Tag Archives: YA

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.

Kindness for Weakness – Shawn Goodman

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One of my students recently read Shawn Goodman’s novel Kindness for KindnessWeakness and when she returned it to my classroom library, she told me that she loved it so much that she’d asked for her own copy for Christmas. Her endorsement encouraged me to read the book and I am so glad I did even though it broke my heart. Seriously.

James is fifteen. He lives with his drug-addicted mother and her scummy, drug-addicted boyfriend, Ron, in a one-bedroom trailer. His older brother, Louis, moved out two years ago. James is adrift; he hasn’t got one positive thing going for him. He is  “just a lonely kid loping along the street with [his] head down.”

Then his brother offers him a job and James, desperate to be a part of Louis’ life, accepts. Problem is, the job is dealing drugs and James gets caught. He won’t rat out his brother, so he’s thrown into Morton, a juvenile facility.

There is nothing good about his new reality. James thinks

I am a loser, I am scared and weak. I want to call Mr. Pfeffer and ask him what I’m supposed to do. I want to talk to him over cold root beers, and have him tell me that everything will be okay. I want him to give me new books, enough to last twelve months, so I can disappear into the pages and not have to deal with this place. I could read one book after the other, stopping only to eat, sleep, and do school or chores or whatever it is they do here.

But James does learns the rules and in some ways he comes into his own at Morton.  There are a couple of guards who are compassionate and make an effort to teach the young men in their charge that there is always an alternative.  Despite his circumstances, James starts to consider what his future might look like.

I want to go to college…I want to live in a dorm where no one will know where I came from or who I was at my old high school. I want to start over and see the world outside of Dunkirk. I want to take writing classes.

James also reaches out to his old English teacher, Mr. Pfeffer, and the two exchange letters. James takes comfort in literature, and I have a soft spot for any character who loves books. James strives to stay out of trouble because he wants to get out and make something of his life.

Shawn Goodman actually worked in New York’s juvenile justice system and this experience gives Kindness for Weakness a real feeling of authenticity, but it is James that is the emotional center of this book.  He is a believable, sympathetic character. I fell in love with him at the very beginning and rooted for him until the book’s devastating conclusion.

Highly recommended.

 

The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

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catcher-in-the-rye-cover-imageSo I recently re-read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in about twenty years (or maybe longer, although I shudder to think) because I am teaching Grade 11 this year and Salinger’s classic coming-of-age story is on the reading list. Now I have to figure out what I really think about this book – not just what I want the kids to think I think about it.  It’s a problem because I believe that Holden Caulfield is definitely a character adolescents should encounter, if only because he (and this novel) is alluded to in so much of the literature, music, and films that followed.

If you’re out of the loop, The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 and concerns almost-17-year-old Holden Caulfield, a smart but disenchanted student who has just been kicked out of Pencey Prep, a fancy boarding school in Pennsylvania. “You’ve probably heard of it,” Holden tells us. “They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time.” Holden is flunking all his courses except for English (he’s a voracious reader) and so he’s being sent home.

When the novel opens though, Holden is recounting “this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty rundown” from a rest home in California. Once he establishes where he is, Holden starts to tell his story – embellishments (by his own admission, Holden is “the most terrific liar”) and all.

There is no question that The Catcher in the Rye is dated. Holden peppers his speech with “goddam” (a rather tame expletive by today’s standards), he smokes and drinks (not that today’s teenagers don’t, but there is something old-fashioned about the way he treats these vices) and he’s able to spend an extended amount of time in New York City without breaking the bank (I wish!). Everyone Holden encounters is a “phony” and despite his obsession with sex, Holden is still a virgin. That said, there is something thoroughly modern in Holden’s quest to make sense of  his life, which has gone seriously off the rails.

At its heart, The Catcher in the Rye is a novel about growing up. Holden doesn’t want to, not really. It is perhaps the reason why he’s still a virgin and why he thinks the Museum of Natural History is a perfect place.

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still just be finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

Holden can’t stop time, although I think he would desperately like to. He also can’t undo the fact that his beloved brother, Allie, is dead. “You’d have liked him,” Holden tells us. He is preoccupied with the loss of innocence that precipitates the headlong fall into adulthood. He tells his little sister, Phoebe, that he would like to be a “catcher in the rye,”

…I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff…

Holden’s narrative amounts to a desperate cry for help, for someone to listen to him, for someone to answer his questions, questions which, on the surface (like, where do the ducks in Central Park go when the pond freezes over) seem innocent, but which really demonstrate Holden’s search for meaning.

In Holden, Salinger has created a timeless character who will always have something to say to anyone who cares to listen.

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.

What Happens Next – Colleen Clayton

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whathappensnextColleen Clayton’s debut YA novel, What Happens Next, follows sixteen year old Cassidy ‘Sid’ Murphy after she’s drugged and raped while on a school ski trip. That seems like a pretty big spoiler, I know, but it’s not. The book pretty much spoils it with the tag line “How can you talk about something you can’t remember?” Besides, it’s not the most dramatic thing that happens in this book, even though it is the impetus for Sid’s journey.

Sid and her best friends Kirsten and Paige are pretty excited about this ski trip, but of the three Sid is the amateur and so after a few hours at the bunny hill she sends her friends off to do some real skiing. While on her own, she meets Dax Windsor, “a hot specimen.” Sid can’t quite believe he’s looking at her. He’s

… the best-looking guy I have ever seen up close and he is interested in me – goofy, loud-mouthed Sid Murphy, with my crazy red hair, bubble butt and obnoxious laugh.

Dax is all slippery charm, though, and when he invites Sid to a party the next night Sid seems powerless to refuse, even though it will mean sneaking out of her chalet. But sneak she does and when she wakes up the next morning in a strange bed with no memory of what happened the night before, Sid’s world is shattered.

Instead of telling anyone – her friends, mother, police – what happened, Sid isolates herself. Her relationship with her besties fractures; she’s kicked off the cheerleading squad, her reputation is sullied, despite the fact that no one actually knows what happened.

This is where things get tricky for the reader (and mother) in me. Although Sid has no control over what has happened to her and is powerless to undo what has been done, she finds a way to quell the panic and shock she feels. First she starts running. A lot, like hours. Then she starts eating and purging. And no one notices. Is it a case of, we see what we want to see?  I don’t know. I would like to think if something this horrific happened to my daughter, I would sense that something was wrong, but all Mrs. Murphy seems to want to do is serve starch-heavy meals.

Then, into the mix, comes Corey Livingston: slacker, stoner, degenerate. Sid judges him  in exactly the same way as everyone is judging her – without knowing all the facts. As the two start spending time together, though, Sid feels herself starting to trust Corey, not enough to tell him her darkest secret, mind, but enough to at least feel like she has one friend. Their relationship is one of the nicest things about What Happens Next.

Despite a few things that didn’t quite work for me – that last 20 pages or so just seemed rushed – Clayton’s book will appeal to any teenager who has ever felt that they have a burden too insurmountable to overcome. Sid is a likeable character, but I think the real prize here is Corey.

Complicit – Stephanie Kuehn

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Kuehn-Stephanie-COMPLICITA few months ago I read Stephanie Kuehn’s riveting and devastating YA novel Charm & Strange so I was pretty excited to read Complicit. Also YA, Complicit is the story of siblings Jamie and Cate Henry, who have lived for a decade with their foster parents after their young mother is killed in mysterious drug-related circumstances. As a teen, Cate did some pretty bad things and she’s spent the last couple of years in juvie. To say Jamie and Cate are estranged would be an understatement.

Jamie is now sixteen. He’s an awesome piano player; he’s got a thing for a girl at school which seems to be reciprocated; he has a pretty good life. It’s not all sunshine and roses though: he has huge gaps in his memory, he sometimes blacks out and out of nowhere he loses all feeling in his hands, a condition for which there seems to be no explanation. Then Cate gets out of jail and starts calling him.

I have no proof it was Cate who called, but what if?…I can definitely see her calling me on a throwaway phone in the dead of night. That’d be Cate all the way.

Complicit reads like a psychological thriller where you’re just waiting for all the pieces to click into place. Told in Jamie’s anxious, confused voice, the reader is given a glimpse into his past when his relationship with Cate wasn’t quite so hostile. As kids, Cate was “precocious. Outgoing. Spunky.”  As a teenager, though, she seemed angry and wild, “her jeans too tight. Her shirt too low. her mood too black.”

Jamie is not really interested in a reunion, but Cate is persistent. The more she calls him, the more Jamie feels compelled to follow the bread crumb trail she leaves about their mother’s death and what really happened the night that the Ramirez barn was burned to the ground, the crime for which she spent time in juvenile detention.

Although he is desperate to “forget the empty ache where my mother should be, my sister’s madness, my own rotten feelings of guilt,” he can’t help but somehow feel complicit in Cate’s crimes. And Cate doesn’t seem to want to let Jamie forget anything.

Fortunately for the reader, Jamie’s story isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems. Kuehn paces her twists perfectly and although careful readers might think they’ve got it all sorted out by the time they’ve reached the novel’s shocking conclusion, I’m guessing not so much.

Another winner by Kuehn.

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.

The Little Woods – McCormick Templeman

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littlewoodsTen years after the death of her older sister, Clare,  Cally Woods gets accepted at St. Bede’s Academy, a boarding school in the Sierra region of California. It’s a big deal for Cally: her father is dead, her mother is a mostly absent drunk and Cally’s been offered a full-ride scholarship to St. Bede’s because of what happened to her sister. Seems that as a kid, Clare had visited St. Bede’s with a friend whose mother taught there and “on the third night of her visit, she and her friend had vanished from their beds. Their bodies were never found.” That’s pretty much the premise of  McCormick Templeman’s debut novel, The Little Woods.

There’s a lot going on in this novel, making it difficult to decide whether or not it’s a straight up mystery.  (There are definitely some mystery elements; Cally is there, after all, to figure out exactly what happened to her sister. Although as the police never have it’s ridiculous to think she’ll be able to solve the whodunit on her own. Still.) Is it a coming of age stor? (It’s certainly got all the bells and whistles: mean girls and first love.) It’s peopled with a wide variety of teenage characters: the beautiful jock (“he was black with vaguely Asian features, bright eyes and the most incredible body I’d ever seen); the student body president (whom Cally catches going through her underwear drawer) and Jack (“one of those boys who make you dizzy when you look at them). You’ll recognize all the players well enough.

Cally finds it relatively easy to infiltrate the inner-circle and soon enough learns that St. Bede’s is a hot-bed of rumours and disappearances. In fact, she’s moved into the room of a girl who disappeared only a few months ago. There’s also talk about the “little woods.” Hunky Alex explains at a party:

“All due respect, but everyone knows these woods are straight-up haunted. We do this walk all the time, and there’s always some scary fucking noise that can’t be explained. Ask anyone.

…

I’ll tell you what we’re hearing…We’re hearing the lost girls.”

It is at this party that Cally discovers that her sister’s death is legend: “The woods are haunted. These two little girls were murdered out there….Seriously, you guys. They wandered off into the woods or whatever, but they were totally murdered.”

Although Cally doesn’t expose her connection to Clare, she watches and listens for any clue that will help her uncover the truth.

As far as mysteries go, The Little Woods is decent enough. The problem I had with it is that the story is bogged down by so many other things – side-plots and intrigues, that it was hard to keep the whole convoluted story straight. Doesn’t mean avid YA readers won’t eat it up, though.

Roomies by Sara Zarr & Tara Altebrando

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roomiesMaybe it’s because my daughter is graduating from high school in a few weeks and heading off to university or maybe it’s because, just lately, I have been feeling unsettled and nostalgic, but whatever the reason: I LOVED Roomies. Co-written by Sara Zarr (Story of a Girl) and Tara Altebrando, Roomies‘ narrative is comprised of the back and forth e-mail communication between Elizabeth (EB) and Lauren (Lo), who have been assigned a room together at UC Berkley, as well as their first person narrative of events during that pivotal summer between high school and what comes next.

EB lives with her single mother in a condo on the Jersey Shore (but she doesn’t sound like a character from the reality show of the same name.) Her first e-mail to Lauren is a rant of epic proportions: she’s just had a fight with her mother and she’s already counting the days until she can leave the nest and fly across country.

Lauren has five younger siblings. They are so much younger, in fact, that she’s more like another mother than an older sister. She loves her family, but she has been dreaming about a single room for a while and so the first note from EB comes as something of a disappointment. She imagines writing a reply to EB that says:

I requested a single. All I’ve wanted for the last decade is a room of my own. Some privacy. A place to be alone with my thoughts where they are not constantly interrupted by someone else making some kind of racket, or even just someone else just quietly trying to exist in the same space as me…A “roomie” is really not what I had in mind. Really not what I had in mind at all.

Of course, this is not the note Lauren sends. Her actual reply is much less personal and honest. Nevertheless, despite the awkward beginning, the email exchange between EB and Lauren slowly morphs into something special as each girl tries to navigate that tricky period between “childhood” and “adulthood”.

I remember that summer between high school and university as a very transitional time. I wasn’t actually going away to school; my parents couldn’t afford it. Most of my best friends did go away, though. And so did the boy I fell in love with that summer. I wanted to be someone different – desperately. (Funny, that – almost forty years later, I still often want to be someone different.) Zarr and Altebrando capture that yearning ache so perfectly that I felt myself magically transported back to that long ago summer. Everything was funnier or sadder or profoundly important then.

When you go off to university (which I did the following year) you get to reinvent yourself. The person you were in high school can be magically shed like an old skin; there is no one around who “knew you when” and there’s something pretty amazing (albeit terrifying) in that. But there is also something pretty amazing about being with the people who have known you through all those formative years – people who know your flaws and love you anyway.  I appreciated the way Zarr and Altebrando handled those high school relationships – the push and pull that comes from preparing to make the break and also desperately holding on to something that is important.

Lauren writes:  “There’s this party on Saturday with kids from our high school and she (Lauren’s best friend, Zoe) wants to go and wants me to go with her. I don’t know. I just feel like high school is over…”

EB writes: “Lately my friends don’t talk about anything I find interesting. I’m not sure when that started.”

Over the course of the summer, the correspondence between EB and Lauren becomes more personal as they share details about their last summer at home. I loved each girl’s voice and story. I loved the secondary characters: parents and boyfriends. I loved how EB in particular comes to a deeper understanding of her mother. Perhaps some day my own daughter will understand me a little bit better, too.

Although I would love to follow EB and Lauren through their first year as roomies, I am glad that Zarr and Altebrando decided to end their story where they did. I haven’t read a YA book I have loved as much as this one in a long time.

As my daughter prepares to embark on her own journey I am both elated and terrified. I hope she makes friends like EB and Lauren. I hope she becomes the person she wants to be.

Highly recommended.

Pushing the Limits – Katie McGarry

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pushingThe only limit Katie McGarry’s YA novel Pushing the Limits pushed was my patience. It took me forever to get through this brick of a novel which was, by my estimation, about 200 pages too long. And it pains me to say this because if there’s one thing I love it’s a bad boy/good girl.

Pushing the Limits is told in the alternating voices of high school seniors Noah and Echo (and oh, how her name grated). We meet them (separately) in the office of Mrs Collins, “Eastwood High’s new clinical social worker.” We meet Echo first. She’s in the office with her father and pregnant stepmother (slash former babysitter, that’s right, the dad married the babysitter). She’s there because “after the incident, Child Protective Services had “strongly encouraged” therapy.” Echo is reluctant to talk and desperate to know more about “the incident”, an event that left her with horrible scars on her arms.

Noah doesn’t want to spend any time with Mrs. Collins, either. “Look,” he tells her at their first meeting, “I already have a social worker and she’s enough of a pain in my ass. Tell your bosses you don’t need to waste your time on me.” Of course, Mrs. Collins sees straight through the tough-guy façade to the cream puff that lives underneath. No question, Noah is a “bad boy” but he’s been dealt a crap hand: his parents were killed in a house fire and his two younger brothers are in foster care, but not in the same foster home as he is. He’s barely allowed to see them because of his “anger” issues.

Mrs. Collins figures that Echo and Noah would make good study partners and it doesn’t take long before the two of them are concentrating more on each other than on calculus.

And seriously, this exchange (before they are even ‘dating’) just made me cringe:

I smacked my lips like a cartoon character and bit into the succulent burger. When the juicy meat touched my tongue, I closed my eyes and moaned.

“I thought girls only looked like that when they orgasmed.”

Trust me, there’s more where that came from.

I can’t quite decide why Pushing the Limits didn’t work for me.  I started to get irritated by the number of times Noah called Echo “baby” or reminded me of her silken red curls and cinnamon smell. The central mystery (if you can even call it that) of what happened to Echo is revealed ever…so…slowly and when the truth finally makes its way into the light, it’s a bit of a bummer. There was something shrill about these characters and the way they fumbled through their story towards their happily ever after.