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The Knife and the Butterfly by Ashley Hope Perez

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Azael wakes up in a prison cell and has no idea how he got there nor why he’s there. It’s not the first time he’s ended up in prison either but it is the first time he can’t quite figure out what did him in. He remembers a fight between his gang, the MS13, faced off against the Crazy Crew, but he can’t help think this prison sentence feels wrong. He doesn’t get a phone call, and he isn’t getting news about his family. He’s also without a lawyer.

Things are even more complicated because Azael is forced to share a cell with Lexi, a white girl, with whom he has no interest. She’s not opening up, and he can’t help but wonder why she’s in prison and what she has to do with him.

The Knife and the Butterfly (TKTB) is Perez’s sophomore novel, and before delving into talking about what worked well in the story, I have to say I hope she continues writing the sorts of books she’s writing for a long time. This story, as well as her first What Can(‘t) Wait, feature Latino/a main characters and they’re both set in Houston. TKTB features a main character from El Salvador, and it’s a story not only about gang culture, but also about broken homes, poverty, and the challenges of being a minority. There aren’t a lot of stories tackling one — let alone all — of these issues, and these are the stories that when I read them, I know there is an eager audience for them. Never once do any of the issues come across as inauthentic or pandering. These aren’t issue-driven books but involve characters and situations that are relatable to audiences who often don’t have these sorts of stories written for them. Many times these stories are instead written at them.

TKTB is a character-driven story, rather than a plot driven one. It’s told through Azael’s eyes (and his name isn’t really Azael, it’s his street name — his real name is Martin, and understanding this distinction is crucial to understanding who he is) as he tries to put the pieces of the event that caused him to be sitting in a jail cell yet again. As he combs through his memories, we’re transported back through the events of the last few weeks and years of his life. Immediately, we know he comes from a troubled home. The only true family Azael’s had is his brother Eddie, and when he’s unable to to talk with Eddie about what happened and why he’s sitting in juvie, Azael begins to suspect something has really and truly gone wrong. He’s beginning to think maybe he’s lost his only family in whatever ensued.

While in his cell, Azael manages to convince one of the staff members to help him piece his story back together. In rummaging through his files, he stumbles upon a news article about the gang fight he vaguely remembers occurring, though much of the information about the whos and whats of the incident are redacted. What Azael realizes, though, is he has to figure out Lexi. Even though she is nothing like him and he has absolutely no interest in her, he has reason to believe that they wouldn’t be sharing a cell if there wasn’t a reason behind it. But as much as he observes her and as much as he tries to figure her out, he can’t.

Until he convinces his guard friend to take the journal she’s been writing in. That’s when he puts together the pieces of who, exactly, Lexi is.

As readers, we’re on the outside of who she is, as well. She’s not telling the story at all, and we never get her perspective until Azael gets ahold of her journal. Then we’re dropped right into her mind. Slowly, she reveals bits of her life, too. Lexi hasn’t had it easy; if anything, her life’s been as unstable as Azael’s, but in a number of different ways. She wasn’t involved in gang life at all, but she’d been shuffled around so much in her life, she never really had any support system nor role models nor the opportunity to truly succeed. Both the reader and Azael come to understand Lexi and we begin to sympathize with her. Because we’d only been in Azael’s head for so long, we’d only ever viewed Lexi the way he had, as a privileged white girl. But through her journal, we learn otherwise and we have to reassess our own assumptions about her. If you’re at this point and thinking that the story will turn into a romance, well, I’ll break the news: it doesn’t. Not a lick of romance in this book.

I can’t talk too much more about plot or character here, since it’d delve into spoiler territory, but I can say that I didn’t see how the two characters were connected through the length of the book. Not only that, but there’s a huge twist in the story that I didn’t see coming — and I credit Perez hugely for making it work out. I can usually put the pieces together quickly but this one didn’t do that to me, and I didn’t felt cheated or tricked, either. It was clever.

Because we’re exposed to both a variety of time periods in both Azael and Lexi’s lives, as well as a variety of mediums — the straight-forward narrative, the journal entries, news articles — there’s not a lag in the pacing. This is a relatively short book at just over 200 pages, and not a word nor a scene feels wasted. It’s edgy and it’s powerful, and it will appeal to reluctant readers. The obvious comparison for this book to me feels like Watt Key’s Dirt Road Home, but that may simply be because of the juvenile detention center setting (which will be enough comparison for many readers). To be fair, Perez’s story is more mature and treads territory geared toward older teen readers than Key’s story, but I think readers who want these types of stories won’t think twice about it, and readers who want stories about gang life will certainly want to pick this up. I don’t think there’s any doubt this book will have mega guy appeal. Azael’s voice is believable.

I’ll admit, I had a hard time reading this book because this story was not up my alley at all. In fact, I picked this book up right before heading to Dallas for ALA, but I didn’t read it on the airplane, nor while I had down time, nor even when I made it back home. I put it aside for a few weeks and came back to it with fresh eyes. This isn’t a knock on Perez’s writing nor story but rather the fact that I’m not the target audience of this book. But let me reiterate: there IS a target audience for this, and Perez does no disservice in writing a book that not only has this appeal, but it’s a story that’s also worth reading. This is the world many of the target readership may already be familiar with or one with which they’ve got fascination.

I’m a reader of author’s notes, but I know not everyone is. This is a book that reading the author’s note is worthwhile, but make sure you save it until you’ve finished the story at hand. Reading it beforehand may spoil the story’s twist.

 Review copy received from the publisher. The Knife and the Butterfly is available now.

A Pair of Contemporary Reviews

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As soon as I think I’m caught up on writing reviews, I find myself buried even deeper. Part of it is because I can’t write the review as soon as I finish the book — I need time to think through what points are worth talking about and which resonated — and part of it is simply because it takes a long time to write a cogent and thorough review. Alas, sometimes I have to remind myself it’s okay to write short(er) reviews that get to the key points. Then I think my understanding of what a shorter review is pretty skewed, too. The point of this all is to say that today, I’ve got two reviews for the price of one!

I heard about Jesse Andrews’s debut Me and Earl and the Dying Girl because of Capillya’s author thoughts post on the cover. I’m not a big fan of cancer stories, but I bit the bullet on this one because it looked like a much more light hearted approach to the heavy topic. And it was.

Greg’s always been sort of a social outcast and fine with it. In fact, he sort of prides himself on it because it means he can blend in and out of all the different cliques in his smallish high school. Plus, he and his best friend Earl like to spend their time making videos. They aren’t good at it, and Greg will tell you as much. As the story begins, we know that the story is actually already over and we’re being told the “what happened” via a lengthy flashback essay. Not only is the set up immediately engaging because of this, but the essay set up also allows Greg to incorporate film scripting right into the story, and it makes his passion for making films more palpable from the onset.

Greg’s always been a little awkward around girls, and he’s willing to admit this. Because of his desire to sort of maintain a status-less social standing, he doesn’t like to make commitments to girls, either. But then Greg finds out from his mother that Rachel, one of the girls who he knew from a church group, has leukemia. And Greg’s mom thinks it is a great idea he befriend her so she feels less alone. He’s not thrilled about the prospect — it messes with his invisibility and, well, he feels weird suddenly befriending someone who could potentially die — but Greg does it anyway. What Greg and Rachel get out of the relationship is more than either could have expected.

This is a book that does characterization very well. As much as Greg likes to pretend he’s a rebel and he’s worlds different than anyone else, the truth is, he’s an average teen. He is easy to relate to, and he’s got a sense of humor that’s enjoyable as a reader. Earl, on the other hand, has a much more challenging life and personality than Greg does, but because we’re seeing Earl through Greg’s eyes, we aren’t given the impression that Earl is anything but a pretty good friend to Greg (we learn this isn’t necessarily the case the further we get into the book, as Earl is almost a foil to Rachel).

Andrews’s story is light-hearted, even up until the end when inevitably, things take a turn for the worse with Rachel. Greg has a good sense of humor, and he’s willing to reflect on everything that happened to him with that humor in place. Early on in the book, we hear Greg’s given up his film-making aspirations, and as the story unfolds, readers are unsure when or how it happens. This was what kept me compelled — I had so much invested in Greg because I liked him and wanted to see him pursue his dreams, but when he talks about the last film he makes, I understood why he believes he’s done with film making.

There’s definite male appeal in this book, and I appreciate how Andrews did not go down the romance path in this book. What emerges between Greg and Rachel is at best friendship and, in my mind, it’s not even necessarily friendship. This story was much less about what Rachel needed as she sunk deeper into illness and much more about Greg learning to connect with other people and to connect with himself. Leukemia is sort of the tool, and it’s used well and treated fairly without becoming maudlin or being too convenient and easy. Readers who are wary of cancer stories can rest assured that while the outcome in the story won’t necessarily be the happy one for Rachel, it doesn’t require the reader to bring their own baggage and experiences to the story. This one’s about Greg learning about himself.

The voice sings in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and that, along with the set-up and execution of the story reminded me a lot of Geoff Herbach’s Stupid Fast. This book will appeal to fans of Herbach’s, as well as those who love Brent Crawford’s Carter series. Andrews’s debut will be available March 1.

Brian James’s Life is But a Dream is an exploration into the debilitating mental illness of schizophrenia. From the onset, I was impressed with James’s ability to not conflate schizophrenia with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities). This story follows Sabrina as she becomes sicker and sicker, to the point her parents choose to institutionalize her for treatment. Prior to institutionalization, Sabrina’s life was full of color and fantasy, and she lived in what basically amounted to a dream world. Her experiences in the real world paralleled what most people experience in deep sleep. While it doesn’t necessarily sound scary, the effects of such distance from reality isn’t pretty and it causes Sabrina to act in ways that put her in danger.

While being treated, Sabrina meets Alec, a boy who convinces her the folks in the institution are working against her. Taking the drugs they’re giving her is only harming her, he says, and she begins to believe him. She doesn’t want to become brain dead, and she becomes convinced her life will be better if she doesn’t go along for the treatment. So she and Alex make an escape plan. To save themselves.

This part is spoiler, so feel free to skip down to the following paragraph. As a reader who knows a bit about schizophrenia (and about Sabrina’s experiences with it), I was never quite sure whether Alec actually existed or if he was one of those dreams concocted in Sabrina’s mind. The evidence to support either argument is in the book — he could be real or he could be a figment of her dream world telling her to act a certain way. Even in the end, when Sabrina makes a run for it, it’s uncertain either way.

The uncertainty, though, might be the greatest strength in the book. I found the writing to be distancing, and while it works for Sabrina’s world and her own voice, it kept me far away from her, too. I couldn’t connect with her in any way, and because I wanted to, I became frustrated. It makes sense because that’s how these illnesses work, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it works for readers. It’s a dream world.

Moreover, I found it a little disappointing that the person who’d save Sabrina would be a boy, as I find that a trend that won’t stop coming. Even if what I said in the previous paragraph were true, it still doesn’t settle too well for me. I’d not come to see Sabrina as much of a romantic or one who’d love a relationship with Alec, but it’s something I could have bought had Sabrina’s voice been stronger and she let me in. Fans of stories about mental illness will want to read this one, especially those who are interested in schizophrenia because James nails it (I’d say textbook nails it, but textbooks can leave out the emotional side of the illness, and James offers that quite well). Life is But a Dream will be available in mid-March.

Review copies provided by the publishers.

There is No Dog by Meg Rosoff

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What if God were a teenage boy? That’s the question Meg Rosoff asks in her latest novel for teens, and the results are pretty darn funny. The god of Earth is Bob, a perpetually teenaged boy whose mother won the creation of Earth in a game of cards and decided to give the job to her son. He created Earth in a creative but rather slapdash way, which means there are some truly unique creatures, but none of it works together very well. He also had the appalling self-centeredness to not only make humankind in his own image, but to make them all worship him to boot. 
Bob isn’t necessarily a bad guy, but he’s not exactly good either – selfish, lazy, and short-tempered are all excellent descriptors for him. In order to keep things on Earth somewhat controlled, the administration assigned Mr. B, a middle-aged middle-management type, to assist Bob. Poor, poor Mr. B. Was there ever a more thankless job? Particularly now that Bob has fallen in “love” (again) with a human girl named Lucy, throwing Earth’s weather completely off-kilter.
There is No Dog is more of a gimmick than an actual novel. I don’t think there’s any way to say that without making it sound bad, although that’s not my intent. Character development here is minimal. The jacket copy makes it seem like Bob is the protagonist, but if there is one, it’s Mr. B, the middle-aged consultant. He’s the only one who experiences any growth and the only one we get a real feel for.
It’s mostly for that reason that I hesitate to call There Is No Dog a YA novel. Bob is there, but he’s always played for laughs. He’s your stereotypical teenage boy whose delusions of grandeur are, in fact, not delusions at all. Lucy is 21 and is concerned with her career and falling in love, but in a much more adult way than a teen would be. Mr. B and the Eck (more on him later) are who we really care about, and neither of them are teenagers with teenage concerns. I’m actually quite pleased to have discovered this book. It seems to fit firmly into the 20-something age range, which can be tough to find. Often it seems the shelves overflow with books for teens and middle-aged adults, with not much in between.
This was a tough review for me to write, because I’m concerned that all of those things I mentioned in the two paragraphs above make it seem like I disliked the book. Far from it – I found it delightful and clever and funny and refreshingly different. The lack of character development didn’t bother me. Rosoff’s prose carries a laugh in almost every sentence, which means that this is first and foremost a humor book. (As opposed to simply a funny book. I hope this distinction makes sense.) In a humor book, things like character development and world-building and plot coherence aren’t as important. (And here again, I worry I’m making this book seem bad. I promise you, it’s not. You should read it.)
On a somewhat unrelated note, reading this book was a very interesting exercise in ARC study. Most of the book is written in past tense, but sometimes it jumps to present. There’s no rhyme or reason to the switches. Frequently, it happens mid-page or even mid-paragraph. It makes me think it’s unintentional – perhaps Rosoff originally wrote it in one tense and switched to the other for the final draft. I haven’t been able to locate a finished copy yet, but I certainly plan to. (It should come as no surprise that I prefer the sections in past tense.)
I can’t end this review without mentioning the Eck. Eck is Bob’s pet. He’s a “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, and all he can say is “Eck.” He is by far the most delightful thing about this book. In fact, he’s the impetus for much of its action, since Bob’s mother loses the Eck in a card game and Bob (and others) attempt to get him back before he’s eaten. Apparently, there’s a rumor floating about that Ecks are delicious. Aside from Mr. B, he’s the creature we get to know best, and the book is all the better for it.
Review copy received from the publisher at ALA Midwinter. There Is No Dog is available now.

MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend by Rachel Bertsche

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My husband and I will celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary in June. We’re both in our mid-twenties. Before we got married, we talked about everything you’d expect a couple who is about to get married to talk about: what we want in a career, where we want to live, do we want kids, what sort of life do we want for ourselves in one year, five years, thirty years. But maybe the most important thing we decided as a couple before we married was that no matter what, we would not become one another’s only friends. It was crucial we’d maintain our own private friendships separate and different from our relationship.

And despite the fact the things we talked about before — the plans we envisioned — have gone completely astray on nearly every level, the last part about maintaining separate and meaningful friendships outside ourselves is something we have done. To varying levels. I like to think that decision has made weathering the things that weren’t in the plan a lot easier to grapple with.

Because of the bumps in the road, because of the changes in place and space, I think he’s had a much easier time of this than I have. My friends? I made them in college (in Iowa) and I made them in graduate school (in Texas). I live near neither. My best friend lives half a country away, and we haven’t seen each other in years. Sure I’ve got friends near me — one who lives literally a hop down the road (um, or will until Friday when she moves a car ride away) — but getting together requires planning and work. Our lives our busy and getting together requires an hour or more in the car. It’s hard to call them up and say you’ve had a day and need them there to finish up a bottle of wine right now to make it better. My husband, on the other hand, went to school here, and he has a wealth of friends who live close. It’s easy for him to drop by their place after work, for him to go out with them after work. He’s met his tribe here, so to speak, while I haven’t.

Rachel Bertsche’s memoir, MWF Seeking BFF, caught my eye when I read about it last year because I felt like I would be able to relate to Bertsche. She’s in her late-20s, newly married, and she left everything she had behind her in New York City when she moved with her husband to Chicago. She lost her support system in the move, and now she was on her own to make a new BFF in her new city so she’d have someone to turn to when she needed it. Bertsche chose to do this through serial “girl dating” — meeting up with people she’d been connected with through people she knew or through various friend-dating services or through putting herself into activities she liked and chumming up someone she felt could be a good match for her. The book is a chronicle of her dates, as well as a musing upon the ideas of friendship and how friendship changes as you get older. It’s not like you can knock on your neighbor’s door and ask them to come out to play anymore when you’ve got a career and a family.

I brought my preconceived notions to the book: Bertsche starts by telling readers what her idea of a BFF is. It’s someone you can go to at any time and it’s someone you can call up at a moment’s notice to grab dinner with. It’s someone who sees you through the good and the bad. Someone who (her words) she can grab a mani/pedi with at the last second to gossip. She talks about her two best friends in New York City and how she’s looking for that sort of companionship in her new city. This is what she wants out of her serial girl dating. Immediately, I just … didn’t connect with Bertsche the way I hoped I would. Her ideas of friendship were so wildly different than mine. It was so singular, so narrow. I knew from the start she’d never be the kind of person I’d get along with and couldn’t see myself befriending.

As she goes on her dates, though, she offers up some interesting research and insight into friendship and what it really is. Bertsche meets a wide variety of women, ranging from her own age to much older and even much younger, and she gets to know women who are in various stages of life (some who are single and still looking for romance, some who are happily married with children, some who will never quite grow up, etc). After each interaction, Bertsche talks about what did and didn’t work and why she did or didn’t see the girl as someone who had that BFF potential. At the beginning of the book, it’s almost a check list to her. Would x-named girl be the kind of girl she could call up on Sunday morning and have brunch with in an hour? No? Well, time to drop her. Would this girl be the kind of girl she could spend an afternoon discussing Harry Potter with on end and then spend the evening devouring the latest television drama? No? Well, she won’t work either.

I found myself so irritated with her definitions and her boxes and I kept wondering how I’d make it through the book. It’s a longer read, since Bertsche does chronicle (to some level) all 52 of her dates. See, I’m a big believe in the fact friends all serve different purposes. At least, that’s how I view friendship. I have friends I turn to for different things and friends who offer me differing levels of support on different things, and I like to think I offer that back. I’d be hard-pressed to believe any of my friends has a whole picture of me or knows everything about me, and it’s a fact I’m okay with. Maybe one I’m comfortable with. And that’s not to say I don’t value friendship because I certainly do, but I prefer a wide network of friends who are one-or-a-few things to me and a much tighter network of intimate friends who know a lot more and will always know a lot more. I keep it this way because it helps me evaluate what I can offer them in return. I can’t be a good friend to everyone, and I never can pretend to be. But I can be a good friend to a few people, and I can be friendly and thoughtful and kind to many, many more. If I evaluated everyone in terms of their BFF potential, I’d never actually get to offer or experience friendship. Maybe it makes me sort of a hippie in thinking there is a bit of the organic in how it happens and how it develops and how those circles I maintain can always shift. I believe give and take happens when and where it should and when you’re in sync with someone else, you just know.

About half way through MWF Seeking BFF, Bertsche has a total light bulb moment. She, too, realizes that trying out everyone as a potential BFF — her idea of what a BFF is anyway — wasn’t going to help her really make friends. In fact, she says that her idea of a BFF was in and of itself out of sync with her life now. Nothing could ever be what it was like when she was younger and unmarried and in New York City. That realization was a huge one for her, and it shaped how she approached the remaining friend dates she made. It also made me step back and think about my own preconceived notions of Bertsche, too: I’d judged her immediately, hadn’t I? I considered my friendship compatibility with her, too. Who she offered herself at the beginning of the book rubbed me wrong but who she offered herself at the end of the book was someone I admired a bit.

Her biggest realization in the entire experiment? Friendship comes about when you learn to be independent. That’s really what her book is about — independence and figuring out how to be.

What stood out to me most in the book and what made it a worthwhile read, especially in the beginning where I did a lot more sighing than engaging, were the lengthy musings on what friendship is and what it really means. Bertsche made me do a lot of thinking about what friendship is and not just what it is to have a friend, but what it means to be a friend. The truth of it, and I think what makes it a hard topic to think about or talk about, is that sometimes you can never know what makes you a friend to someone else. What you believe you offer isn’t always what the other person is receiving. They may be getting something entirely different. Bertsche also broaches the idea of need fulfillment and about social networks and how or why some friendships endure while others never quite hit it off. She backs it with research and her own experiences, and because I’d been along with her on her dates, I felt like I got a good understanding of the hows and whys of her assertions. She mentioned more than once feeling a bit weird when she’d find common ground with someone over a sick or dead dad (hers had died when she was in her early 20s). But she offered it, and her returns either came back ten fold or never came back at all. As much as it was awkward to put herself out there like that, her reflections upon it were great, and I quite admired her at all for putting herself out there like that. Personally, the tough topics don’t make it out of my mouth until I truly know and trust someone wholly. Risk and reward are tricky.

More than once, I put the book aside and thought through my own feelings about friendship and what matters to me, and my husband and I even had a lengthy chat about what we believe our closest and most meaningful friendships are now and why they are that way. We talked about what we feel holds us back and what we do and don’t have in friendships and why we do or don’t care to have that. I couldn’t help think this would make an interesting book club title because the topics worth discussing here are many. Even if the chronicling of every friendship gets tiring — and it does — the moments of reflection at the end are worth it.

One of the points I disagreed with, though, had to do with maintenance of friendship. Bertsche (and many of those she pulls from) is a big believer in the value of the in-person interaction; she’s regularly discussing the phone call over the text message, over the email, over the Facebook or Twitter interaction. This sort of showed her privilege a bit in being an upper-middle class urbanite — something that also grated at me a bit as a reader. She had the opportunities to get out and do things, had the money and resources to go on all of these dates (she does admit to the cost of the endeavor).  The truth is, sometimes our good friends, those we want to give and share with, are never going to be there in the flesh with us when we need it. And while it’s certainly one thing to have that person next door, in today’s modern world, I think it’s becoming a lot more of a luxury than a regular experience. I don’t think maintaining a good friendship means you have to be there in person. It just means you have to be there, period.

My other big criticism of MWF Seeking BFF is that Bertsche periodically dives into female stereotyping. She becomes one and she pushes it in her own observations. There are moments where she discusses food and weight and bodies in a way that made me wonder why it was there in the first place. Then it hit me: target demographic. These bits weren’t authentic to the story nor did I think they were even authentic to Bertsche nor the experience she was trying to share. It felt simply like a way to make her story relatable to a certain 20-something female audience. Take a second to think about all of the magazines aimed at the demographic. It’s not entirely shocking, but I found it incredibly frustrating and simply noise to the greater stuff in this book. Is it possible for a memoir by a woman to not go down this road? Not everyone worries about whether they ate too much sushi, whether or not they’ve gained the average 2 pounds a year, whether they look like crap when they go to the grocery store when they’re feeling less than amazing. I can overlook it, but it doesn’t make it less irritating as a reader.

The book reads like a Malcolm Gladwell title in how it approaches weaving research and anecdote and in some ways, it reminded me a bit of Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project (which I loved). I think the audience on this one is adult women, but because Bertsche’s relationship only plays into the story so long, it’ll easily appeal to those who are married or single. The premise is friendship, and she doesn’t stray too much from that. While walking away from the book didn’t necessarily change my ideas about friendship nor relationships, it did further cement them a bit. I noted a few pages with passages and ideas I believed, including this one: “It can be freeing to have relationships built on exactly who you are at the moment […] If it’s a good match, you’ll find that it wasn’t actually necessary for you to have all those shared experiences.” This is spot on.

Back to my original story: am I bummed to not have friends right here at my call in my new world outside college and grad school? Sure. But the truth is, what I get out of my friendships is worth more than the simple act of being able to walk to their house and share a drink. The real value is in something much deeper and something that transcends space and place, but you can never, ever go wrong simply being kind and thoughtful toward everyone, regardless of whether or not you are seeking a friend. You always get it back some how. I like to think every day I’m lucky for what I have when it comes to friends because they are worth more than their weight in gold. No matter what anyone says or tells you, they will always be as (and sometimes more) important than other relationships in your life.

I purchased a copy of this book.

Guest Review: Paul Stenis on The Fourth Stall, Part II

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Last year, Paul Stenis — a fellow Texas library school alum and kid lit writer — stopped by to write up a review of Chris Rylander’s middle grade novel The Fourth Stall. When we were asked if we’d be interested in reviewing the sequel, of course we had to go back to Paul and ask if he’d offer up his thoughts. He agreed! Without further ado, we welcome Paul back to talk about The Fourth Stall, Part II.

Chris Rylander’s sequel to The Fourth Stall, the aptly titled The Fourth Stall Part II, is a worthy successor to the original. Young readers again hang out in the head of Christian “Mac” Barrett, wily sixth grader, expert problem solver, and comic genius. This time Mac faces problems with more severe consequences, but the sense of humor is the same.

The novel opens when Trixie Von Parkway, a pretty, sharp-witted eighth-grade girl marches into Mac’s office in the fourth stall of the abandoned school bathroom. Not only is she demanding and kind of mean, she has a pretty big problem. One of the new teachers, Mr. Kjelson, always chews her out and gives her detention for no reason, and Trixie wants it to stop. Mac and Vince agree to take the case only to learn that 1) Mr. Kjelson is beloved to his students, 2) he loves their favorite baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, and 3) he coaches the school baseball team. The very same baseball team that Mac and Vince are trying out for.

If that weren’t enough, a new school administrator gets wind of Mac’s business and makes it his personal mission to take it down. Trixie’s stories no longer seem to add up, even as Mac and Vince find themselves competing for her attention. Could a dame like her come between our favorite pair of die- hard Cubs fans?

I found this review difficult to write because this book is so similar to its predecessor. Because of that, rather than in spite of it, I enjoyed this book just as much. I imagine that other readers will agree that the central joke—a sixth grader in a Godfather-type role, speaking with a Godfather-like voice doesn’t wear thin. Rather than returning to the well for the same jokes, Rylander grounds his humor in fresh situations, and that keeps both Mac and the reader on their toes.

If I have a complaint, it’s that Mac makes a poor decision in this book, a decision that leads to consequences that could have been more fully explored. I’m being vague to avoid spoilers, yes, but I think any discerning reader will do a double take and think, “Wait a minute. Mac wouldn’t do that.” It’s one of the only times in either book that Mac makes a mistake, so it feels like a missed opportunity when he’s let off the hook with only a few harsh words. On the other hand, maybe we’re seeing a new side to Mac’s personality—a side that Rylander can explore in a third installment. I hope so.

Review copy received from the publisher. The Fourth Stall: Part II is available now!