STACKED

books

When I Was The Greatest by Jason Reynolds

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If you’re looking for urban fiction, you might want to give Jason Reynolds’s When I Was The Greatest a shot. Set in Bed Stuy, New York, this is the story of Ari, a good guy who is just trying to pull it all together and keep afloat in a neighborhood which isn’t always the easiest, the fairest, or the safest place to be.

But this isn’t really a story about feeling sorry for Ari. Ari is a pretty sweet guy — he absolutely adores his mother and his little sister Jazz. His dad, who is not living with them, has made a lot of mistakes in his life, but Ari understands the whys and hows of those mistakes and accepts his father despite them. Dad comes around quite a bit, so he’s not an entirely absent father.

Then there are Noodles and Needles. Not their real names, of course. They’re Ari’s neighbors, brothers, who are about as divergent in personality from one another, and from Ari, as possible. Noodles is older, and he’s probably Ari’s best friend. But he’s a troublemaker. Noodles engages in activities he shouldn’t and he does so without a whole lot of remorse. He’ll steal and he’ll act out and it’s not a big deal to him.

Needles gets his nickname from the needles he uses to knit. He learns how to knit from Ari’s mother, who decided to show Needles how to do it because her background in working with mentally ill taught her that sometimes having a means of refocusing attention can help a person with an illness.

Needles has tourette syndrome, and he regularly breaks out into tics. The knitting, as they all discover, is a means of helping calm Needles down during a tic. He loves the activity, as it keeps both his mind and his hands busy. Ari thinks it’s kind of neat that Needles is so taken with it, but Noodles is far less into it — it makes his brother look even weaker than he already is.

Reynolds’s novel is a character-driven one, as the bulk of the action in this story is far less important than the development of the boys. We learn pretty early on that Noodles acts out, and Ari suspects there’s a lot more going on within him as to why he chooses to behave the way he does. As we get to know the characters better after the big incident — which I’ll get to in a minute — we discover than Noodles’s behavior is related to the resentment he has toward Needles’s illness. Noodles believes that his brother’s tics are the reason that their father left them, and even though he loves Needles, he can’t help but associate his father’s absence with him. Of course, there is a lot more to it than that, but knowing Noodles’s world view, his beliefs and suspicions ring true and honest. He’s a teen in a rough part of town with no father and a brother who he loves and wants to love more, but he can’t make sense of the way all of the cards have fallen in his life.

What Ari wants to do is get all three of them into one of the biggest area parties for just one night. That party, which will be brimming with pretty girls, booze, and good beats, should help loosen them all up. And of course, it’ll make them look cool, since they’re all under 18. The bulk of the plot of When I Was The Greatest revolves around Ari, Noodles, and Needles getting new hair cuts and styles and flashier clothes in order to fit in to this party. But when they get to the party and Ari’s put into a corner he doesn’t know how to escape from, he fears that his reputation will forever be tainted. Except that’s not really the thing he has to be worried about.

Needles is in trouble. And Noodles will be in trouble, too.

How the three boys untangle themselves from the party and the fight that broke out is what changes their relationships with one another and for Ari, it changes his relationship with his father.

The setting in this story is rich, but what I think I appreciated about it the most was that while this was urban and while it indeed featured the elements you’d come to “expect” in an urban novel — violence, drinking and drugs, gangs, and so forth — that’s not at all what the book was about. This was a book featuring black teens who are just that: teens. They’re navigating relationships with one another and they’re figuring out their own selves in the world they’re a part of. Things aren’t perfect, but the story is never focused on that imperfection. It’s on the sidelines. The focus is instead on the characters. Reynolds does an excellent job of making Ari’s voice authentic and relatable. There are good adults in this book, too, and what makes some of them such good adults is that they’ve all made mistakes and not only do they own up to them, but they talk about how much they’ve learned from their past choices. Beyond Ari’s mother — who works two jobs to make ends meet — and Ari’s father — who does sketchy stuff in order to make a living — there is Ari’s boxing coach who becomes an incredible mentor for Ari not just in terms of the sport, but on a much grander scale.

When I Was The Greatest is a bit of a slower read, though, because it is more focused on character than it is on plot. Perhaps a means of describing this book would be to call it literary urban fiction. This book should have good appeal to teen readers, and in conjunction, there’s a lot that can be talked about. There is great service done even in the packaging of this book. The knitted gun on the cover is appealing and raises questions of what role it could have in the story (there’s not a knitted gun, but there is knitting and there is a gun incident that stands as the moment when Ari and his father really connect).

Readers who love Coe Booth’s work will find Reynolds’s novel to be a really good read alike. As long as language isn’t an issue — because one of the characters suffers from tics — this book would be okay to hand to younger teen readers eager for edgier realistic fiction.

When I Was The Greatest is available now. Review copy picked up from my library. 

And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard

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Emily Beam’s boyfriend killed himself in their school library. It wasn’t intentional, and it wasn’t his plan. He maybe didn’t have a plan and it was a panic reaction. Emily was there.

A funeral, followed by a trip to Boston to see her aunt, and Emily is then sent to a boarding school in Amherst. It’s the same school Emily Dickinson once attended, and immediately, Emily feels a connection to the poet, through her words and her spirit. She also connects, in a weird, disconnected kind of way, to her new roommate KT. She doesn’t tell KT why she’s new in the middle of the school year, and KT doesn’t press her. She listens, then she lies to the other girls in their hall about why Emily is as quiet, reserved, somewhat off-putting as she is. The lies don’t make Emily happy. At least they don’t when they happen (lies are hard to keep track of, as she says) but eventually, Emily appreciates the lies because they tell her something much deeper about KT.

And We Stay is Jenny Hubbard’s second YA novel. Like her first, it’s technically historical fiction, as this is set in 1995. It’s a setting that frustrated me the entire time I read the book and long after finishing. There was nothing in this book, save for a couple of easily changed pop cultural references, that necessitated the time period setting, and the only way readers are privy to that time setting period is because Emily dates the poems she writes and shares in the story. In every other way, this was as timeless as could be, and I think this was a huge disservice to an otherwise outstanding book.

So now that I got out what didn’t work in the novel, here’s what did: the writing. This is literary YA at its finest. It’s carefully and thoughtfully constructed, as Hubbard manages to weave Emily’s past right into her present. The story is told in third person, and as we learn more about Emily’s background and why she’s truly at this boarding school, we also see how she’s fitting into the present and making sense of her past at the same time. We get the pieces of the past alongside with her present, which is offered to us in her own poetry. That poetry, inspired by Dickinson but wholly Emily’s, comes between each chapter of narrative. The poems are reflections on what happened and they serve to make sense of Emily’s story not just for us as readers, but for Emily herself. But even on the paragraph-by-paragraph level, Hubbard succeeds in telling bits of the past right into the present moment. Emily, who is grieving significant loss, falls into moments of reflection and those moments come right in the present. There’s not info-dumping here. It’s elegant, careful, and it’s tight enough that it never overwhelms the story.

There’s more to this than Paul’s suicide, though. And yes, this will be spoiler territory up until the * in the review. Emily harbors a secret, and it’s one that she has to make the most sense of for herself: she was pregnant with Paul’s baby. This isn’t a secret baby though. Paul knew about it, and Emily shared the news with him the moment she found out (he, in fact, bought her the pregnancy test, which she took at a McDonald’s bathroom in a scene that was so stark and gutting to read that it is impossible not to completely get Emily in that moment). The two of them, being incredibly responsible, did talk about the what ifs. But ultimately, Emily made the choice that she would have an abortion, and it was a decision she made with the help of her parents. She delivered the news to Paul, and it wasn’t news he was happy to hear.

Paul wanted to propose marriage and have the baby. But Emily couldn’t do that — she notes it would have been unfair to her, and to Paul, and to the baby. There’s an incredible paragraph in the story before the big reveal where Emily notes that girls don’t get to have choices. That the holes in their lives are ones they have to learn to deal with. That in a situation where there’s a baby, a boy has two choices: propose marriage or leave. It’s not meant to belittle the emotional struggle of what a boy who gets a girl pregnant goes through, but rather, it’s meant to highlight that there’s a physical aspect for a girl in the situation. A literal piece of her body created and taken in some manner or other. So when Emily makes that pronouncement to Paul, the things between them get ugly. They can’t be a couple anymore, and with that breaking up — with that news — Paul panics and does what he does.

The trip to Boston after his funeral was the trip away from their small town, where Emily could safely have the abortion. The move to the boarding school, her way to make sense of what happened without the judging eyes of the town. Without feeling like a victim for making a choice for her own body and her own life. Without feeling responsible for what Paul did with his.

Emily’s time at the boarding school isn’t perfect. She’s not a perfect girl. She breaks rules, and she finds herself in trouble. She smokes, and she isn’t good with attending to all of the responsibilities expected of her. But that’s who she is. It’s part grief, and part of something bigger that makes her a whole and flawed person. Emily’s also incredible secretive about what happened to her, and even as she begins to understand her roommate KT better, she’s reluctant to be honest. Paul’s sister calls the dorm, and it’s hard enough for Emily to take the call, let alone then face her roommate afterward. It’s when Emily overhears KT defending Emily’s right to privacy and her own secrets, though, when Emily realizes KT is, perhaps, the best kind of friend she can ever ask for.

And that’s really where I think And We Stay shines. Many will find the relationship between Emily and Dickinson and Emily and her own writing to be powerful here, but I thought the way Hubbard developed an incredible, supportive, and caring friendship between KT and Emily was the knockout element. We don’t see a whole lot of it, nor should we. Emily’s protective of everything, and her grief often counteracts what’s going on in the world around her. But there’s no question that KT respects and honors, and when Emily finally opens up, KT doesn’t press her. She listens, she offers support, and she offers a bit of herself back to Emily in a way that’s not meant to say she’s had it worse but instead to say no one is perfect and that bad things happen and you can’t always make sense of those things.

There’s something really rewarding in reading a book where the girls aren’t all bad or nasty. They aren’t all perfect here — there are girls here who are snippy or thrive off gossip — but then there are girls here like KT who knows there’s much more to being a friend than that. It’s not just KT, though. There is an entire cast of well-rounded females in this story, all of whom have flaws and make mistakes, and many of whom become real mentors for Emily as she works through what she needs to work through. Of course, there’s the thread of Emily Dickinson, too, and the way that Dickinson’s contributions to not just literature but cultural history as a female weaves well into Emily’s own understanding of self. It’s by unraveling the complexities of being a girl that Emily understands that that is the entire nature of being a girl: it’s complex. That the holes in her life, be they physical or emotional or mental, are things she can patch up with her own strength and forward movement.

* And We Stay has no romance, aside from the reflection upon Emily’s relationship with Paul, and the story ends with girls empowering girls. It’s the kind of message that’s surprisingly rare in YA, and I think that’s what will resonate with readers who pick this up. This certainly could be labeled a feminist novel. The smart lines and messages about what it means to be a girl are hard to overlook — and they’re never preachy nor over the top. They’re skillfully discovered as Emily works through the events of the last couple months of her life.

Which is why I return again to my earlier criticism of the timeframe. There are a couple of very minor things that I could see a setting without a time stamp causing problems with, but they’re so minor, they could have been written around. In setting this book in 1995, I felt like what could have been an outstanding and powerful novel about the value of friendship, the challenges of grief, and the merit of feminist thinking and behaving was undercut. Nothing that happened between 1995 and today’s world has changed so significantly that this needed to be historical (and it’s historical — 1995 was almost 20 years ago, so even today’s 18 year olds weren’t yet born). It’s unfortunate that so much of the time I wanted to know why this choice in time because it really detracted from so much of the hugely positive aspects of the book. I suspect that other readers will wonder the same thing, and I think many will note, like I did, that the girl on the cover sure looks like a teen out of 2014, rather than one out of 1995 in terms of style.

Hubbard’s interweaving of Emily’s personal poetry between chapters works in the story, rather than detracts from it. I’ve read a number of books that have tried to incorporate the character’s own writing into the text and it’s a place I skip because it adds nothing (I think of things like Cath’s fan fiction in Fangirl). In And We Stay, I found myself eager to read Emily’s poetry. It was not only well-written and believable from the voice of a teen girl, but it added so much depth to what she’d been through. Her poetry also becomes a way that she lets KT in and it’s the way that KT really professes her friendship to Emily. She respects Emily’s talent and she gets it in a way no one else really can.

Pass And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard off to readers who like complex, literary novels, as well as those who love stories that may feature Emily Dickinson, young writers, or stories about grief and loss. Readers who liked Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things by Kathryn Burak will like this one, though there’s no mystery in Hubbard’s novel. Likewise, this is a book to hand to those who want a story about friendship, complex, compelling, and flawed female characters. It’s feminist and empowering, and it should offer loads of opportunities for readers to think about what it is to be a girl in the world today (even though it’s set in 1995 — which, yes, I am going to keep bringing up because I wish it weren’t). It’s a slower read, but it’s very rewarding. I can easily see this being the kind of book with great adult crossover appeal, too.

As for the title, it’s a line from a Dickinson poem that plays a huge part in Paul and Emily’s shared lives — and the life Emily has to work out in the after. It cements in the final pages of the story.

And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard is available now. Review copy received from the publisher. 

The Killing Woods by Lucy Christopher (& a giveaway!)

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Emily’s father came home after a trip out to the woods — somewhere he went regularly — and he had the body of a teen girl in his arms.

She was dead.

It doesn’t take long before police arrive and Emily’s father’s put into jail, accused of murdering the girl. He was the only one it could be, right? But Emily has more questions than answers, though she is positive her dad was in no way responsible for killing Ashlee. Sure, he might suffer PTSD and he might not always be in his rightest of minds, but her father isn’t a killer and no way will she let him be locked up for the crime he didn’t commit.

Welcome to Lucy Christopher’s The Killing Woods.

Damon is the boyfriend of the girl — Ashlee — who was found in the woods. He’s at peace with the idea that the person who killed Ashlee has been found, but he’s not at all at peace with how she died in the first place. Worse, he feels immense guilt because when she died, he was too drunk and high from their playing “the Game” to know up from down or even be aware of what was happening around him.

All he knows is that they went into the woods and she didn’t come out alive.

Christopher’s novel is told in alternating view points, both of which are full of desperation. Emily determined to clear her father’s name from the crime and Damon, determined to find out just what happened and how Ashlee died. Emily and Damon aren’t coming together on this; quite the opposite, in fact. School’s turning into a real hell hole from Emily, as people see what they believe her father did as somehow something she should have to suffer for further.

But even if the two of them aren’t coming together, Emily and Damon will come together, when they realize that the only way to put the entire story to bed is if they figure out the timeline of events. Who was really in the woods? What really happened to Ashlee? What role did Emily’s dad actually play in her death, if any at all? The novel is built upon the two of them investigating this independently but it’s when they have to piece it together collaboratively that the tensions and stakes rise even higher.

The woods in Christopher’s novel are exceptionally depicted. Part of why the woods matter so much is because of what they meant to Emily’s father. The woods contained an old bunker, and he liked to spend his time in there. Maybe “liked to spend his time there” is a bit misleading. Emily’s father felt somewhat comforted by the bunker’s presence. As readers who know anything about mental illness know, what helps a person doesn’t always make the most sense. In this case, it doesn’t seem clear why her father would be comforted by a bunker, but at the same time, it makes perfect sense.

Damon and his friends weren’t strangers to the woods themselves. In fact, they enjoyed the sprawling, somewhat odd, woods because of how it afforded them the chance to play “the Game.” The game was one that let them show off their masculinity. Their power. Helped them train to become tough guys and strong guys. It would be a nice means of getting them prepped were they ever to want to join the military because they’d be prepared physically — and mentally. And the day Ashlee died, she was playing the game with them as well. Except her version of the game differed from their version of the game. And the day Ashlee died, the game involved a little more partying from the boys than it did usually.

And the day Ashlee died, more secrets spilled out than ever before.

Perhaps Damon and Ashlee weren’t exclusive.

Perhaps Ashlee wasn’t a victim of Emily’s father’s hands.

Perhaps Ashlee was a victim of . . . herself.

Don’t want to be spoiled? Go ahead and skip down to the paragraph beginning with a “*.” Because from here on it, it’s all spoilers since there is a lot I want to talk about which can’t be tackled without spoiling the reveal.

As it turns out, Ashlee wasn’t killed by Emily’s father. Nor was she killed by something that Damon did. Throughout the book, we see both of their stories, and we worry about whether Damon’s being drunk and high when she died played a big role in what happened and we worry at times that Emily’s father really did commit the crime. Christopher is savvy in how she builds her evidence for both sides, and because both teens are well-voiced and their passion for answers strong, there are enough faults in logic in each of their tellings that it seems maybe what they hoped wasn’t true really is. For a long time, I bought more into Damon being responsible, though at times I saw where Emily’s father was responsible, too. This is great story crafting, and it compelled me to keep pushing forward to figure out who the responsible party really was. But better — I hoped neither of those possibilities was the actual explanation.

And neither were.

Even though we’re given a pretty big picture of the story through two sets of eyes and two perspectives, what we aren’t knowledgeable of is what ends up playing the biggest role in the resolution: we don’t know Ashlee. We know of her. We know she played the Game. We know she was Damon’s girlfriend. We know they were sexually active and involved and we know how much that mattered to Damon. But beyond that, we’re not keen on who she was or what her goals or desires were.

Until there’s a break and we learn that maybe Ashlee wasn’t entirely sympathetic. That maybe she harbored some really dark secrets. That maybe she wasn’t exactly as faithful to Damon as Damon was to her.

Because Ashlee liked attention and she liked the attention of boys who’d give it to her. Especially when those boys were playing their Game. Especially when she could get a boy alone and let him play her game.

Although it’s well-written and plays into a bigger, quite interesting, theme about emerging sexuality and experimentation with adulthood (drugs, drinking, the Game’s goals of building and bulking up), where Christopher’s story falls apart a bit for me is when we get the big Ashlee reveal. Her game was the choking game. She lived for the high of being choked and passing out. In many ways, it’s written to be equivalent in terms of a high as reaching orgasm. It was the height of pleasure and thrill for her, and that she could convince boys to do this to her, it was even more of a high to her. Ashlee’s death happened because the boy she convinced to choke her managed to hurt her more than intended — either by her or by him. Emily’s father comes into the picture when he tried to rescue her from the woods and resuscitate her. Because her father had been in the bunker and managed to figure out there was a girl he could try to save in a way that he’d failed to save when he was himself at war. This was his shot at redemption for past actions (again, handled exceptionally well knowing that this was his means of making sense of PTSD through his PTSD-suffering mind).

What seems like a logical explanation for what happened doesn’t entirely fit the voice of the story nor does it work for me in terms of the ages of the characters. The choking game is very juvenile: it’s the kind of thing teens experiment with in middle school and something that — at least in my experience — becomes a warning to kids very early on in their lives. I don’t like to self-insert when it comes to review writing and suggest my experience is universal, but I think most teens who are 16 or 17 or 18 are well beyond the point of finding the choking game the kind of rush that Ashlee might. And while Christopher does a good job of building it against the idea of sexuality, thus aging it up, I don’t necessarily buy it. I don’t want to say it felt convenient because it didn’t — the writing and storytelling allow this explanation to be right — I don’t buy it. I wonder how teens would feel about this explanation. Would it feel too juvenile to them? Or would it make sense to them and feel like it was written right at them?

* While I didn’t buy the explanation, I thought the strong writing, the compelling characters, and the pacing of this book make it a great read. It’s crafted smartly, and I loved how much want there was in this story. At no point was there a lull because every scene involved a character desperately seeking something: an answer, a resolution, a connection. There’s no saggy middle.

Like in her Stolen, Christopher gives us characters who have a lot going on internally and who struggle with their ethical and situational choices. She knows how to write moral ambiguity and that shines through. The characters grow and change their minds, and even when the explanation comes through, what resonates with The Killing Woods isn’t the “how it happened,” but instead, “how they grew.” Damon changes significantly throughout the book, and at the end, he realizes what it is he really needs to move forward. Emily discovers the depths of her father’s own illness throughout and it helps her in the end better connect with him in a way she was never able to before.

The Killing Woods will appeal to readers who loved Stolen and who love stories where nothing is quite as it seems. This is a character-driven thriller, and there’s a lot of respect paid to teenagers coming into their own. Emily and Damon aren’t necessarily characters you like as a reader, but they’re characters you come to care about because their stories are interesting and honest. Readers who loved Carrie Mesrobian’s Sex & Violence or Stephanie Kuehn’s Charm & Strange will find this an excellent next-read in terms of character and voice, as well as for their explorations of violence and sexuality and masculinity and more. Readers who liked Laurie Halse Anderson’s The Impossible Knife of Memory, especially the aspects regarding how Hayley’s father’s PTSD impacted her and her family will find this book to be complementary — there are some neat parallels between the two books. There’s more mystery to The Killing Woods, but it’s the characters who resonate (and make up for the aforementioned misstep in the “what really happened” aspect of the story).

Readers who like their realistic YA with a darker edge have been treated lately to a lot of great stuff, and Christopher’s book will further satisfy those readers.

Want your own copy of The Killing Woods? Thanks to Scholastic, I’ve got two copies to give away to a US reader. Fill out the form and I’ll pull two winners at the end of the month.

One Old, One New, and One Coming Soon: Three Recent Contemporary Realistic YA Reads

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Since I’ve finished my committee reads, I’ve had time to finally read for me. I could write lengthy reviews on each of these, but sometimes that feels like more pressure than enjoyment. And my idea of short is longer than most people’s anyway. In this set of reviews, I’ve got a book coming out today, a book that’s been out for a few years, and a book that’ll be out next month. They’re very different in topic, but all are contemporary/realistic YA.

The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson (out this week)

Like you’d expect of Anderson’s work, this is well-written, compelling, and tackles the issue of the impact of PTSD not only on the sufferer — who happens to be the father character — but also on those who are related to or have a relationship to the sufferer. This is emotionally-gripping, and I thought that Anderson really knocked it out of the park with Hayley’s snarky yet pained voice at the beginning of the book. That voice made the book for me, and it gave a real sense of the anguish she felt as her father’s primary caregiver. But when Hayley met Finn and began a relationship with him, her edge dulled significantly. In many ways, this makes perfect sense: she finally has someone she can talk to, relate to, and having that romance is an anchor for her. I found myself less invested in Hayley and more invested in her father’s well-being when it seemed like her voice shrunk.

Some of the plot points in the story were a little underexplained for me, as well. I needed to know more about the step-mother/not-a-step-mother who had been part of the reason Hayley and her father chose a life on the road in the first place. Was she an enemy? Was she to be trusted? Because by the end of the story, Hayley herself wasn’t entirely sure, but she was almost too willing to trust. Given the anger which Hayley had described their relationship, it seemed too easy and convenient, and I think part of that goes back to Hayley’s voice being tamped down.

The biggest let down, though, was the ending. It wrapped up far too quickly, far too easily, and the pacing in the final 15 pages of the book was way off. While the story itself spanned a few months at the beginning of the school year, once the Big Event happened at the end of the story (one that ultimately changes Hayley and her father’s relationship and both of their relationships with his PTSD), nearly a year blows by in just a few pages.

The Impossible Knife of Memory has a lot of tragedy in it, and at times, it felt a little bit too much. Hayley also abandons her best friend when she’s in need — her parents are going through a big divorce — and she does so not to help her father, but in favor of strengthening her relationship with Finn. It felt a little bit out of character for her, and given how much time speeds by in those last pages, I never got to know what happened with that plot thread nor if their relationship ever came back together. That said, it’s Laurie Halse Anderson, and it’s a solid contemporary YA novel. Readers who love her will pick this up and enjoy it, despite the weaknesses. Those who are new to Anderson, though, may want to start somewhere else. This is a nice addition to stories of PTSD, and interesting to me is that it publishes at the same time as Lucy Christopher’s The Killing Woods, which also tackles a father’s PTSD on his daughter. They’re nice companions to one another.

Making the Run by Heather Henson

I decided to pick this one up after reading through this list of YA recs and realizing I’d never even heard of it. It’s been out for a little over ten years, but topically, it’s as relevant as ever.

Lu’s mother died too young, and she’s been grieving that loss for a long time. It’s the end of her senior year and she cannot wait to leave her small town of Rainey, Kentucky, but when her older brother’s best friend Jay returns to town after his own leaving-after-high-school trip, Lu begins to fall for him. Add to that a best friend whose life is changed dramatically by one bad decision and then changed even further by an accident, Lu wonders if she’s destined to ever get out of Rainey or not.

Henson created a really angry girl in this story, and I thought that anger came through brilliantly. Jay says to her at one point that she either needs to use her anger or her anger will use her, and I felt that summed up the trajectory of Lu’s journey. The setting was palpable, and I appreciated that Henson allowed Lu to have hopes and dreams of getting out of Rainey that weren’t dependent upon her getting a scholarship and going to college. Lu’s only an okay student, and she doesn’t want to do that. She puts her passion into her photography, and while she doesn’t know if there’s a future in it, she’d rather spend time in her basement studio than hitting the books. It was refreshing to read a story where “the future” and “getting out” weren’t bound up entirely in the idea of college.

I didn’t feel like the rest of the characters were fleshed out quite enough, though. I never found what made Jay attractive, and while I felt bad for what happened to Lu’s best friend, I found all of the ancillary characters to be merely filler. None of them felt like they had lives of their own but were instead names. In context, it made sense since that’s all they were to Lu, but it made for a bit of a drag on the story.

This felt very real to me, in a way that I think a lot of current stories about middle class or lower middle class teens don’t. There’s not always a golden ticket out. Kids who want out have to consciously choose to do that sometimes, and I felt Lu’s struggles at the end about whether she could do it or not do it were authentic. I’d pass this book off to teens who love photography, who might not be the kinds of kids who are university-bound but still have dreams and aspirations, and it’s definitely the kind of story teens who live in similar towns and want nothing more than to get out will completely get.  I could see readers who dig gritty stories in the vein of Gail Gailes, Heidi Ayarbe, or maybe even Ellen Hopkins. It’s older, but it is definitely not dated.


Faking Normal by Courtney Stevens (available February 25)

The reviews are likening this to Anderson’s Speak or to Sarah Dessen, but I had a lot of issues with this tackling of rape What could have been a powerfully rendered story about secrets, lies, and the long-term effects of being a rape victim were instead marred by the fact this book was much more a whodunit than it was a fully-fleshed, rich, pained account of the after effects of what Alexi went through. Readers are lead astray more than once on who the criminal was here, and it was unnecessary because it removed the power and immediacy of what happened to Alexi away from her. Readers instead wonder if it was this football player, that football player, or someone else entirely. Alexi knows fully who it was, so this isn’t about her figuring it out.

More than that, it became far too obsessed with Kool Aid boy and Captain Lyric (who are the same person, which is a spoiler but not a spoiler than anyone who reads a few pages wouldn’t guess), and the story ends up allowing Alexi’s new romantic interest to steal her story of survival. He even takes the opportunity to tell her best friend what happened, despite the fact Alexi herself hadn’t felt comfortable doing so.

The story is set in the south, and it reads with that very southern feel in terms of some of what the characters say and how they act. There’s nothing wrong with it, and it in fact enriches a lot of the story and characters. I forgave some of the weirdness the teens had around Kool Aid boy, who liked to dye his hair with Kool Aid, as simply something that teens where they lived did. Perhaps it was weird to them a boy would want to color his hair in weird ways (I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and teens did it every day so it was never noteworthy — perhaps here it was).

However, there are a lot of awkward turns of phrase, and there are entire passages that needed some tighter editing. Again, I think a lot of this happened because this book didn’t know what it wanted to be. Was it meant to be an exploration of the way a survivor survives? If that’s the case, I never got to know what it was Alexi was really thinking or feeling. There was a lot of talking around how things were or talking through how things were, rather than talking about the things themselves. For example, Alexi took out her pain by scratching the back of her neck, but as readers, we’re never privy to how that felt or the things Alexi experienced prior to doing it or in the moments while it happened. She simply told us she did it and she worried about having blood found somewhere or being discovered with her hair pulled up. There’s not an immediacy to it.

What bothered me was that Alexi didn’t get her own story here — it kept being moved or displaced or handed over to someone else. And when she did get her own story, it didn’t always make sense. The first football player she went on a date with also tried to assault her and she left the situation very angry about it. After accepting an apology, she then later thought that he was Captain Lyric and then changed her mind about his intentions all along. I had a hard time suspending disbelief about the relationship dynamics between Alexi’s sister and fiance, especially at the end of the story. Moreover, I thought that when the reveal happened and we learn the identity of Alexi’s rapist. I had an even harder time buying that the criminal had never done anything in the prior ten years that would have roused suspicions where they should have been roused. It’s not that Alexi is being blamed here — far from it. It’s simply a matter of actual statistics.

I wanted more from this book and I needed less, too. Faking Normal had some charm to it, and I thought that Kool Aid boy was pretty interesting. His backstory was compelling, despite the fact I thought it was convenient how he and Alexi ended up spending so much time together. I thought Alexi herself really was pained and that what happened to her hurt her not only on a personal level but it hurt her because of the implications it would have for other people. She cared deeply about other people in a way that I think many readers will relate to — you can’t always stand up for yourself when you worry about the repercussions for other people not directly involved with something.

This is a worthwhile book because of what it tackles, but it’s not the best in the field. I think the comparisons to Anderson and Dessen are a little heady, and part of me wonders if those comparisons are based because of topic more than the actual exploration of story or the writing itself.

Review copies of The Impossible Knife of Memory and Faking Normal from the publisher. I purchased my copy of Making the Run. 

Roomies by Tara Altebrando and Sara Zarr

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When New Jersey girl Elizabeth gets her rooming assignment for her freshman year at Berkeley, she’s comping at the bit to get in touch with this girl named Lauren who lives in San Francisco. But when she reaches out, she’s met with short, clipped responses that raise Lauren’s worries about what this year of living together would be like. Thus begins the relationship between two soon-to-be roommates in Tara Altebrando and Sara Zarr’s Roomies. 

Little by little over the course of the summer between the end of high school and beginning at Berkeley, though, the girls exchange more and more with one another and find themselves revealing some of their deepest secrets with one another. How do you make the transition from high school to college? How do you — if you do at all — break up with friends? What about boyfriends? Do you take a chance on a guy who you know you’ll only be able to be with for a couple of months? The girls grapple with these challenging questions via email and while it all seems peachy, things take a turn south when Elizabeth reveals one of the biggest reasons she wants to go to Berkeley: the long lost hope she’ll be able to reconnect with her gay father, who left her and her mother when she was seven years old.

Elizabeth knows where her dad works, and when she slips that into an email to Lauren, Lauren does a little sleuthing — unintentionally — and while she hoped to keep it a secret from Elizabeth (who is under the belief her father can’t see her before college starts since he has to vacation in Italy), Lauren spills the beans. And Elizabeth is not happy. How dare a girl she doesn’t even know meddle in her affairs? 

This book is on the lighter side, but it explores SO much good stuff. It asks the hard questions about transitions and moving, as well as tough questions about what relationships are and how relationships develop. Both girls have really memorable voices and bring great back stories with them to their budding roommate relationship/friendship, and Zarr (who writes as Lauren) and Altebrando (who writes as Elizabeth) deliver incredibly authentic girls who experience the entire range of what anticipation feels like and looks like. There is a nice story about sexuality here, too, as well as budding romances for both girls — though that never takes a higher place in the story than THEIR friendship. Elizabeth gets to enjoy losing her virginity and she divulges that to Lauren in a very real, very positive manner that leaves Elizabeth not feeling like she’s missing out on something but that, instead, she gets to be there for her friend for HER big, life-changing-to-her moment. 

There’s also a well-drawn pair of stories about family here. Lauren comes from a massive family with little privacy, whereas Elizabeth comes from a family of just her and her mother where privacy is achieved through secrecy and deceit. Thus why both act and react as they do. 

Many books that are worked through email feel like they’re trying too hard, but it never felt that way here. It’s very authentic — and the way that Elizabeth and Lauren learn to trust and care for one another comes through these emails. Little by little they test the waters of how much they can share and how much they can pry, and they both put themselves out there as givers and takers. It’s one of — if not the — most fascinating and true means of how friendships happen and grow. I love that Zarr and Altebrando weren’t afraid to show that sometimes the most VALUABLE relationships are those which are the ones you get to create this way. And more than that, the way you nurture it is not any different than those you have in your every day, in person interactions. 

Hand Altebrando and Zarr’s Roomies off to readers eager for that next chapter in their lives, as well as those who love a good story about friendship or family. I see this being a great book for graduation presents for girls who will be heading off to college after high school, but I also see it as the kind of book for any reader worries about changes in his or her life, period. This is a book about transitions and about the anticipation therein, which transcends the roommate situation. 

Review copy received from the publisher. Roomies is available tomorrow.