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Audio Review: A Matter of Days by Amber Kizer

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The BluStar pandemic has killed most of the Earth’s population. Nadia and her little brother Rabbit (nickname for Robert) managed to survive thanks to an injection given to them by their Uncle Bean, who somehow knew what was going to happen and had a vaccine available. Their mother, though, never got the shot, and after Nadia and Rabbit watch her die, they pack up the family’s Jeep and head out east, intending to travel to their Pappy’s home, where Uncle Bean mentioned he’d meet them when he saw them last.

They know it’s not going to be an easy trip, but their father – a military man who died a few years ago – taught them how to “be the cockroach” and “survive the effects.” They know how to shoot a gun, how to forage for food and supplies, how to survive without electricity. Rabbit actually read up on survival guides while Nadia was taking care of their dying mother, so he neatly avoids embodying the annoying younger sibling trope. He’s a kid, sure, but he’s also helpful.

The story is very episodic: Nadia and Rabbit travel for a bit, make a stop, run into some trouble (with wildlife, unsavory people, or the environment), survive it, then move on. They’re alone for much of the story, though they do pick up some strays along the way (a dog, a bird, a teenage boy, and a little girl).

The narration, done by Alex McKenna, is a failure. She voices Rabbit like a 60-year-old with a lifetime smoking habit. Nadia doesn’t fare much better, but the problem with her voice (which is the primary one, since this is a first-person story) is where McKenna chooses to place emphasis. More often than not, she’ll overemphasize entire sentences that should have been read neutrally or matter-of-fact. When sentences should be emphasized, the words she chooses to emphasize are strange and don’t carry the meaning she intends. It often made me wrinkle my brow in confusion and brought me out of the story.

Still, the book wasn’t a complete loss. Despite its episodic nature, I found myself fairly engaged, in a “If I miss a bit of this because I’m not fully focused on it, it’s not a big deal” way (great for driving!). There’s no complicated overarching storyline that the listener needs to puzzle out – just a girl and a boy traveling across the country, meeting and overcoming a series of obstacles.

In a way, this reads like a younger version of Ashfall, except with a pandemic instead of a supervolcano. But where Ashfall was frequently harrowing, A Matter of Days is not nearly so dark or filled with tension. There is certainly danger, but it’s not felt very strongly. Most of the story involves the fairly mundane aspects of survival: finding food and fuel, coping with poor hygiene, navigating roads full of stalled vehicles. For the most part, I thought it was nice to read a book without having to constantly worry if a beloved character would be violently murdered (or eaten).

That’s not to say there is no threat of violence. There is, but much of it occurred in the past. Nadia and Rabbit stumble upon a lot of dead bodies, and not all from BluStar. Nadia does have occasion to use her gun, and they run into some people who wish them harm. Where other end-of-the-world survival stories tend to emphasize the violence, though, A Matter of Days tries instead to emphasize the kids’ loss and the other non-violent horrors. Nadia and Rabbit are now orphans, and they’re not even sure Pappy and Uncle Bean will still be alive when they reach their destination. There’s a genuinely heartbreaking moment during a flashback as Nadia cares for her mother on her deathbed. There’s also a lovely moment when Nadia is hiding from a group of violent raiders in a room with a decomposing body and she mentions she tries to swallow her own vomit. Early on in the book, Nadia and Rabbit rescue a dog and have to pick glass out of its paws. There’s not a lot of blood, but there are a lot of moments like these.

This will probably appeal to fans of Ashfall, though hardcore post-apocalyptic readers will likely find it a bit tame for their tastes. (And I’d recommend picking it up in print.) If you’d like to listen to a bit of the book and see if you agree with me about the narration, Random House has an excerpt on their website.

Finished copy received from the publisher. A Matter of Days is available now.

To Be Perfectly Honest by Sonya Sones

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I’ve known of Sonya Sones since I began working in a library, but I never actually picked up one of her books. She’s been perennially popular, and I thought it about time to see just why. To Be Perfectly Honest was an excellent introduction and I am looking forward to becoming familiar with her back list sooner, rather than later.

As fair warning, this review is pretty spoiler heavy. So if you don’t want to know what makes this book the way it is, come back after you’ve read it for yourself. 

Colette’s mother is a movie star, and this summer, she’s shuffling Colette and her little brother away from their home and the promise summer in Paris. They’re heading instead to a small town in California where she’s filming her next movie. Colette’s beyond bummed about this. But when she meets Connor, she starts to sing a little bit of a different tune. Maybe it won’t be so bad when there’s a cute boy around.

Something to know about Colette: she’s a liar. She lies about everything. And it’s not that she’s an unreliable narrator. She’s completely reliable — if you accept she’s a liar. 

Colette and Connor are in love or so it feels. And when Colette tells her mother she needs alone time with Connor, away from her brother, her mother grants this wish to her. She even leaves a box of condoms, in order for them to be truly safe. 

But Colette’s not ready for that quite yet. Even though she’s told Connor she’s 18 (she’s not — she’s 15) and that she’s sexually-experienced (she’s not — she’s a virgin), when the time comes for them to take their relationship somewhere more physical, she takes a stand and says no.

That’s when Connor gets back at her for her lies. 

He wants to get with Colette so badly, he tells her he has cancer. He goes as far as to make himself look sick — a slick little trick Colette herself has tried in order to get attention. As a reader, I had a suspicion he was lying about this. Part of why my suspicions were raised was because up until this point in the story, I had been on board. I couldn’t wrap my head around Sones taking such an easy way out of the story. No way would this go down the road of making the reader and Colette feel bad for Connor now because he’s got cancer. I had much more trust in the story than that, and I am so glad I did. 

But Colette is none the wiser, nor would she be. He’s convincing! His head is bald. He looks sick.

It’s all a rouse so he can get her to sleep with him. And yes, it’s a big charade for a sexual encounter, but as he tells her later, he’s gone further. It was a conquest for him. To make it more disturbing, he’s not 18 like he claims. He’s 21.

Since no sex goes down — Colette figures him and his lies out before it could happen — there’s no rape, no charges. 

But now she wants to get back and get even.

Except, Colette comes around before the big “gotcha” happens. 

The turnaround in Colette is believable and I was appreciative of it. I didn’t love her as a character but that’s why I was compelled by her. In fact, when she was prepared to take Connor for a ride herself, I was really invested. Would she REALLY go through with her plans or was this a rouse on us, as readers?

In the end, we don’t really know. Perhaps that’s what made the book successful for me as a reader, the never knowing whether what was going on was truth or if Colette was playing a big game upon us as readers. 

I felt the end of this book was almost a cheap way out of the story. But I had to remember the main character is 15 — she’d just turned 16 at that point — and so it was less of a cheap way out and more of a realistic way out of HER story. I believe her and it, even if it wasn’t my favorite ending. 

Sones masters verse novels. This is how verse works. It plays with the story, telling readers enough while leaving just the right amount UNSAID to make the reader wonder where and how Colette is leading us on. Her voice is spot on, and I thought the relationship she had with her learning-disabled younger brother was sweet and authentic. The wrap up with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend was a little schmaltzy for me, but it was believable in context of the story. 

To Be Perfectly Honest is for YA readers who like challenging characters, who like verse novels, and who are good with “tough” topics like sex, drugs, and drinking in their books. Even though Colette is on the younger side, this is one to hand to younger teen readers only if they’re ready and like those topics tackled in their books (and many do!). I wouldn’t put this on the level of Ellen Hopkins in terms of content, but I’d say it’s a stepping stone to readers who will go to Hopkins down the road. 

It’s possible I’ll talk about this in another post about repackaged book covers, but I wanted to say I love what they’ve done to update Sones’s books to appeal to today’s teens. They’ve gone through a few transformations, but these are by far my favorite:

They’re fresh and feel so contemporary. I love when books that are popular in the library, like these, do get new looks a few years after their publication because when it’s time to replace the battered or missing copies, they really do look new.

To Be Perfectly Honest is available today. Review copy received from the publisher.

Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang

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Gene Luen Yang is a big name in the graphic novel scene, and deservedly so. I really liked his Printz-winning book American Born Chinese, but Boxers & Saints – a new duology about the Boxer Rebellion told from two perspectives – tops it.

Boxers tells the story of the Boxer Rebellion from the point of view of a Chinese boy named Little Bao. Since he was a little boy, he’s seen the Westerners invade his town and his country with their strange language and their strange religion. The book opens with a Christian priest smashing a statue of one of the revered Chinese gods, declaring it a false idol. The foreigners humiliate his father, run roughshod over Chinese culture, and there are whispers that the foreign leaders plan to carve up China like they have so much of the rest of the world.

Anti-Western sentiment is high, and it’s no surprise that Little Bao – now not so little – chooses to follow his kung fu teacher in fighting against Western influence. When his teacher is executed for an act of (justified, to Little Bao) aggression against Westerners, his resolve only strengthens. Over time, he and his village friends recruit an army of men who intend to march to Peking and rid China of the foreign and Christian influence. It’s fairly simple for them to dispose of the foreigners; it’s less easy when it comes to the “secondary devils,” the Chinese people who have converted to Christianity. Bao’s story is harrowing in its violence and heartbreak. He commits terrible acts of violence, but such is the power of Yang’s story that it’s difficult to condemn him completely.

Saints is less successful, but only marginally so. Four-Girl is so insignificant to her family that they didn’t even give her a proper name, instead choosing to call her by her place in the birth order. She goes her whole childhood feeling unwanted, and eventually decides to embrace her “devil” side. If she can’t be good, she’ll be exactly the opposite. She finds her way to Christianity in this vein, but she eventually embraces it as her own faith when she chooses a name, Vibiana, therefore making her one of the “secondary devils” Bao despises so much.

I know the Chinese converts had myriad reasons for their conversion, and some were probably not motivated completely by religious fervor, but I never really bought into Vibiana’s complete capitulation to her new religion. It seemed a bit too abrupt to me. There wasn’t quite enough transition from her joining the religion to spite her family to her actual belief in it, and as a consequence, I never really felt that her religious conviction was so strong that she would die for it (highlight to read the spoiler).

Despite this complaint, her story is still heart-wrenching, made even more so by the fact that I knew about her through Bao’s eyes going into it. The format of the duology works exceptionally well – the two stories complement each other, clearly communicating different, valid perspectives while also endorsing neither completely. This could have been a quite didactic way to tell the story (remember kids, you have to look at everything from both sides!), but it never felt that way. It’s a story about two people caught up in something bigger than themselves and what they choose to do about it.

As is normal for Yang, there’s a bit of magic in each story, though it’s never quite clear if the magic is real or inside the people’s heads (as is also normal for Yang). Bao and his comrades transform into Chinese gods when they fight, making them almost invincible (at least in their minds), and Vibiana sees visions of Joan of Arc. Each of these elements provide a longer historical context for the story, beyond just the years of the Boxer Rebellion. They also provide a bit more cultural context, essential in a book for English-speakers who probably don’t know much about China.

This is perhaps the best example I know of what the graphic novel format can do. It’s written in English, but when the Westerners speak, their language is portrayed in an incomprehensible scrawl that slightly resembles Chinese characters, with the translation below. The art is fantastic, with colors by Lark Pien, who chose to utilize all colors of the rainbow for Boxers and went with mostly muted grays and browns for Saints. Just as the text is the story, so too is the art. They work together to create something a prose novel never could.

Authorial intent is often discussed with books like these. Yang is even-handed, and if he has a bias, it’s not detectable. What really comes across is the immense sense of tragedy. These books are heartbreaking, not only because of what happens to the
people, but because of what the people do to each other. Yang first
makes the reader care about Little Bao, to sympathize with him, to see
exactly where he’s coming from, and then he has Little Bao do terrible
things because of it. It’s hard to read. It’s made even more difficult after reaching the end of Boxers and picking up Saints, knowing how Bao’s and Vibiana’s stories intersect and how they end. Either book would be a solid read on its own, but together they are more than the sum of their parts.

If you read only one graphic novel this year, make it this one. And then tell me what you think of it.

Advance copies provided by the publisher. Boxers and Saints will be available September 10.

OCD Love Story by Corey Ann Haydu

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Bea has OCD.

Bea doesn’t identify as someone with OCD. She doesn’t exhibit a lot of the trademark signs of the mental illness — she doesn’t really have compulsions or obsessions. Or at least, she tells herself she doesn’t, and by extension, she convinces us as readers she doesn’t have them. But slowly, as OCD Love Story unravels, Bea comes around to the idea that the things she does which other people don’t do are precisely what mark her illness.

It’s a school dance, and Bea’s at the local all-boys academy. When the power dies, she finds herself sitting beside a boy with whom she strikes up an immediate conversation and kinship. She can’t see Beck, but she knows she likes him right away. Even though he’s tentative about her seeing him, she pushes. She wants to know who this boy is. But when the lights come back on, she’s lost him and she knows nothing of him except his name. Maybe she’ll see him again. Maybe not.

When Bea shows up for her next therapy appointment, it’s all routine: she gets there early enough to grab the seat nearest Dr. Pat’s office, where she can listen to the session before hers. It’s a couple — Austin and Sylvia — and they’re having issues. Bea takes copious notes about them, including what they’re saying to one another, what their challenges might be, what she imagines their life at home must feel like. As Dr. Pat calls her into the office that day, she drops not only the bomb that she’s suspecting Bea’s challenges are due to OCD (and specifically the compulsions) and worse, Bea’s going to start going to group therapy. Such therapy would be good because it would allow for meeting other people who are suffering with similar problems and more importantly, it would provide her an opportunity for exposure therapy.

And it’s at the first group therapy session when Bea reunites with Beck. How many local boys have that name? She recognizes his voice. She recognizes him as him.

Beck has OCD. The things he told her about the night at the dance make sense. And more than that, Bea becomes aware of how his OCD manifests quite quickly. Their first “date” happens when Beck asks her to take him to the gym after therapy. Because he told his mother his sessions lasted three hours, when really, they were more like an hour. Those additional two hours were for his working out.

Even though she sees it immediately in him, Bea is blind to how her own OCD manifests. We as readers are blind to this for a long time, too. She is an expert at hiding it and revealing it to herself — and us by extension — slowly. Rather than tell us, rather than even showing us, she experiences it, and as readers, we experience it right along with her. We are there as she drives to Austin and Sylvia’s house over and over. We are there as she pinches her thigh hard to stop herself from acting upon something. We are there as she panics when she starts to drive and when she has to pull over. We are there when she tells us about the scrapbook from the boy who did something violent. As Bea has her ah ha moments thinking about her past, particularly when she tells us why it is she ended up in Dr. Pat’s office for therapy, we see more of the backstory. We see more of the forward progress in these moments, as well.

Bea is very sick, but she doesn’t show it off in the ways people would expect of someone with OCD. She fixates on people and on their lives. She stalks people she becomes fascinated with, even at the expense of those relationships in her life which are good and strong. Bea has a solid family unit, and she has a great best friend. But those are things she can’t wrap her mind around. She sees other people’s lives as so much more interesting and so much better than her own, even when it’s clear they are not. But she fears tremendously that things could change in an instant. She worries about sharp objects, about violence, about glass and knives and the pain they could potentially inflict upon anyone she loves and cares about.

She does have a huge moment later in the story recognizing this — and it’s one of the most painful moments of exposure therapy that she could have never planned. When she comes to understand that the image in her head of Austin and Sylvia’s rock star life isn’t what she’d imagined, Bea has her understanding of just how ill she is and yet at the same time, just how okay she is.

OCD Love Story has a bit of a misleading cover. This isn’t a light-hearted romance. There is indeed a budding romance here, and there’s sex and talk about sex (Bea’s not really ashamed of being sexually active), but I wouldn’t call what Bea and Beck experience traditional in any way. Those looking for a romance won’t really find it here — there isn’t hand holding, there aren’t first kisses, there aren’t moments that are really swoon-worthy. In many ways, I’d argue that almost makes the romance more authentic, but that’s to the real world, rather than the fictional world.


OCD Love Story does not have a misleading title, though: this is a love story through and through. It’s a love story to Bea coming to understand herself and coming to love herself, despite the very serious issues she’s tackling with internally. It’s Bea wrestling with loving those who are around her and support her because of and in spite of these things. Lish, her best friend, is an excellent friend. Haydu took serious time to craft a fully-fleshed cast of supporting characters in Bea’s life, and even though her lens is skewed throughout, we as readers recognize this skewed perception. She allows us this, telling us in one breath than Lish is doing something really nice for her and then immediately questioning whether Lish is sick of her or is just being nice because she feels obligated to do so.

Haydu’s writing is strong. Bea’s got a great voice, and she’s convincing in how she presents herself both to herself and to us as readers. She doesn’t seem sick. But slowly, she breaks. And as she breaks, it’s not because she’s presenting readers a show. It’s because she’s realizing she herself isn’t strong enough to keep up the charade, and she knows she doesn’t need to be (I think we can attribute part of that to her relationship with Beck — he’s never there to save her, but she’s there beside him as he struggles with his problems and she realizes it’s okay to be weak and allow people in when she needs it). This book will get under your skin as you watch someone who appears so strong crumble a little bit. Then crumble a bit more. Then break completely. And yet, as you watch this happen, you can’t help but feel like it’s going to be okay for her. There will be a bottom to the fall, but there’s a nice net there to catch Bea. The craft here is solid.

Pass OCD Love Story to those readers who want a straight on, unashamed look at mental illness. This is the kind of book that will realign their thoughts on what OCD is — it’s not just one of those challenges that can be the butt of a joke. You don’t have OCD if you check your alarm’s settings three times before bed every night. It’s not something that is easily recognized by those suffering, and Haydu does immense service to that with Bea. In many ways, this book is scary. It’s scary to experience the suffering right along with a character in a way that feels like it’s happening to you, too. In many ways it’s voyeuristic, but it’s through this lens that the book is so successful and powerful. An excellent, worthwhile debut novel. I’m eager to see where Haydu will go next.

I liked this book so much I called it my July favorite over at Book Riot’s monthly roundup.

OCD Love Story is available now. Review copy received from the publisher or picked up at BEA or something. 

The Theory of Everything by Kari Luna

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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.