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books

L.K. Madigan, Flash Burnout, and a giveaway

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We were devastated to read this news from L. K. Madigan last week. As a burgeoning talent in the YA Lit world, it is heartbreaking to think her life and career will end long before it should. Her debut novel, 2009’s Flash Burnout, took home the much-deserved Morris Award last year, and in 2010, she published The Mermaid’s Mirror.

We’ve been brainstorming what we can do — what best way we can herald her work and keep her in our thoughts through this difficult time — and we wanted to relink you to Kelly’s original review of Flash Burnout, as well as bring you Jen’s new review of this title. Likewise, we’re giving away a copy of this title (form at the bottom). In addition, we have made a contribution to the American Cancer Society in her name.

You can check out reviews and additional chances to win Madigan’s titles by stopping this week at GreenBeanTeenQueen, GalleySmith, YA Librarian Tales, and Fat Girl, Reading. There is also a fantastic post up by the 2009 debutantes here that includes a giveaway of 40 copies of her books.

Flash Burnout

Blake has finally found his first girlfriend: Shannon, she of the gorgeous body, sleek shoulders (Blake’s a shoulder guy, what can he say?), and sparkling wit. It’s all he can do to keep his hands off of her, dreams about the day they’ll finally have sex, and actually truly enjoys her as a person, too. But then there’s Marissa, Blake’s new friend in his photography class, the one he can joke around with and share photography techniques with. And the one who comes to depend upon him when the “gritty” photograph Blake takes for a class assignment actually turns out to be Marissa’s mother: homeless, meth-addicted, strung out, and skeletally skinny, someone in need of both finding and help. As Blake helps Marissa locate her mother, he becomes

inextricably intertwined in her life. But she’s just a friend who needs his support, right? Then why is Shannon so jealous? And why is the pull of Marissa so strong?
I was absolutely blown away by Flash Burnout, L.K. Madigan’s debut novel, the winner of the 2010 William C. Morris Award, which honors the year’s best young adult debut novel. Blake’s voice is spot-on, and if I didn’t know otherwise, I would have thought that, due to this authenticity, Madigan was actually a male. Blake is the perfect mix of snarky, impulsive, thoughtful, and sensitive. As an aspiring comedian, he keeps mental tallies in his head of when he makes people laugh. And he’s hormonal, yearning for sex and skin: “She’s so luscious in her little white top–it barely reaches the waistband of her baggy shorts…I want to touch her like a junkie wants his drug” (paperback, p. 6-7). Madigan does not hold back from expressing the genuine urges that teenage boys feel. Everything is out there, which results in a genuine, true to life protagonist.
Another refreshing aspect of Flash Burnout is the supporting characters, especially Blake’s family, who are not exactly what you would call normal. His parents are wrapped up in death–his father is a medical examiner who leaves pictures of bullet wounds on the kitchen table, while his mother is a hospital chaplain who regretfully knows the seedy side of town all too well. But it is the presence and emotional support of his parents that truly shines through, especially in a genre that all too often shuttles parents away or presents the token divorced, unsupportive authority figures. Blake’s parents listen, they help and guide, disciplining Blake when necessary and asking no questions at all when necessary. His older brother Garrett is spot-on, as well: a condescending, tormenting sibling who nevertheless comes through for Blake when Blake really needs it.

Madigan portrays a slice of teen life that truly blooms to life on these pages. I honestly felt that Blake was a real person: flawed, despairing, yearning, and confused. Like many teenagers, he is impulsive and rash, following his emotions rather than stopping to wait for logic and reason to catch up with him. And these actions have consequences, ones that affect both Blake’s life and the life of his friends and loved ones, consequences that are not even wrapped up by the novel’s conclusion.
Maybe that’s what I most loved about Flash Burnout–the realism and the open-endedness of it all. Madigan created a character so real and so genuine that he worked his way into my heart. And at the end, Blake’s journey was left unresolved. So I can still see him out there, fumbling around, trying to find his way in life. Just like all of us.

Recent Reads, Twitter-Style

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Yep, it’s my turn for another set of Twitter-style reviews: short, snappy reviews of some of my recent reads.


My Mos

t Exc

ellent Year: A Story of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park

Stev

e Klu

ger

I’ve bee

n meaning to read this book for ages, and finally purchased it last month. Oh, am I glad I did. In three alte

rnating narratives, the reader meets Tony Conigliaro

(T.C.), a die-hard Red Sox fan w

ho is crushing hard on the hard-to-get Ale; Ale, an ambassador’s

daughter whose real passion is

the stage; and Augie, a recently out of the closet musical theater fanatic who is developi

ng his first crush on a boy. The three come together when they stage a school variety show and become involved in the life of a young deaf boy. As a Massachusetts n

ative, the Brookline and Boston locations fascinated me and the format (a mix of narrative, journa

l entries, IM chats, and posters) pulled me quickly through the text. But it is the heart of this novel that truly grabs the reader. I fell in love with each and every one of these loving, quirky, and charming characters.

Prom and Prejudice
Elizabeth Eulberg
Lizzie Bennet is a scholarship student at Longbourn Academy, an institution where

prom is the social event of the season and wealth and privilege are prized commodities. As she is only at Longbourn because of her music abilities, Lizzie is an outcast, tormented and excluded by all except for her kindhearted roommate, Jane. Jane, who is dating the sensitive Charles Bingley, introduces Lizzie to Charles’ friend Will Darcy, a snobby, self-

righteous student at their brother school, Pemberly. Lizzie and Darcy’s eventual clashes and misunderstandings subsequently follow the plot of Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice. While this book was, of course, predictable, Eulberg does a wonderful job of modernizing this oft-redone tale. While this is a fairly short book, Lizzie becomes a three dimensional character, and the twists and turns of Lizzie and Darcy’s courtship, though predetermined by Austen’s plot, ring true to the modern time period.


Beautiful Darkness
Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
This sequel to Beautiful Creatures, while engrossing, suffers a bit for me under the weight of its mythology. Although Ethan and Lena evaded Lena’s potential fate as a Dark Caster at the end of Beautiful Creatures, Lena is just as confused as ever in Beautiful Darkness, suffering from the weight of her guilt over a loved one’s untimely death and fearing that her seventeenth birthday will now bring the determination of her fate. As Lena begins to avoid Ethan, hanging out instead with the eerie, inscrutable John Breed, Ethan is pulled even deeper into the Caster world beneath the town of Gatlin. Aided by Link, Ridley, and Liv, Marian’s new apprentice, Ethan must figure out how to stop Lena from leaving him–and Gatlin–forever. While the reappearance of old characters was welcome and the new characters were well-integrated into the already established universe, I felt like there was almost too much mythology in this sequel, too many details piled on to one another. Nevertheless, Garci and Stohl excel at both world-building and sensory details, creating a vivid world that leaps from the page.
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children (audiobook)

Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman
A fascinating compilation of intriguing recent scientific studies of child development that purports to upend tradition thinking about both childhood and parenting. The authors reveal why lying is actually a good thing in children, how praising children can end up backfiring, why parents should speak to their children openly and honestly about race, and what exactly encourages optimal and advanced language development in children. Narrator and co-author Po Bronson has a warm, engaging voice that truly invites the reader in to his fascinating research, and the book itself is quite accessible. While some of the advice that claimed to be revelatory in fact seemed like plain common sense to me, NurtureShock was nevertheless an intriguing read.

Fart Party and Drinking at the Moves by Julia Wertz

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I think I have a new hero in Julia Wertz.

To ring in the New Year, I treated myself to two of her comic autobiographies, and to say I had a good laugh or two would be an understatement. Before proceeding, though, I must warn that those who don’t have a tolerance for crude humor or profanity, these might not be the right books for you.

Fart Party, published in 2006 after originally appearing in smaller pieces online, is Wertz’s story about life as a 23-year-old in San Francisco. In it, we’re introduced to boyfriend Oliver, her younger brother, her older brother, and her mother (my favorite character). She lives on her own, works a job she loves, and does her comics on the side.

The story is told through vignettes that progress chronologically. To give the story some sort of anchor, I’d say it’s primarily about the development and ultimate death of the relationship between herself and Oliver. That’s not to say every comic is about that, but he plays a lead character in her life at this point, and she spends significant time talking about the growth and development of their relationship, up to its premature death. The end of their relationship comes thanks to his acceptance to school in Vermont and the reluctance on both their parts to change their minds — Julia’s to leave the city she loves and Oliver’s to engage in a long distance relationship.

But this is also the story of a girl learning how to devote herself to her art. Anyone who has had a passion — be it drawing, music, writing — will relate to Julia’s struggle to create. Amid the challenges thrown in her way, she still finds small pockets of time and energy to tell her stories, and she finds the humor in every day situations for fodder. And yes, she’ll even tackle that itself in more than one scene.

Although the art of the comics is nothing spectacular (simple pen and ink), it compliments the writing well. Wertz has an incredible sense of humor and although it is crude and at times offensive, this is the lens through which we get to know her characters so well. Julia is a 20-something navigating the tricky terrain of being on her own for the first time in a big city where things don’t always come easy nor where there is some sort of instructional guide. There are entire comics devoted to drinking the day away, the fact that cheese can make up a person’s complete diet, and how finding a television show you love can turn you into a zombie who needs nothing more than their next fix (ahem, not that that’s relatable or anything). But they are supplemented with comics about having her comics published, where she finds her inspiration, and the moment she knew her relationship with Oliver was officially over.

Fart Party’s tone is direct and honest, and although it is humorous, there is a lot of heart behind the story. This is a collection that begs to be read cover to cover rather than in spurts to get the full impact — in one strip you will be laughing to tears and in the next, you’ll simply be in tears because you understand completely how awful what’s happening really is.

What I found I loved in Fart Party I thought worked better in her 2010 book, Drinking at the Movies. Although the artistic style remains the same (and still works), the story arc and character growth and development are top notch in this volume. It feels more like a straightforward autobiography.

Drinking at the Movies chronicles 25-to-26-year-old Julia’s decision to leave San Francisco — the city she loves — and try to make it by in the mean streets of New York City. Now single, she has a little more freedom to roam, and like all good artists, she believes NYC (and the struggle to survive there) is a natural progression. Even though she doesn’t know a soul there, she packs up and moves.

We watch as she bounces between low-paying part-time jobs that offer no fulfillment, apartments that come with a myriad of quirks, and a variety of interesting health and art related challenges. She struggles with learning about her older brother’s inability to control his drug addiction, a family member’s cancer, and how to cope with her father’s new life with her step mother in Arizona. Then there’s the challenge of discovering how a city so different from the place she lived the first 25 years of her life works.

For me, Julia was a fuller character in this volume, and perhaps it’s because this is more a story of her figuring who she is through herself rather than a story about her relationships with other people and how they make her who she is. She has a lot of challenges and doesn’t deal with things particularly well, but they’re honest. She struggles to find the time and drive to make her art amid the personal challenges — and in this book there are far more personal and family challenges than in Fart Party — and she maintains a sense of humor throughout her huge and minute struggles.

Because I don’t want to spoil the end of the book, I won’t explain why this book resonates so strongly with me. But Julia comes to a conclusion at the end about herself and about where she is in her life that is something I still wrestle with on a daily basis. It’s a moment I felt coming and one which I wanted to tell her to look out for, but because I still can’t come to terms with it in my own life, I kind of hoped for a bigger fall. I suppose that will be tackled in her next volume.

Maybe Wertz’s style can best be described as what would happen to Daria when she leaves home and tries to make it on her own. Her books encapsulate life in one’s 20s with spot on humor and unflinching rawness. They are sad and funny, full of hope and hopelessness, crudeness, rudeness, and downright heartfelt moments. I am eager to dive into her other work and look forward to the possibility alluded to in Drinking at the Movies that Fart Party may become a television show in the near future.

Audiosynced: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

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My library’s collection of audiobooks for teens and tweens was practically nonexistent before I started working there, and I’ve been building it up slowly over many months.  One title I elected to purchase was Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, a novel which really needs no introduction.  I somehow missed out on reading it when I was a teen and it was first published in 1999, and it’s been in the spotlight once again recently, so I figured I should give it a whirl, even though I tend to stay away from contemporary YA.
In short: Melinda Sordino went to a party the summer between 8th and 9th grade.  Things got out of hand and she called the police, who arrived and broke up the party.  As a result, Melinda starts high school as a social pariah.  Her outcast status and unmentioned events that occurred at the party drive Melinda to silence.  Her former friends have ditched her, her grades drop, and she finds herself unable to talk to anyone about what’s happened – or, in most cases, talk at all.
While I think the book itself is a good one, the audio production is flawed.  The narrator speaks in a flat, monotone voice and as a result, it’s difficult to really feel for Melinda, even though what she’s experienced is incredibly traumatic.  Inflection is rare and there’s almost no vocal change between the characters.  I can understand why this choice may have been made: Melinda seems almost shell-shocked by what’s happened to her, and her reaction is to shut down rather than lash out.  It’s still not an effective narrative device for an audiobook.
Another factor that may have contributed to my dislike of the experience is my prior knowledge: I knew the midpoint twist ahead of time and thus was always anticipating when the ball would drop.  There was no mystery or “aha” moment for me. 
I did appreciate how the novel was structured, with a lot of cheeky asides and clever turns of phrase by Melinda (the cheerleaders get a group discount on abortions; her report card indicates an F in socializing and a D- in lunch).  Much of the dialogue is structured differently as well (“Mom: blahblah.  Me: silence”), an effective device for a novel about a girl who refuses to speak.
I think my mistake was listening to this novel on audio instead of reading it in print.  I never really got the impression that Melinda was silent, since I was, in fact, hearing her voice the entire time.  Thus the impact of the whole book was lessened significantly.
I listened to Speak right on the heels of Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall, an excellent audio production of a different kind of story, but one whose intention was also to bring the reader into the head of the protagonist.  It was much more successful in this regard: I felt deeply for Sam, was completely invested in her situation, and believed wholeheartedly in her transformation.  In Speak, however, I felt more removed from Melinda than I think Halse Anderson intended.  I blame the audio production for this, since the whole point of Speak is that we don’t hear Melinda’s voice until the very end.
Speak is such an important book in the YA canon, and for good reason – it’s written well, is about an important topic, and still makes headlines more than ten years after its publication.  If you haven’t yet read it, it really should be added to your to-read list – but keep it off your to-listen-to one.

Cryer’s Cross by Lisa McMann

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Lisa McMann’s Cryer’s Cross begins with a bang: “Everything changes when Tiffany Quinn disappears.” The reader is immediately plunged into a poor, working-class, small town community where everyone knows each other and just twenty-four students make up Kendall Fletcher’s senior class. Suspicion is immediately raised when new student Jacian Obregon enters the community, as both police and students suspect him of a possible involvement in Tiffany’s death. But life goes on, and both students and adults get back to the business of living, of working the farms for their livelihood, and of returning to school in the desperate hope that they will someday escape their stifling hometown.
Kendall, who loves dance, yearns for a scholarship to Juilliard, while her best friend and kind-of-boyfriend Nico aspires to be a nurse. Yet even beyond finances and opportunity, life is always difficult for Kendall, who struggles with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, a condition that she keeps under wraps from everyone but her family members and Nico.
But everything changes when Nico starts acting oddly: spacing out and flaking on Kendall, not at all like his normal, supportive behavior. And then he disappears–just like Tiffany had done months earlier. As the town sends out its second search party and begins imposing strict curfew restrictions on the children and teenagers, Kendall begins an investigation of her own, finally focusing on the desk that both Tiffany and Nico had sat in in their classroom, the desk that now appears to display strange carvings. And that seems to whisper messages of persuasion and comfort when Kendall herself finally sits in the desk.
I read and devoured Lisa McMann’s Wake series last year, and thus was eagerly awaiting Cryer’s Cross. However, while McMann’s trademark build-up of tension was fully evidenced in this book, the plot itself fell flat for me.
McMann does a wonderful job of building suspense through her writing, and her choice of using the present tense to orient the reader right in the moment with Kendall was a fantastic decision. However, I’m not sure if it is because I am so used to reading first person narratives, but the use of third person slightly disoriented me, jarring me a bit and taking me out of the story when I wish I would have been sucked further in. Perhaps this was a calculated choice on McMann’s part, but it did not quite work for me.
Perhaps it was this disconnect that never quite let me into Kendall’s world fully, never fully let me connect with her as a three dimensional character. The book itself felt like a framework, waiting to be filled and shaded in more fully. Similarly, Kendall’s growing relationship with Jacian was rather predictable and sudden, and I just never quite felt the chemistry that I was meant to feel.
I also have mixed feelings at the treatment of Kendall’s Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the novel. While McMann does depict Kendall’s routines, compulsions, and the panic she feels when her urges are stifled, I still felt like the disorder was being given short shrift and that the author never quite showed the full effect that OCD had on Kendall’s life. The disorder’s ultimate contribution to the novel’s conclusion was a bit of a stretch, and didn’t quite match up to the way that Kendall had experienced OCD throughout the rest of Cryer’s Cross.
While the evil forces working in this book were ultimately explained, the build-up to this revelation was a tad bit confusing to me. Short, not even one page sections between chapters hinted at the supernatural forces threatening Cryer’s Cross, and although these sections made sense upon the book’s conclusion, I then had to go back to the beginning in order to fully make sense of the clues dropped earlier in the novel. I also found the concept of the desks unconvincing, as well. While I may be reading too much into the plot, but the supernatural twist was a stretch for me.
However, where McMann excels is at creating a fast-paced, page-turning narrative that really does give the reader the creeps. The eerie atmosphere permeates every word of Cryer’s Cross. I read this book in a night, eager to see exactly who kidnapped Nico and if Kendall would figure out how exactly the graffiti had a hand in the disappearances. It was also quite refreshing to see a character embrace parts of her mental illness at the end, realizing that all of her quirks and struggles aren’t world-ending, but actually aided her in parts of her life.
Despite some of the weaknesses, this would be a fantastic book for reluctant readers, as well as fans of the Wake series. Paranormal fans of Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush, Hush, Jeri Smith-Ready’s Shade, and Kelley Armstrong’s Darkest Powers series may also enjoy this.
Cryer’s Cross will be released on February 8, 2011. Review copy received from publisher.