STACKED

books

Battling Boy by Paul Pope

|

Paul Pope is quite the name in comics. As a relative newcomer myself, Battling Boy was the first I had heard of him, but I know his reputation for high-quality comic storytelling.

In this graphic novel for kids, the first in a projected series, Pope first introduces us to Haggard West, hero of the town of Arcopolis. He’s fighting one of the monsters that have been taking over the town, and he seems to be winning, as he always does…until he’s not. In fact, the monster kills him. Haggard West is dead.

The town is distraught. Who will hold back the tide of monstrous creatures? West’s daughter, still a child, thinks she’s the natural successor.

Meanwhile, the godlike Battling Boy is living in his home above the clouds, with his godlike father and his godlike friends. His father announces that it’s time for Battling Boy to go rambling, a rite of passage for their culture. This means Battling Boy is sent to a part of the mortal world where he will test himself against whatever plagues the people – and he’s sent to Arcopolis.

Things start out rough for Battling Boy, and they don’t get any better in his first battle. Except…a series of events fools the citizens into thinking he is a full-fledged hero with the power of gods, when really, he’s only a hero in training, and not a great one at that. He tries to keep up appearances with the help of a set of t-shirts with images of animals on them, which give him powers based on the animals’ strengths. Will Battling Boy be able to save the town, even though he’s basically an impostor hero? (Hint: you don’t actually find out in this volume.)

This title has been getting a huge marketing push from First Second, and it’s getting a lot of early critical acclaim as well. I felt pretty tepid toward it, though. Mostly, I was frustrated there was so much beginning here. It never seemed to advance beyond exposition, despite the frenetic action. There’s a certain plot point near the end that I felt could have happened much earlier and propelled the story further along in this first volume.

I thought the mythology was a bit muddled as well, but I’ve always been more interested than most in backstory. Without more details about Battling Boy and his cultural background, it seems quite generic, perhaps a bit too much like Asgard.

I would have liked to see more of Haggard West’s daughter. She seems interesting; I genuinely want to know more about what it was like to grow up with a superhero (without any supernatural powers) as a father. We get snippets of that upbringing, but she doesn’t get to do much except go to her classes, which include advanced science as well as fighting. Her story doesn’t meet up with Battling Boy’s (though I expect it will in future volumes).

But those are mostly personal complaints. Kids who like the serial nature of comics and are used to waiting several volumes to progress beyond chapter one probably won’t mind that nothing is resolved here. The t-shirt concept is very modern; I can picture kids throwing on their own graphic tees and imagining themselves with super powers based on the images. The art, also done by Pope, fits right in with the traditional comic book aesthetic. It’s actually a bit better than most, I think, with vivid colors and a vibrancy that complements all the action. Kids who love comics will be thrilled with this new superhero and Pope’s modern take on it.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Battling Boy will be available October 8.

Conjured by Sarah Beth Durst

|

Eve doesn’t know who she is. She only knows what people tell her: that her name is Eve, that she is in witness protection, that a serial killer from another world is out to get her. She learns she has magical powers, but whenever she uses them, she suffers more short-term memory loss. Despite her memory problems, she begins to discover that the people who work for witness protection may not actually have her protection as their primary goal. What’s more, she’s seeing visions of a storyteller and a magician at a strange circus, and they’re torturing her in these visions. She wonders if these visions could be her memories coming back to her.

Most of the book focuses on Eve’s struggle to remember what happened to her in the past, whatever it was she had to do with this mysterious serial killer. That’s what the people in witness protection want, and it’s what she wants, too, really. She wants her memories back. She wants to know who she is. The problem is, everyone around her is lying to her. She finally finds a boy she can trust, and together they set out to determine the truth.

I had hopes for this one, but they didn’t pan out. The book is slow, and not much happens for the first two thirds aside from Eve doing magic, passing out, and seeing visions. It makes for a pretty dull book. Leisurely-paced books aren’t inherently bad, but when the pace is so glacial that you contemplate simply skipping to the end so you can be done with it, that’s not great. It didn’t help that for most of the book, the plot seems so very pedestrian.

Despite its common elements (visions, amnesia, witness protection), this is actually a pretty original book. But you won’t know that until the end, when the nature of Eve’s visions is revealed. I’m not sure the payoff, which is intensely weird (but not in a bad way, really), is worth the slog to get there. I wonder if hints to this big revelation at the end could have been threaded through the earlier parts of the novel more successfully. Then again, I wonder if the only way to do this is through more visions, and I certainly didn’t want any more of those.

Much of my aversion to this book is subjective. I dislike reading about visions, dreams, flashbacks, or anything related. (The Harry Potter books, for all the love I bear for them, drag whenever Harry has his prophetic dreams.) Truth be told, my attention wanders and I find myself skimming those sections. So the creepy descriptions and neat turns of phrase that populate those sections were largely wasted on me. Perhaps others get more out of them.

I also have to admit that I have a big aversion to circuses. You may be thinking “Kimberly, why did you read this book? It is full of things you know you do not like.” Well. That is a valid question. I loved Vessel. I like Sarah Beth Durst’s writing. I like that she doesn’t stick to certain types of fantasy and branches out, writing a bunch of different subgenres. I hoped this one would work for me, despite the warning signs. Alas, it did not.

I read an arc of this book, and the point of view changed from third person to first person abruptly near the end of the book. At that point, the book became much stronger, though that also may be due to the fact that the plot also picked up at the same time. I’m very curious to see what the POV is in the final copy, as this strange shift seems like an editing mistake rather than a deliberate stylistic choice.

Review copy received from the publisher. Conjured is available now.

The Theory of Everything by Kari Luna

|

Fourteen-year-old Sophie Sophia and her mother just moved from San Francisco to the small town of Havencrest, Illinois (roughly 50 miles north of Chicago) after spending the bulk of their lives in Brooklyn, New York. Sophie is obsessed with eighties music, with dressing however the heck she feels like, and with figuring out what happened to her father.

Sophie’s super-smart, passionate, and strange physicist dad disappeared just a few years ago, and that’s what set her and her mother off on this series of cross-country moves. It was less about getting away and more about finding. Finding themselves. Finding a way through the grief. Finding a way to build something new.

It doesn’t take long before Sophie’s made herself a new friend in her physics class named Finny. But it also doesn’t take long before she starts being visited by her shaman Panda named Walt. Is Sophie crazy or can these trips to a parallel world full of spiritually-guiding pandas be the way to find and connect with her long-long father?

The Theory of Everything is an enjoyable read, but it won’t be one of my favorites. I certainly see how it’s been compared to books like Going Bovine or even The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I think it falls short of being a strong read alike to either of those titles. In many ways, Luna’s debut novel fails to fully form Sophie as a memorable character in and of herself, which both Bray’s novel and Chbosky’s do. Much of what makes Sophie a character are the things surrounding her, rather than who she is in and of herself. More than that, she’s hard to buy as a 14-year-old with the sort of knowledge and wisdom she has in consideration of the larger story, and secondary characters throughout the novel don’t blossom beyond certain tropes.

The bulk of Luna’s novel is realistic — it’s about Sophie learning to cope with big changes in her life. She’s recently moved, and now she has to learn to fit into a small town where she is, of course, under the belief she’ll be the only eccentric girl there who loves 80s music and funky clothes because no one in a small town has any culture to them. While I buy that belief wholeheartedly, especially given that Sophie is from Brooklyn and spent time in San Francisco, I took issue with her obsession with 80s music. I know I’ve blogged before, but in many ways, the trend of having characters who love anything 80s or setting a book in the 80s for the music/pop culture rings false to me. It reads more like authorial nostalgia than it does character development or authenticity. Do teens today like 80s music? Maybe some do. But as someone who was born in the mid-80s myself and who tries to stay moderately up-to-date in pop culture, a lot of the references or significance of this stuff is completely lost on me. I think we aren’t quite yet removed enough from this era to see it or appreciate it for what it is in that historical context. I think in the case of Sophie, it wasn’t so much about her character being a fan of the music. It felt more like a way for her character to be unique, which I didn’t like. She had plenty of other qualities inherent to her character to do that for her.

Almost immediately in the story, Sophie befriends Finny in her physics class. Both geek out about string theory and the notion of parallel worlds, among other things. They’re best pals quickly, and Sophie opens up to him about the real things going on in her life, including why she’s living in Havencrest. Finny, on the other hand, gives almost nothing to Sophie — maybe because Sophie is a little self-absorbed she misses it, but I think that in many respects, Finny just isn’t a full character. What we know about him is that he’s gay and he’s easily convinced to skip school and hop a train with Sophie for a whirlwind adventure in Brooklyn to look for her father. We learn later on he’s the type of person who can establish relationships quickly, period, as he does just that with the new woman in Sophie’s father’s life. I wish he’d been a lot more developed because he was interesting. I wondered about his own life in small town Illinois, about what it was like for him to be gay in that situation, and I wondered, too, if he had any friends besides Sophie. In many ways, Finny felt like simply the gay sidekick in the story.

The Theory of Everything isn’t entirely realistic though — at least, it might not be. What makes Sophie truly unique is that she often falls into a parallel world, where she’s greeted by a shaman panda named Walt. He is friendly with her and he assures her many times that things are going to be okay.

The thing about these episodes Sophie experiences, though, is that they’re the same episodes her own father used to experience. They’re the same kinds of episodes that would happen and cause him to disappear for days at a time and to raise worries with her mother and his other loved ones. These moments of disconnecting with the real world and falling deeply into this made up one were the real reason he disappeared and never came back, as well as why Sophie and her mother left Brooklyn.

What makes Luna’s book go the magical realism direction, though, is that it’s possible these episodes aren’t a method of coping nor a mental illness. They could all be explained by physics in some capacity. Are there parallel worlds we can fall into? If so, how can we do that? If parallel worlds exist, are Sophie and her father both capable of entering and exiting them in as much a physical way as they are able to enter them in a mental way. Sophie can bring objects back with her from her episodes, only making these questions tougher to answer.

There is a lot of suspension of disbelief necessary for the story beyond the episodes. Sophie and Finny run off to Brooklyn together without either of their parents becoming too concerned — and remember, they’re 14. There’s also a really underdeveloped and somewhat random romantic interest given to Sophie mere days after her move, and the guy stays patient and understanding with her, despite the fact she flakes out on him more than once. So there is a “love story” here in terms of a romance, but it’s shallow and secondary; the real “love story” might instead be to family.

The ending is a bit unsatisfying, as I’m not sure it draws any conclusions or further considerations for Sophie beyond giving her closure in the understanding that sometimes, there simply is not closure (which is a fair takeaway for her and for the reader, even if I don’t necessarily like it).

Writing-wise, there’s nothing particularly memorable here. It suits the story, and it doesn’t get bogged down. My only qualm might be that it felt like there was too much trying to be crammed in in an attempt to give Sophie a quirkiness that she didn’t need to have because it already existed within her — starting with her name.

Despite the fact this wasn’t one of my favorite reads in recent memory, those looking for something different and fun, despite the heavier themes of grief and mental illness, will likely appreciate The Theory of Everything. I can see readers who like Natalie Standiford’s brand of quirk in How to Say Goodbye in Robot or Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters finding this a satisfying read, as would those readers who want their stories with a little bit of science-fantasy. Likewise, readers who like A. S. King’s magical realism, particularly Everybody Sees the Ants, will likely find this a great read alike. There’s probably a lot to be discussed among the two when it comes to mental illness and coping mechanisms.

Review copy received from the author. The Theory of Everything is available now. 

Through to You by Emily Hainsworth

|

It’s becoming rare to read something different in YA fiction. That’s not to say books that tackle similar topics are bad — they’re not — but when you pick up a book that is so different from what you’ve read before, it’s noteworthy. Emily Hainsworth’s debut Through to You is fresh, inventive, and engaging.

Camden Pike lost his girlfriend Viv in an accident, and he’s grieving the loss hard. It’s not just grief he’s grappling with though; Cam also blames himself for the accident. A few moments of carelessness on his part caused her to die. Viv was everything to Cam. She helped him recover from an injury that sidelined his football career and she was there as his family fell apart and his father become more and more distant from him. She was his guiding strength through so much.

Cam would do anything for just a few more minutes with Viv. He’d do more to have her back completely.

One night, upon visiting the memorial dedicated to her at school — the place where the accident happened — Cam’s visited by a spirit he doesn’t know. She introduces herself as Nina, and she tells him she comes from a parallel world accessible through the green light glowing nearby. In this world, Viv is still very much alive. But as much as Nina warns Cam that going with her to this parallel world isn’t good  for him, he doesn’t listen. He goes. And what he discovers about Viv changes his perception of not only who she is in this alternative world, but it changes his perception of who she was in his world. Was Viv the girl he thought she was? And how does Nina fit into all of this?

Through to You is one dash contemporary, with a dash of science fiction, time/space travel, thriller, and fantasy/supernatural. What keeps it woven tightly, though, is the romance and pursuit thereof. Cam’s desire and passion for his relationship with Viv transcend place and time, and Hainsworth successfully marries her genres because the story remains grounded in the human element of connection.

Cam’s voice is knockout — he is direct and unfiltered, sarcastic and hard to crack open. Despite holding back his true feelings, as readers we know what’s going on in his mind. He’s miserable and pained because of losing Viv, and he shows us this through his actions. He withdraws socially, reacts with intensity, but he lets us inside little by little through his counseling sessions. We learn about him, too, through his reactions to his parents’ divorce and the instability in his family life. While it can be a little jarring and difficult to initially connect to Cam, that distance between reader and character is essential in establishing who he is. He’s not easy to like and he doesn’t necessarily want to be liked, either. The more we become invested in his story and the more we realize that he’s struggling not just with grief, but also with guilt and anxiety and depression and confusion about the future, the more we’re hopeful that he can come to some sort of closure with Viv in the parallel world.

When Cam enters the parallel world, Nina warns him repeatedly that Viv isn’t who he thinks she is. Of course, Cam disregards her warnings because all he wants is to be reunited. This is his chance. And, of course, Nina’s warnings are right — Viv isn’t who she was in Cam’s world. She’s much crueler, darker, and possessive than what she was in his life. Cam can’t get close enough to her, but as he watches her in this parallel world, he comes to discover that he isn’t quite himself, either. That the choices he makes here are influenced heavily by Viv. The longer he’s here and the more he longs for more time with Viv, the more he begins to question what Nina’s warning meant. The more he begins to realize that maybe her warnings were right. That maybe, just maybe, the Viv in this parallel world is the true and honest Viv of his real world.

Fair warning that this next paragraph is spoiler, so feel free to jump down to the following one if you don’t want it.

What Hainsworth does in developing this alternative Viv, one who is so much more controlling and powerful in the relationship, is savvy. Cam’s grief in the real world and his guilt over causing the car accident that ended her life has done nothing but cloud the truth about who she was to him. She was possessive and greedy of his time. She took more away from him than she gave to him — where he thought she was the person who helped him through an injury, the truth was she was the person who kept him from returning to the sport he loved. She’d exerted her control over him and forced him to stray from who he was and what he wanted. When confronted with the truth of who Viv is in the alternative world, Cam realizes that her death frees him. As cruel as it sounds, she was the element keeping him tied down and keeping him from achieving what he hoped to achieve. It kept him from establishing other relationships and from being closer with his friends. His love for her was less about love and much more about being comfortable and feeling as though he were being accepted. This, of course, ties back into the trouble with his parents and feeling like the cast off in the family as they go through divorce. It’s in Cam’s realizations about Viv and what she really was to him that readers really connect with him. Grief can make people blind — for Cam, it makes him blind not only to what Viv was to him, but it protects him from what may be the scariest thing for him: freedom. Her death is his new beginning and the prospect is scary, despite being what he needs and deserves.

As much as the hook and threads of the story are in this romantic element and in Cam’s grieving, what stood out to me was how Cam navigated and began to understand relationships with the adults in his life. In particular, Cam’s interactions with his father were brutal. There’s a scene that stands out to me, where Cam’s father calls him and the tension and strain in their relationship as father and son sear. It’s much less about the divorce or about what it means when parents divorce. This scene and the subsequent scenes with his mother highlight to Cam that making choices about the course of his life rest within his own power. He’s watching two adults who are making choices — and not always ones he agrees with — and he’s observing how adults can be selfish. Cam realizes in this phone call with his father that he is the one with the power to choose what he wants their relationship to be like. These moments tie directly back to the relationship Cam has with Viv; he’s watched a destructive relationship between his parents, and that’s why he didn’t quite put together the potential destruction going on in his own relationship. Moreover, though, this is where the concept of choice and of false choices ties together. The ball is entirely in Cam’s court when it comes to making choices about everything. He just has to find the power within himself to make them and live with the consequences.

The parallel worlds aspect of Through to You emerges not only in concept, but in actuality. It is the ultimate what if?

I haven’t talked much about Nina, the third major character in this story, and that’s because her role is almost too obvious. We know she’s here to help Cam see the truth and she’s here to guide him through the grieving process. Moreover — and this is spoiler — it seems clear from the beginning that she’s going to make an appearance in the real world. She wouldn’t exist only in the parallel world unless she had a complement in Cam’s reality, and readers will know full well what that role is early on. I saw it coming from miles away, but I still found it satisfying. For Cam, Nina is little more than a ghost worth ignoring because she stands in the way of his being with Viv again. But readers know to expect more from her and they know that what she is is much more real and fleshed than what Viv is, despite Viv being depicted as the truth and whole thing. In the moments where Cam attempts intimacy with Viv, there are constant interruptions that break them from one another, where in the moments when Cam and Nina are together (not intimately), things are awkward but they’re solid and unbroken. As much as Cam wanted Viv to be right, he knows she cannot be. It’s clear who is. 

Emily Hainsworth’s debut is tightly written, well-paced, and will appeal to a wide range of readers, especially those looking for something a little bit different. This felt like classic YA to me in some senses, but I’m struggling to put my finger on what made it feel that way. Perhaps because it crosses so many lines in terms of genre and perhaps because it doesn’t follow a lot of the current trends.

In so much as this is a story about grief and loss, it’s ultimately a story about what the past is and whether people can move on from it or whether it ties them down. Through to You is quite minimalist in style, meaning that readers aren’t going to have a lot of world building nor a lot of explanation for the hows and whys of parallel travel. That’s a strength of the book — what it means and how it works lies in the hands of the readers to construct.

Review copy received from the publisher. Through to You is available today.

A pile of contemporary reviews

|

I’ve hit a weird reading slump this summer. It’s been really hard to get into anything, and it’s been slow going when I have started something (even if I’ve liked it). I’d say I average between 10 and 15 books a month, but I think in the last two months combined I’ve maybe read 10 books. Since I’m not reading at my usual pace, I’ve also not been reviewing at my usual pace, meaning the things I finished back in early July are still sitting in a pile to be reviewed. Rather than try to write lengthy reviews for each of those titles, I thought I’d tackle a bunch of them at once. All of these are contemporary stories.

Joelle Anthony’s sophomore novel, The Right & The Real tackles one of my favorite topics head on: cults. When Jamie’s father marries Mira, he signs himself over to the church of The Right & The Real. But when Jamie is faced with the decision to sign herself over, she can’t do it — she’s not ready to make the commitment to the church and their beliefs. Even though joining the church was originally her idea, her father’s commitment has her worried and for good reason. Now that she has chosen not to commit, he’s kicked Jamie out of her house.

Jamie is entirely on her own to figure out her life now without her dad and without the church to back her up. Not to mention her long-time boyfriend Josh, who got her into the church in the first place, has also ditched her. As much as Jamie believes that she can go this on her own and make it work, she also misses her father terribly and worries that the church is ruining all they had as a family.

The Right & The Real was a great premise, though I didn’t necessarily find the execution as strong as I wanted it to be. The challenge for me was that the story begins immediately, with little exploration into the cult itself or what makes it such a bad place to be (aside from being a cult, that is). Because I couldn’t know what the threat was from within, I couldn’t place what the threat was externally, either. It was challenging for me to develop an emotional connection with Jamie or for me to understand her fear and terror. So while I was on her side and worried about her well-being — particularly because she was in a desperate place figuring out basic means of survival — it was hard for me to grasp what it was that worried her about her father, about Josh, and about the ramifications of being cast out from the group.

More frustrating, though, was Jamie’s insistence upon entering relationships and being saved by someone other than herself. Jamie is a strong female character — she has to be in order to make such a life-altering choice as to not join the cult — but she is fixated on the broken relationship she has with Josh. But it’s not just that; she quickly develops a relationship with another boy, Trent, who ultimately is the hero in the story. And when they share a moment near the end, it felt to me like it was his ownership of her and of the situation that brought resolution to the story and Jamie herself is secondary.

Anthony’s writing in the story is good, as is the pacing and there is no doubt that despite the flaws that kept this from being a knock out for me, there will be a great readership for The Right & The Real. Fans of Holly Cupala, particularly Don’t Breathe a Word will enjoy this, as will those readers who enjoy other cult-centric stories, such as Carol Lynch Williams’s The Chosen One and Michele Green’s Keep Sweet. What was maybe most interesting to me about Anthony’s book is that unlike other books that explore the cult culture, The Right & The Real is a story from the outside, rather than from the inside. Even though it made for challenges I talked about earlier, it stands out from the crowd because of this. Anthony’s book is available now.

One of my all-time favorite novels is Jenna Blum’s The Stormchasers (reviewed here) and when I saw the description for Lara Zielin’s The Waiting Sky, I noticed immediate similarities and was sold.

Jane’s mother is an alcoholic, and after a particularly horrific incident involving her mother, a car, and Jane’s best friend, Jane knows she needs to get out and away, at least for a short time, to reassess what it is she needs in her life. Yes, she’s 17 and even though it sounds somewhat absurd for her to have that sort of maturity about her own life, it makes sense. Jane’s brother left years ago, moving from their home in Minnesota down to the southern plains to become a tornado chaser. She’s going to spend the summer with him, learning the skills of the trade. It’s her opportunity to feel like she has some sort of control over her life. I probably don’t need to explain the metaphor there, but it is there, and it’s not some sort of hypothetical. Jane really becomes a storm chaser, but this is a story that’s light on the storm chasing and a lot stronger on the rebuilding a world that’s collapsed beneath the weight of a storm.

After a particularly strong tornado in Nebraska, Jane and the crew stick around to help clean up the damage. Of course, there’s also a budding relationship between Jane and a guy from a rivaling chasing team, Max. What I appreciated was that their interactions were short, were meaningful, but ultimately, both of them knew there wasn’t a whole lot more that could emerge between them. Here’s where I can employ another reference to the metaphor of the storm and how it can cause for high emotions in short bursts and leave people with what they need in the end.

As much as I liked Jane in the story — and let me say that she’s likeable but she is a deeply flawed character who makes a lot of questionable choices that really hammer that home — I found myself more invested in Victor’s story. He’s one of the fellow storm chasers, but he is terrified of storms. The only reason he keeps doing it is for his brother’s sake. Zielin weaves in a nice thread here, in that Victor’s dedication to living in fear/worry about storm chasing to make his brother happy is similar to how Jane herself gave up her freedoms and ability to live for herself in dealing with her alcoholic mother. But I do question how the heck Victor can hate the movie Twister. It’s a classic.

The Waiting Sky will appeal to readers who love contemporary stories, particularly those delving into families, friendships, and the meaning of each and both. There’s a lot to appreciate in this and it felt very different and fresh in approach, though I found some of the writing and references to be a little stilted and dated. For the plot and for Jane as a character, I was willing to overlook those issues. The ending is a little convenient, but it did not kill the rest of what made the book work. Anyone who enjoyed Twister or enjoys the idea of storm chasing will want to track this one down. The Waiting Sky is available now. Readers who dig this one and are looking for something similar and/or something more literary will be eager to then look into Blum’s The Stormchasers.

Hannah Harrington’s sophomore novel, Speechless, has one of the coolest covers, I think. It’s so stark that it ends up being very bold and I think it’ll stand out because of that. Apologies for how vague this review is going to be, but I don’t want to spoil the big reveal.

Chelsea Knot was part of the popular crowd, and she enjoys her time at the top. But when she stumbles upon a situation at a party and tells her friends, the person at the center of the situation becomes a victim not just of Chelsea opening her mouth, but of an attack initiated via her loose lips. The moment Chelsea realizes her gossiping is the reason for the violence, she takes a vow of silence. Except it’s not just a vow of silence she ends up taking — Chelsea becomes outcast from her popular friends and finds herself completely alone and without anyone to confide in. If she had anything to confide, that is (she does — she just won’t).

Speechless follows as Chelsea learns who she can and cannot trust, and as could be expected, it’s not who she thought it was. Everything she thought she knew about the cool and the not-cool kids ends up being untrue and Chelsea finds herself befriending new people who are truly there for her. In the end, she has the chance to face the person whose entire life changed because of her decision to talk at the party and it’s then she comes to realize how important those issues of trust and friendship are.

It sounds like a sweet story, but it’s not. It’s rough and gritty, and Chelsea is subjected to torment and bullying. Relentlessly, even. The problem for me, though, was that this was never once Chelsea’s story. It was Noah’s — he’s the guy at the center of the secret she divulges. His story is so lost in the book because the focus and attention is on Chelsea, and maybe it’s because I’m an adult reading this, I felt like she didn’t deserve the attention of the story because she’d already gotten too much attention anyway. In fact, Chelsea’s vow of silence and behavior following the horrible thing she did felt like a huge cry for more attention and pity, where I felt like Noah, the real victim here, deserved it way more than she did. That’s not to say she ever deserved the bullying she got — she didn’t — but I was much more invested in Noah’s well-being than Chelsea’s. For me, she got in the way of the story, despite being the catalyst for it.

Harrington knows how to write teens, though, and there’s no doubt in my mind this book will appeal to them. While reading Speechless, I was reminded of Courtney Summers’s Some Girls Are in terms of the bullying/abuse inflicted upon characters, of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, in terms of the hows and whys of Chelsea’s silence, and maybe I was reminded most of Molly Backes’s The Princesses of Iowa in terms of how the issues of sexuality and popularity and rumor-spreading all interweave. Readers who appreciated those stories will want to check this one out, though I think it pales in comparison to any and all of those. Speechless will be available August 28.

Review copies of all titles provided by the publishers.