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The Lying Game by Sara Shepard

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Seventeen year old Emma Paxton has bounced in and out of foster homes since she was four years old, when her mother left her at a friend’s house for a play date, never to return again. After being framed by her leering, skeevy foster brother for petty theft and facing an uncertain future, Emma is shocked to discover a video uploaded online that shows a blindfolded girl being strangled and falling unconscious–a girl who looks exactly like Emma. After making connection with this doppleganger, Sutton Mercer, on Facebook and being invited to meet her in Arizona, Emma immediately sets out, thrilled at the thought of finding a family once again. However, what she soon finds is not a pair of welcoming arms, but a missing Sutton. Their resemblance is so remarkable that Sutton’s friends and family, and even the police, not only mistake Emma for Sutton, but don’t believe Emma when she tries to explain the mistake. And while Sutton’s luxurious life may be a far cry from the foster child lifestyle that Emma has lived, Emma soon finds that all is not as it seems in this tony Arizona town. Mysterious notes show up, claiming that Sutton is dead and that Emma must play along—or else. Sutton’s friends are all involved in something called ‘The Lying Game,’ a mean-spirited prank war that is escalating fast. And Emma can’t quite figure out who is responsible for her sister’s death. No one, friend or family, can be eliminated.

I admit, I have read all of the Pretty Little Liars books, and I started reading them even before the show started. They’re not the best written books in the world; they’re cheesy, name drop brands like crazy, and feature pretty damn irredeemable characters. Yet for some reason, I just couldn’t stop reading. The Lying Game is the same way, although just a bit worse, as I pondered just putting the book down about 75 pages in. But I soldiered on, strangely compelled by the characters and by Shepard’s far-fetched plot.
One of my main problems with this book was the point of view, a mixture of first-person AND third-person. While The Lying Game basically follows the story of Emma, told in omniscient third-person, it is also framed through the first-person narration of Sutton, who, in death, is strangely connected to her sister, forced to follow her around as a ghost, observing Emma while unable to participate in anything that is happening. In fact, Sutton has a type of amnesia, is unaware of how she died, and begins regaining her memory in flashes throughout the book. While this ignorance of her past may slightly humanize Sutton, who is revealed to be a pretty horrible person, the presence of the two shifting points of view is just plain distracting.
Perhaps this is just a feature of Sara Shepard’s quick paced, interaction-filled, get-to-the-next-twist writing style, but I honestly didn’t feel like there was much character development in this novel. We know that Emma’s an orphan and that she’s the stereotypical ‘good twin.’ But other than that, I really didn’t feel much depth.
However, Shepard does excel at writing a page-turning plot filled with multiple twists, as evidenced in her Pretty Little Liars series. This was a quite a fast read, and those in the mood for a quick novel that will keep you guessing will most likely not be disappointed with this one. I’d hand this off to Shepard’s existing fans, along with fans of Gossip Girl and Kate Brian.

Across the Universe by Beth Revis

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Beth Revis’ debut, Across the Universe, is a book after my own heart – a science fiction involving cryogenically frozen people aboard a ship bound for a new planet, combined with a spine-tingling mystery?  Yes please.  I really hate reading books on a screen, so when I tell you that I read the entire first chapter online (available here), you know that the premise has to be pretty darn awesome.
And it is.  The first chapter opens with seventeen-year-old Amy being frozen alongside her parents in preparation for a 300-year trip across space to a new planet.  Her mother works with DNA and her father is a military strategist, so they’re both vital to the mission.  Amy is going along simply because she’s their daughter, but they’re not forcing her to – it’s her choice.  She’s leaving behind her entire life to take this tremendous risk, and it’s tearing at her.
I was so impressed with the first chapter that I knew I had to read the whole thing.  Particularly impressive is Revis’ description of the freezing process.  Amy watches her parents being frozen, first her mother and then her father, and it is neither comfortable nor pretty.  When Amy herself steps into the coffin-like container to undergo the same process, the reader is right there with her, feeling her physical and emotional pain and dreading what will happen next – will she really lapse into dreamless sleep, as she’s been told, or will she be stuck in a 300 year long nightmare?
Unfortunately, Amy’s sleep ends too soon – she’s woken up fifty years before the spaceship is due to land on the new planet, by someone unknown who supposedly wants to kill her.  Amy survives, but other people who are prematurely defrosted aren’t so lucky.  Alongside a few friends she makes on the ship, Amy tries to figure out who the killer is before he or she goes after her parents next.
This is made difficult by the fact that the society on the ship (those people who are descended from the original people who signed up to staff it and prepare for colonization of the new planet) is not a friendly one.  They’ve all interbred over generations so they all look alike with dark hair, eyes, and skin.  Amy has pale skin and bright red hair, so she sticks out.  What’s more, a terrible plague hit the ship many years ago, and since then the society has been restructured.  Most people don’t know about the frozen cargo at all, and they all resemble mindless drones, going about their work with no real questions or defiance of the authority, a man called Eldest. 
Across the Universe has a tremendous amount of potential, but it’s unfortunately pretty uneven.  The first chapter – used in promotions and marketing – is polished and well-written.  We get a great view into Amy’s mind while still being entertained and wanting to turn the pages as quickly as possible.  After that first chapter, however, the perspective shifts for a time to the leader-in-training on the ship, named Elder.  We get a little insight into his character throughout the story, but not nearly enough to really know him, and not enough to believe the romance that blossoms between him and Amy.  To me, the romance was completely unnecessary and the book would have been stronger without it.
Revis relies a lot on short, choppy sentences and paragraphs for extra emphasis.  While this works in moderation, it’s overused here.  When a character we care about dies, it’s hard to really feel its impact since it happens in a single sentence.  Similarly, the rapid back-and-forth shift in perspectives from Amy and Elder don’t allow the reader to ever really become fully immersed in either person’s experience.  While the book is 400 pages long, that’s sort of misleading – the text is large and there’s a lot of white space.  There’s plenty of room for a bit more development, particularly character-wise.
My other main complaint has to do with unanswered questions.  There’s one particular question broached in Chapter 1 that is never resolved – it’s never even alluded to in the rest of the book.  I don’t expect books like these to answer all of my questions, but to me, this seems like an unintentional loose end – the ball dropped by the author.  I know now that Across the Universe is meant to be the first in a trilogy, but you’d never know it from just reading it.  Perhaps some sort of reflection on Amy’s part near the end – What’s next for me? What about that thing in Chapter 1 that I was so worried about but didn’t give a second thought to in the rest of the book? – would have satisfied me. 
Across the Universe, which publishes January 11, is a good choice for people who prefer their science fiction without a lot of science (like me).  If the author tells me that Amy can’t be refrozen due to cellular degeneration, that’s a good enough explanation for me.  It’s also a good choice for people who value a fast-paced plot above all – over character, setting, theme, and so on.  I do believe the plot is a good one, I just wish I could have had the rest, too.
Galley received from the publisher.

The Things a Brother Knows by Dana Reinhardt

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While most people would be thrilled when their brother comes back from war, Levi isn’t. He’s still lost in his place as at home and at school, unsure, too, of where he and Boaz even stand as brothers. When Boaz makes it home, things grow only worse for each of them — Boaz retreats to his room for weeks, unable to interact with even his own family members, and Levi devises several ways to find out what’s going on with his brother.

When he returns, Levi’s role changes from living for himself (and figuring himself out) to uncovering what happened to his now-silent brother. Did he enlist because of a bad relationship? Fear of not succeeding in college? Levi’s few chances at the inner workings of his brother reveal little other than a bunch of maps and addresses and the knowledge that Boaz hates riding in vehicles. Oh, and he plans on walking from their home in Massachusetts to Washington D.C. for some march.

You better believe Levi plans on following.

The Things a Brother Knows is the kind of book you can’t know too much about going into. From the cover and flap copy alone, it’s pretty apparent this is a story about war and relationships. But what Reinhardt achieves in this is a moving story about the costs and effects of war on the individual — both that on the good side and the enemy.

Levi is a well-written male in this story: he’s realistic, authentic, and true to himself even amid the changing family dynamic. He’d become somewhat accustomed to being the only child, primarily because of Boaz’s radical decision to enlist. Boaz had before him a bright future of ivy league colleges and a girl who would love him deeply. Why would he give it all up to go fight in a country no one could locate on a map? I find believable male main characters difficult to achieve, but Reinhardt does Levi extremely well.

The book is a slower paced book, but by no means is it necessarily a quiet book. As a reader you are immediately sucked in, but like Levi, you have to work through the muddled mess of relationships and feelings and the foreignness of what it’s like to come back from war. This makes reading slow essential; the clues Levi picks up about his brother are the same ones the reader can discover and put together, sometimes quicker than Levi himself does.

What was most powerful for me in this book was its lack of stance on the issue of war. While Things a Brother Knows is a war story, it’s not a moral story about war. Reinhardt doesn’t tell me whether I should be for or against it nor does she inform me who was right or wrong in the war (which remains unnamed and unplaced). Instead, she tells of one person’s internal struggle with decision making during the war, and the internal struggles those who don’t choose to serve make. For me, this book was intensely personal: one of my best friends — post college, post job, post marriage — chose to pursue enlistment and he deploys early next year. Many of us have wondered why, and this book may have answered it for me.

This is a layered book, one that begs for rereads. As soon as I finished, I wanted to return immediately to the beginning and read it again with another perspective. The first read was about Boaz. On a second read, I think I’d want to learn more about Levi.

Be prepared to be rattled at the end of this one. The last few chapters are emotionally wrenching and are precisely why this is anything but a quiet book.

This is my second Reinhardt book, and even though I wasn’t a huge fan of a prior title of hers I read, I’m glad to have picked this one up and purchased it at the Anderson’s YA Conference. This is a book I plan on talking to my kids because this is what their lives are and this is precisely what so many of them will experience in one way or another, either from the position of Boaz or that of Levi. It’s an essential read and one worthy of discussing. There is no question on intended audience here.

Guest Post: The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

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Journalist and blogger Matthew Jackson joins us a second time for a guest review of The Sherlockian, a debut adult mystery/thriller from Graham Moore which went on sale today.  Jackson blogs about books, movies, and other nerdery at www.awalrusdarkly.blogspot.com. 
 Upon Arthur Conan Doyle’s death in 1930, his personal effects and papers were scattered among family members, universities and other scholarly organizations. Doyle was a writer in the most literal, compulsive sense, documenting the details of his life in a series of leather bound diaries. After his death, one of these diaries, documenting the latter portion of 1900, went missing. Sherlockians (scholars who study, often fanatically, the life and times of the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes, and his illustrious creator) of the highest caliber have searched for the diary, considered the Holy Grail of Sherlock Holmes studies, for eight decades without success.

Graham Moore uses this last mystery of one of the great mystery writers as the catalyst for his debut novel, The Sherlockian. In Moore’s highly fictionalized version of events, based loosely on the strange death of noted Sherlockian Richard Lancelyn Green, a noted Doyle scholar claims to have found the diary and promises to debut it to the world at the annual convention of the Baker Street Irregulars, the world’s largest Sherlock Holmes club. On the eve of this highly-anticipated lecture, the scholar turns up dead in his hotel room, and the diary is nowhere to be found. Newly-initiated Irregular Harold White and freelance reporter Sarah Lindsay are asked by a member of the Doyle family to get to the bottom of the mystery.

In between Harold and Sarah’s Da Vinci Code-like quest for the grail of Doyle studies, Moore tells the tale of what happened to Arthur Conan Doyle himself in the months the diary is said to document. After a mysterious package appears on his desk, Doyle, with the aid of his friend Bram Stoker (author of Dracula), sets out to solve the mystery of a trio of murdered suffragettes that takes him into the seedier sections of Victorian London.

The Sherlockian flits back and forth between these two stories, attempting to present two simultaneously satisfying mysteries while feeding out a number of scholarly nuggets on Sherlock Holmes, Victorian London, The Baker Street Irregulars and Doyle himself.

It sounds like a cool concept, is a cool concept, especially if you’re a fan of The Great Detective, but despite having a killer (pun intended) hook, a dynamic setting and the weight of one of mystery literature’s great icons in its corner, The Sherlockian falls flat.

Good thrillers, especially the kind that attempt to juggle two storylines, have to be fast. They have to be lightning fast, so hot in your hands that you can’t think about sleep, even when it’s 4 a.m. The Sherlockian’s premise achieves that, but its pacing does not. Once the initial fire of the early chapters wears off, it’s a stiff trudge to the next plot milestone, and when you get there the result is often underwhelming. Moore’s overuse of detail when his characters begin to lecture on Holmes, Doyle, Victorian London and the like, is part of the problem, but it’s not the only problem. Neither mystery is tight, or threatening, or even particularly complex. Both plot lines seem to meander along from clue to clue, often clumsily hitting on what are supposed to be huge revelations, but turn out to be either red herrings of flat-out disappointments.

Even the most flawed of plot-heavy fiction can be saved by the addition of a few intriguing, amusing or even disgusting characters, but everyone in The Sherlockian, even the towering figure of Arthur Conan Doyle, seems like a grayscale sketch of a person rather than anything real. Harold is little more than a talking encyclopedia most of the time, and the intended sexual tension between him and Sarah ends up as little more than weak banter. Every chapter seems to bring a new predictable archetype, no one seems to have any real face, and that means that the things they’re after mean even less as the book wears on.

Moore is an able enough writer, even a good writer, but The Sherlockian is a debut novel that reeks of timidity and second guessing. There are moments – a discussion between Doyle and Stoker on the changing world in front of them comes to mind – that soar with a kind of insight that makes your hands tighten around the book, but they are few and far between. The rest is a mass of almost-good, shrug-worthy storytelling of the kind that almost makes you angry; angry that you can see the potential, but not the follow-through.

Galley obtained at BEA.

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

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“I’ve left some clues for you.
If you want them, turn the page.
If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please.”

So begins the latest whirlwind romance from the New York Times bestselling authors of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Lily has left a red notebook full of challenges on a favorite bookstore shelf, waiting for just the right guy to come along and accept its dares. But is Dash that right guy? Or are Dash and Lily only destined to trade dares, dreams, and desires in the notebook they pass back and forth at locations across New York? Could their in-person selves possibly connect as well as their notebook versions? Or will the be a comic mismatch of disastrous proportions? (Summary from Goodreads)

It’s a few days before Christmas, and Dash, a holiday Scrooge who hates the commercialism that strikes New York City every December, has finagled a solo Christmas for himself, telling each of his divorced parents that he is with the other parent. But one day at the Strand, his favorite bookstore in New York (which I am now DYING to visit–18 MILES of books? Yes, please), Dash stumbles upon a red Moleskin notebook, wedged near a copy of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and filled with instructions that send him throughout the bookstore, following obscure clues. After completing this scavenger hunt, he makes the pivotal choice to send the red notebook back on to its writer, Lily–slightly quirky, slightly lonely, slightly overprotected, and wholly endearing–, which sets into play a unique pen pal correspondence/scavenger hunt/mystery.

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares is the perfect book to read around the holiday season, full of New York landmarks (FAO Schwartz, seeing Santa at Macy’s, a holiday lights display) and holiday cheer. Yet Cohn and Levithan spice up these happenings to hilarious effect. While at Macy’s for a dare, Dash doesn’t just visit Santa–he must push past an age-enforcing Elf and actually feel up Santa in order to receive his next clue. A snowball fight in the park with a group of kids leads to Dash accidentally pelting a boy in the face and having his face splashed upon a wanted poster and being pursued by a vindictive mommy brigade. Lily’s fashion statement of choice is a pair of her Great-Aunt’s old majorette boots, complete with tassels.

While I am a fan of David Levithan, I haven’t read any of Cohn and Levithan’s joint works before, although I thoroughly enjoyed the movie version of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. The characters speak in an idealized manner, with a wit and vocabulary that normal high school students generally don’t use in daily life. However, this novel, filled with the twinkling lights, heightened energy, and first love of the Christmas season, almost seems to exist in a fantasy world of its own, lending a bit more believability to the speech habits of its young protagonists. Dash and Lily are both fully realized characters, with fears, doubts, and flaws, and their eventual realization that they just have to try this out and move forward into a life of their own making, together, is emotional and touching. The supporting characters, most notably Lily’s eccentric Great-Aunt and Lily’s brother, are also well-fleshed out, and Lily’s brother provides a lovely portrayal of a gay teenager in the throes of first love.

However, while there is much to recommend this book, it just didn’t strike me as one of my favorites, as something that would stick with me. It was, simply, a holiday treat–full of flavor and charm, but gone all too soon.

Also, let me just say that this is perhaps one of the coziest, most charming covers that I have ever seen. I would hands this to fans of John Green and Maureen Johnson.