“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 the 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.
a horrible tragedy. Now he lives with his grandparents who are “Kind people. They didn’t have to take you in. Or did they? Love? Is it love? Charity.”
who lives in Harlem with her twin brother, whom she calls ‘Twin’) and her Dominican immigrant parents. She’s a good girl; she has no choice. Mami’s rules are law, and Xiomara wouldn’t dream of breaking them. But there are some things Xiomara can’t control. For example, she is “unhide-able”
but because Penny has always felt like she’s the parent and her mom’s the kid. Sometimes Penny wanted to “shake Celeste until her fillings came loose.” Now it’s time for Penny to go off to college – University of Texas in Austin, only an hour or so away, but away nonetheless.
I can’t remember the last time I cried actual tears reading a book, but Jared Reck’s debut novel A Short History of the Girl Next Door actually made me cry. And also laugh.
difficult than I remember my adolescence. There was no social media back then. We hung out, gathering at someone’s house on Friday night to play Trivial Pursuits and drink Pop Shoppe soda. We had dances where you’d just pray not to be asked to slow dance with some geeky guy, especially for the last dance, which was always “Stairway to Heaven” – longest song on the planet. My locker was covered with pictures of Robby Benson. The drama happened in the girls’ bathroom and the bullying happened in person. We talked for hours on the phone…which was in the kitchen, so your end of the conversation could be heard by pesky brothers and eavesdropping moms.
Gordon Korman’s YA novel jake, reinvented takes a page straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby. Like, straight out of it. This is the story of Rick, a high school kid who is only marginally cool because he is the kicker and back-up quarterback for the F. Scott Fitzgerald (yep!) high school football team and hangs out with Todd Buckley, the team’s hyper-masculine starting quarterback.
Ethan Andrezejczak attends Selwyn Academy, a fine arts high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He’s the narrator of Kate Hattemer’s debut YA novel The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy. His life revolves around hanging with his friends Jackson, Elizabeth and the too-cool-for-their-friend-group, Luke, and teaching Jackson’s gerbil, Baconnaise circus tricks. Ethan pines for ballerina Maura and loathes Miki Frigging Reagler from afar. Maura and Miki are two of the stars of the reality show For Art’s Sake (FAS), which is filmed at Selwyn.
Greene is dead.
Jam Gallahue just hasn’t been able to recover from the death of her boyfriend Reeve Maxfield. “I loved him,” she explains, “and then he died, and almost a year passed and no one knew what to do with me.” As a last resort, Jam’s parents send her to The Wooden Barn, “a boarding school for ’emotionally fragile, highly intelligent’ teenagers.”
The Ludic Reader 