison d’etre and you’ve got…nothing. Seriously. At a mere 193 pages there’s no time to really develop the characters or their relationships.

Boy sees girl on the bus and falls instantly in love.

Girl sees boy on the bus and “there was an instant connection.”

We’re on page 28.

And what are the chances, when the plot twist comes — separating these two ‘damaged kids’ — that Aurora knows exactly what Gallowglass is?

As it turns out, pretty damn good.

Give this one a miss.

 

 

The Lost Boy – Greg Ruth

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lostboyGreg Ruth has a successful career as a writer and comic book artist and has worked for Dark Horse Comics, DC/Vertigo and even illustrated Barack Obama’s picture book Our Enduring Spirit.

I saw The Lost Boy sitting on a shelf at Indigo and thought it looked and sounded interesting and as I am always on the hunt for graphic novels to add to my small but growing collection, I added it to my shopping bag.

The Lost Boy is the story of Nate who moves to a new town and a new house with his parents. His father tells him that he gets to choose any room he wants and upon a desultory inspection of the rooms upstairs Nate finds an old tape recorder under a loose floor board. Even more strange, there’s a note with his name on it which simply says: Find him.

The tape recorder belongs to Walter Pidgin and when Nate presses play he hears the voice of Walter, a boy about the same age as Nate.

“These are the facts,” Walter’s voice says. “Six dogs and three cats have gone missing in the past ten weeks. The pattern is too deliberate to be coyotes.”

Walter tells his tape recorder that something ‘unnatural’ is at work in Crow’s Woods and it turns out he’s right.

lostboy2 When Nate meets Tabitha, a girl down the street, she’s able to tell him that Walter went missing many years before and when the ‘otherworld’ starts encroaching on the real worl, Nate and Tabitha decide that they need to go into the woods to find out just what happened to Walter.

I found myself getting confused by the players – and maybe that’s because there’s this complicated world which is unveiled by talking dolls and bugs. Cool, but a perhaps too convoluted for one reading. I liked the art in The Lost Boy better than I liked the story, actually – although the story had a lot of potential.

Nevertheless, a worthy and intriguing additiong to my classroom library.

The Missing Girl – Norma Fox Mazer

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missing girlIt’s a total fluke that I am writing my review of Norma Fox Mazer’s last novel, The Missing Girl, on the anniversary of her death. She died on October 17, 2009 and although she was a very well-known and highly regarded young adult novelist, The Missing Girl was my introduction to her writing. In a career that spanned over 40 years, Mazer wrote over 30 books including Newbery Honor Book, After the Rain and National Book Award Finalist A Figure of Speech.

The Missing Girl is the story of the five Hebert sisters: Beauty, Mim, Faithful, Fancy and Autumn. They live with their out of work father, Poppy, and slightly air-headed mother, Blossom, in Mallory, New York.  Beauty, the eldest at 17, dreams of graduating high school and fleeing Mallory.

When she left Mallory, it would be for Chicago, which she had first heard about from Mr. Giametti, her seventh-grade language arts teacher who gre up there. She was going to a place where no one knew her, a place where she could become whoever it was she was meant to be…

The Hebert family dynamics would actually be quite enough to make The Missing Girl a compelling read, but Mazer had something else in mind.

If the man is lucky, in the morning on his way to work, he sees the girls. A flock of them, like birds.

…

Slight of build, stoop shouldered, wearing a gray coat, a gray scarf around his neck against the cold, his wire-rimmed glasses set firmly on his nose, minding his own business, he could be any man, any respectable, ordinary man.

But there is nothing ordinary about this man. He is watching the sisters carefully, biding his time, waiting for the perfect moment. The reader knows it’s coming. The girls are unaware. They have their own issues and petty grievances with each other. Their lives are chaotic and slightly ramshackle.

What struck me about The Missing Girl was the quality of the prose and the very authentic voices of the characters. Employing first, second and third person points of view, Mazer manages to create compelling lives for all the girls and without anything gratuitous makes their “admirer” a creepy predator.

Mazer said she came to write The Missing Girl via a series of short stories about the Hebert sisters which she wrote for various anthologies. It wasn’t until she lost her daughter to cancer in 2001, though, that she settled in to write this novel. “Her death was unbearable,” Mazer said,” “but of course I bear it. I must. Yet below the surface of my life, her loss remains unbearable and will always remain so.

“I still do not understand this fully, but it seems to me that after her death I was compelled to write about something hard, difficult – you might call it unbearable – and to name that ‘something’ with the three words that name my grief, my loss, my sorrow: the missing girl.”

Hemlock – Kathleen Peacock

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HemlockSo this rarely happens to me. The other night, after I turned my light off, I couldn’t turn my brain off and so I stared at the shapes in my room until 1 a.m.. Then I turned my light back on and raced through the final 100 or so pages of Kathleen Peacock’s debut novel, Hemlock.

Seventeen-year-old Mackenzie ‘Mac’ Dobson lives with her cousin, Tess, in the small town of Hemlock.  Her close knit circle of friends, Jason, Kyle and Amy, have recently been reduced by one: Amy was found dead in an alley, victim of a werewolf attack.

Those pesky werewolves, always maiming and eating.

Mac is suffering from very disturbing dreams brought on, she believes, by a guilty conscience. Amy had called her the night she’d died, but Mac had blown her off so she could study. But her grief and guilt are compounded by other issues: her growing feelings for her best friend, Kyle; Jason’s increasingly erratic behaviour after the death of his girlfriend, Amy, and the arrival of the Trackers, specialized werewolf hunters. On top of all this, Mac decides she is going to figure out what really happened to Amy on the night she was attacked.

There’s a lot going on in Hemlock – the town and the book. Here’s what I liked:

– I liked the fact that the whole werewolf thing just ‘is’. Werewolves exist, let’s move on. In Peacock’s version of the lore, anyone  who is scratched or bitten by a werewolf (at least those that survive the attack) become infected with lupine syndrome. Those people are captured – where it is possible to find them – and sent to rehabilitation camps. (I immediately thought of the Nazis rounding up the Jews and whether this comparison was Peacock’s intention or not, it actually works on all sorts of levels.)

– I also liked how there were werewolf supporters, sort of a ‘live and let live’ faction, which means that anyone who shares this view is also in danger of persecution, thus upping the stakes for a whole bunch of other characters. Mac is decidedly on the fence about this issue:

…I knew not all werewolves were good. Some of them did attack and kill people. And one of them had killed Amy. But Charles Manson, the kids from Columbine, that guy with the Kool-Aid – regs did horrible things to each other, too.

– I liked how propulsive the narrative was. I think Peacock really excelled at moving things along, especially when it came to fight scenes, or scenes where the wolves transformed from human to wolf.

– I liked Peacock’s sense of humour. Sometimes the dialogue made me chuckle.

But here’s my problem. Werewolves.

werewolf2I have no problem with fantasy worlds built around creatures of the night. I have a healthy imaginary life which involves virile vampires. Trust me, I get it. But I don’t get werewolves. There’s nothing sexy about them. Or particularly sympathetic, even. (Yeah, I know, they didn’t ask for this life.)

I was invested in Mac’s quest to find out the truth about Amy. I was less invested in her love triangle, a sort of Bella, Edward, Jacob thing. There was something contrived about it that just didn’t work for me. Bottom line: I didn’t care about them. Jason’s a douche. Kyle is in full-on push pull mode. Both have their reasons; all will be revealed, but I never settled into a space where I wanted her to be with either particularly and that’s a problem in a paranormal romance.

And I felt like there was perhaps a tad too much going on in the opening book of a trilogy. Love. Duplicity. Politics. Family issues. Murder and Werewolves. All the pieces click together neatly by the end though and will leave fans howling for Hemlock‘s sequel. Thornhill.

thornhillI have had the pleasure of ‘meeting’ Kathleen Peacock – virtually. She graciously agreed to speak to students at last year’s Write Stuff workshop. We linked Kathleen via the Internet and had Riel Nason, author of The Town That Drowned with us at the venue and both authors talked to the participants about the perils and rewards of writing. It was really exciting for me and for the students, too. How often do you get to talk to published writers? Kathleen is funny and smart and honest in person – well, you know what I mean. She’s also geeky, which appeals to me. I predict she has a long and successful writing career ahead of her.