STACKED

books

A Couple Brief Reviews

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Bayou by Jeremy Love
Lee is a young girl living in the American South in the 1930s. As a black girl, she has a lot of prejudice to deal with, and so does her father. One of the first major events of the book involves Lee being sent to retrieve a body from the bayou near her home. The body is that of a young black boy who was lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman, and it’s Lee’s job to get it because she’s the only one small enough to reach into where it’s caught. (This book is not for the very young.) 
Lee has a white friend named Lily. One day, Lily is taken – eaten, really – by a creature that lives in the swamp, and Lee’s father is blamed for it. He’s arrested and taken away, and Lee knows he’s soon to be lynched just like the other black boy was. In order to save him, Lee ventures into the swamp – a sort of horrifyingly magical alternate world – to rescue Lily. Along the way, she meets up with a benevolent giant called Bayou who helps her.
Bayou is one of those rare stories where I enjoyed the realistic aspects more than the fantastical aspects. Once Lee began her journey with Bayou, my interest waned. I think it became a little difficult to follow, and it doesn’t help that this is the first installment and is therefore an incomplete story.
While the story lost me after a while, the art is incredible throughout. I admit that part of the reason I loved it so much is that it’s heavy on the greens, which always makes my heart go pitter patter. The illustrations are detailed and expressive, but also somewhat soft (without being babyish or overly sweet, since this is certainly not a sweet story). Many of the landscapes look like something I’d like to have hanging in my house. I’m obviously not doing the art justice with my words, but you can take a look at some of the images and see what I mean.
I loved Everybody Sees the Ants, so I was really looking forward to King’s previous novel, which garnered a Printz honor and was a finalist for the Edgar. While I enjoyed it, it didn’t live up to my expectations. In a nutshell: Vera’s best friend, Charlie, has died in mysterious circumstances. Vera knows what happened – and all about the events leading up to it – but she’s not sure she should share it with the police. Before Charlie died, he and Vera had a major falling out, and Vera’s still trying to wrap her mind around her feelings for Charlie and how it should impact her actions.
Vera’s dealing with a lot of other major issues aside from the death of her best friend – a mother who abandoned her, bullying, alcoholism, a loving but pushy father, etc etc. While her voice always seems authentically teen and Vera isn’t really a wallower, there just wasn’t enough humor to balance out the darkness of this novel for me. One thing I loved about Everybody Sees the Ants was the dry humor that permeated it – in particular Lucky’s voice and the ants’ antics (PUN). King tries it here with Vera’s father’s flow charts and some random sections narrated by the town pagoda, but it fell flat for me. I was also disappointed that this wasn’t more of a mystery. I’m really surprised it was a finalist for the Edgar, since the circumstances of Charlie’s death are known to the reader and there isn’t really a mystery to it.
All those complaints makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy the book, but I really did. I just had higher expectations.

Twitter-style Reviews

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It’s probably misleading to call these reviews Twitter-style, but they’re inspired by Twitter since they’re short and to the point. I love writing a good, in-depth review, but doing that for the amount of reading I’ve been doing is impossible. Yet, I want to talk about so many of these books. Here’s a handful of titles I’ve read lately. I call this sample the “strong willed girl” sampler.

This Girl is Different by JJ Johnson follows Evie, a former homeschooled student who decides she wants to spend her last year of education in a formal high school. As sort of a social experience. The thing is, it turns out high school isn’t as coddling as her homeschool education has been and she finds herself in a heap of trouble as she tries to buck authority.

For me, this book was one homeschool stereotype upon another. Evie is less a character than she is a medley of beliefs and social justice convictions, and throughout the story she doesn’t once stop and consider that her ideas might be the problem. Instead, it’s everyone else around her who is wrong and ignorant. She sips yerba mate tea and does yoga and drives a 70s hippie mobile, loves nature and the environment and she doesn’t get why she should be told how to behave within her environment. Mom isn’t much better, either, as she chooses to work at Walmart (big corporation!) as sort of a social experiment, too. Or, really, because she can’t hold a job elsewhere since she is too quick to start espousing her beliefs.

I found it hard to believe Evie would be able to so quickly befriend two people when it was clear she had no socialization prior to beginning formal schooling. Her relationships were quite one-dimensional. She got along with these people because she could throw her beliefs upon them and the second they challenged her ideas, the relationships ended. Maybe the most challenging part of the book for me, though, was despite how much of a thorn in everyone’s side Evie is throughout the novel, in the end, she’s a hero. The message of sticking to your beliefs is fine, but I disagree with how it’s presented here. Here it’s wrapped under the guise of almost bullying people to believing what you believe. And the stereotypes!

The Girl is Different was well-paced and an easy enough read, despite the problems. It tries too hard to be Stargirl but I can see those who liked Spinelli’s successful tale of an off-beat girl finding this a worthwhile read.

Julie Chibbaro’s Deadly is a historical novel, set during one of my favorite time periods: the early 1900s, pre-war, right when technology and science and women’s rights sort of forged ahead in social consciousness. This novel explores all of those things.

Prudence Galewski takes a job in a science lab as an assistant. Her job was to be mostly secretarial (as women’s jobs were then) but her interest in science and learning it from the men she worked drew her to explore that side of the table. When typhoid begins to strike the city, she’s invested in figuring out just what the culprit is, and lucky for her, her boss allows her to travel on their investigations. That’s when things really amp up, as all fingers point to a housekeeper named Mary. She’s been present in home after home where the disease has wiped out families and now she’s been sent away to avoid spreading the disease further.

Where the plot to the story worked well and the writing advanced it well enough, I needed more passion from Pru as a character. She talks of her passion for science, but I wanted to see it more. I would have really loved to know more about what she was thinking about herself: she talks about women and the strange place women had in the world at this period in time, and yet, she herself, as a woman being allowed to participate in a huge disease case (one which science men pit the spread of typhoid on A WOMAN) doesn’t talk enough about it. She was almost there, but she wasn’t there enough for me on the topic. I found myself getting angry reading the book because of these issues and they left me wanting to talk about them, but the thing was, Pru didn’t feel the same way I did. Maybe she did, but I couldn’t tell from the story. Given it’s written in diary form, she had such opportunity to tap into those thoughts but she didn’t. And I knew she could because she’d tread close but then retreat. I feel like a little bit more of Pru’s internal processing would have taken this from a good read to a knock out for me.

She Loves You, She Loves You Not by Julie Anne Peters begins right where Alyssa’s life starts over. She’s been kicked out of her house by her father in Virginia and sent to live with her floozy mother in Colorado because he found out she was a lesbian and that was Not Okay. Alyssa works on picking up the pieces by finding herself in a part-time job and…finding Finn, a girl a few years older than her who makes her believe it’s possible to overcome the breakup she’d had with Sarah back in Virginia.

Alyssa’s a hard-headed character and she’s confident in who she is. I liked her more than I thought I would, even if she is a bit overbearing in it. The story is engaging as Alyssa moves from being ostracized for being who she is to embracing it and making it her way of life. She battles, too, the fact that her mom left her hanging when she was younger and now she lives with the same woman. Her mom is a complete stranger to her and she’s determined to learn who she is, though when the chips fall and she figures it out, the conclusions are too convenient and contrived. There were a lot of issues in this novel, and while they’re handled fairly well, they become repetitive. I found myself paying attention to these patterns in a way I shouldn’t have. The abundance of car wrecks and showers mentioned weakened those story moments for me because I fixated on how repetitive it felt.

Perhaps the weakest part of this book for me were the second person interludes. These flashbacks addressed a “you” that, for the first two instances, didn’t make sense to me. Were they letters to Sarah? They were actually addressing Alyssa, but that was not evident enough, and I felt that this took me out of the story instead of adding any sort of immediacy or intimacy to it. More than being jarring, though, it never felt resolved. While the tactic revealed the back story of why Alyssa was kicked out of her house, it left open a lot of questions about Alyssa’s relationship with Sarah that are never resolved. At the end of the book, I wanted to know more about Sarah, given she ties up many other loose ends (uncomfortably and satisfyingly for me as a reader).

This Girl is Different picked up from the library; Deadly purchased; She Loves You, She Loves You Not received from the publisher for Cybils review.

The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

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When I read the synopsis for The Future of Us, I felt like the book had been written for someone
like me: I came of age in the 90s and hold a certain fondness for cassette
tapes and dial-up Internet. Well, not a fondness for using them, but for reminiscing about them.

Its 1996, and Emma’s dad has just given her a computer. Her friend Josh has received an AOL CD-ROM in the mail with some free hours, so they get together to take a look at this new-fangled thing called the
Internet. Only something strange happens. After about five hours (I exaggerate)
and lots of beeping, Emma signs on to discover that a website called Facebook
is in one of her “favorite places.”
I’m going to break out my shiny English degree and tell you
that this is what is called “dramatic irony.” Emma and Josh don’t know what
Facebook is, but we do, and therein lies the enjoyment. Facebook reveals the two teens’ future lives – about 15 years in the future – to them. Emma is married to some
man she hasn’t met yet, and Josh is married to the hottest girl at the school.
As Emma reads more and more of her status updates, she
learns more about what Facebook is and decides that she doesn’t like the way
her life turned out. So she does things in 1996 to change her life in 2011.
Predictably, they backfire, and her status updates don’t really reflect a
better life. Josh, on the other hand, is thrilled with how his life appears to
turn out, and he’s not pleased that Emma’s choices are affecting his happy
future.
The Future of Us
is also a little bit of a relationship story. Josh confessed his like for Emma
a little while ago, and Emma did not reciprocate, which has made things between
the two friends tense. This drama is played out over Josh and Emma’s shared secret of Facebook and their decisions to change – or not change – their futures. The year is firmly 1996, but this
part of the story is timeless.
I really enjoyed the concept of The Future of Us, but the execution felt thin. The characters were underdeveloped and the events breezed by so quickly they barely made any impact. Everything was just a bit underdeveloped. I wanted more – more character dimensionality, more meaning, more build-up to the great revelation near the end, more everything. It seemed more like an outline for a very interesting story
I think the book might have a hard time finding an audience of
teenagers. It’s pretty heavy on the nostalgia and Asher and Mackler go a little
crazy with mid-90s references. Don’t get me wrong, I totally dug all of those
references, but I’m not sure teens of nowadays will find them as amusing. (As a
parallel, references to Betamax don’t really do it for me.) Those of you who
say it will appeal to fans of historical fiction, I SCOFF AT YOU. People my age
are not historical figures! Of course, my grandmother scoffs at me when I tell
her I’m reading an historical novel set during World War II, so there you go.
It’s definitely going to date itself quickly. Actually, by
the time it’s released next week, it will already be dated. Facebook has made
some changes, as it is wont to do every few seconds. This reviewer alsohelpfully points out a few historical errors.
Such errors are inevitable in a book about a bygone time, but they’re more
cringe-worthy when people who lived then are still alive and not senile.
What I’m saying is, The
Future of Us has some problems. That doesn’t stop it from being an
enjoyable book. There’s some good stuff about learning to balance your wants
now with your goals for the future that should have broad appeal. And there’s
that perennially popular idea about seeing – and changing – your future life
that can only happen in fiction. Some teens may get a kick out of it, and it
certainly won’t take them long to read. I think 20-somethings will probably
enjoy it more, though.

Review copy received from publisher at BEA. The Future of Us is available November 21.

Frost by Marianna Baer

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I think I’ve mentioned my penchant for psychological thrillers before. The only problem I really have with them sometimes is the plot itself can be fairly predictable. I expect the unraveling somewhere in the last 50 or so pages, but I know how it’ll end far in advance of that. Sometimes within the first five to ten pages I can guess it, even. It’s still often a worthwhile ride seeing how it plays out. So when I picked up Marianna Baer’s debut Frost and knew it was in this subgenre, I prepared myself to expect what I’d seen done a few times already this year.

But oh, was I wrong.

So, so wrong.

Leena’s a senior at a boarding school, and last year, she begged the Dean (with whom she had a very friendly relationship) to let her and her friends live in the small dorm house that sat slightly off campus named Frost House. It’d been an all-boys dorm for years, but she wanted to live there. It was an old Victorian, the kind so many of her dreams and romantic fantasies were wrapped up in. She, along with her three friends, managed to secure rooming there. But when Leena arrives and finds a new boy unpacking belongings into her room, she’d confused. While two of her roommates — Abby and Vivian — were already there for the semester and living in the single rooms upstairs, she knew her third roommate, Kate, wouldn’t be showing up until second semester, so her double room would be a single, at least for a few months. David, though, informed her there’d been a slight change in plans and his sister Celeste would be rooming with her for a month. Celeste broke her leg and needed to have a first-floor room and didn’t Leena know? Plus, it was just for a semester while his sister healed. Kate would be her roommate soon enough.

Leena’s unhappy with the arrangement, as she and Celeste weren’t always friendly, but even after talking with the Dean about it, Leena realizes she’s going to have to live with her. And Celeste…is more than a little disturbed. She’s dropped bugs all over Leena’s bed. She’s convinced the windows in the room are ruining her ability to sleep, and she’s unable to find any rest because there is endless knocking around them. Leena doesn’t experience any of this. Leena knows Celeste and David’s father has a psychological illness, one that’s heredity, and she can’t help but think Celeste might be tripping down that same road.

Leena herself is no perfect girl, though. She’s been hearing voices coming from an old wooden owl she keeps close as sort of a security doll. Oh, and inside that owl is a collection of drugs — mostly of the anti-anxiety sort — that Leena takes because she’s prone to fits, especially after the divorce of her parents. Leena also finds comfort in the closet in her room — the one which belongs to Celeste. It’s got a comforting feel and smell to it, one which reminds her of the attic in her parents’ pre-divorce home.

As Celeste spirals further and further into her thoughts about Frost House, she decides to leave the shared room and move into the tiny desk closet. It didn’t have the windows that tormented her. Leena takes this opportunity to spend more time in the closet which now belongs to her, and the more she realizes she needs to confront David about his sister’s descent into mental illness, the more prone she is to pop pills. Even ones she may have stolen from David and Celeste’s father on a trip to their house to celebrate his birthday.

When she finally confronts David, though, the results are totally unexpected; and then, there’s an even greater twist. One which literally left me shocked because I had been so, so wrong about where the story was going.

Frost has all the elements of a book I’m usually not keen on. The boarding school setting is a convenience a lot of times to eliminate parents, and often, I find the stories to be a bit immature or premature. There are notable exceptions, of course, and this is one. Leena, despite being a bit of a do-gooder, feels like an authentic senior in high school, as do the other students with whom she interacts. As can kind of be anticipated, there’s romance in the story, and even though Leena wants to stick to her guns about not being sexually active and not taking an interest in boys this year because she needs to focus on college and getting ahead in her life, she finds herself falling for David. Cliche, right? The thing is, as much as she and David begin a relationship, there’s something nagging in the back of her mind and in mine as a reader that the romance isn’t real. That it’s sort of contrived as a means for these two to spend time together and keep a watchful eye on Celeste. Neither would openly admit it, though. Baer is smart in developing this relationship — something I’d rarely say — as I think it was crucial to advancing the story without becoming a romantic cliche. Because really, how many boarding school romance stories do we need?

Celeste drove me mad, but only as equally as Leena did. The two of them had deep psychological issues and as a reader, I kept wondering when the shoe would drop. Was one driving the other mad? Were they exacerbating one another’s issues themselves? Celeste’s madness is much more physical than Leena’s, her body showing signs of damage everywhere, and it left Leena mentally tormented. She wanted to tell David, but she couldn’t shake the idea David might be the one leaving those bruises.

I found Leena to be an extremely likable character, and the biggest reason why was because she was so not perfect. She had flaws, and she did things she knew she shouldn’t. She was a real teen, acting before thinking. But more than that, she accepted the consequences for her actions. In the moments when she did think, that’s when things started getting to her (and to me as a reader). That’s when cracks began appearing in the story she told, too. Yet I wanted to buy what she was telling me because she admitted to her own faults and even felt guilty for her reliance on (stolen) prescription medications. Also, there’s something charming about a 17-year-old who needs a wooden owl named Cubby to fall asleep and to talk to. She was multi-layered and driven, but she wasn’t driven in a typical manner. At least, she wasn’t as the story moved forward. Obviously this was part of her unraveling, but it felt so realistic, too. Leena could only exert so much control over her life and her choices and then exert it over others, too. Eventually she lets things go she can’t hold onto, rather than try to be a hero for herself and everyone else.

Baer’s novel is tightly written, and I found myself poring over the language as much as the story. It’s lengthy, but it needs to be to develop and deliver the thrill to the reader. The book’s a page turner, with a nice speedy pace that kept me engaged from the first word through to the end. The main players in the book are fully fleshed and believable, and the secondary characters, who aren’t as well-fleshed, need to be that way. It’s integral to the story itself. As much as I wished I got to know Abby and Vivian a little better (they were Leena’s best friends, after all), I didn’t need to. The descriptions in the story are lush and vivid, and while reading, I could perfectly picture Frost House and I could hear the scratches and bangs within Frost House. I believed myself this place was creepy, but in each of those moments I thought Celeste might be right, I found myself wondering if maybe Leena was the real head case here. Leena had been hearing voices in her head — well, not her head, but from the owl she’d kept nearby. An owl which told her not only to medicate, but also to do a lot of destructive things.

For the first time in a long time, I was wrong about the twist. But more than that, I was so satisfied in being wrong. Thinking back on all of the things I’d read and all the clues I’d picked up, it made perfect sense. Even hours later, I sat on the story and the way it wove together and marveled at how I could be that wrong. Perhaps it was obvious, but I think that was a huge part of the story’s game, and it’s so successful, I can’t help think it was one of the smartest twists in a long time. And as I sat there, sitting in front of a hallow owl figurine as I read, I felt the chills. The frost, if you will.

Hand Frost over to your fans of psychological thrillers. It has its horror moments, but it’s not on the gruesome side of the horror genre; it’s extremely mental, so fans of that side of horror will find this a worthwhile read. Perhaps this is the kind of book, too, that will appeal to paranormal fans (the questions Baer raises in the story DO amount to whether or not other worldly beings are present) or those who are skeptical of paranormal stories (because of the otherworldly beings being present) but want a little of that flavor in their reading. This book was refreshing, surprising, and one that will easily make the list of my 2011 favorites. It’s so unexpected and startling, as well as haunting — but not necessarily in the ways I expected it to be. This was a book about the reader as much as it was a story about the characters.

Finished copy received from the publisher.

Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card

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So, this is my first Orson Scott Card. I know, I need to read Ender’s Game. I will eventually. But this book sounded cooler. It involves time travel, and that is always cooler than the competition. 
Pathfinder is actually two stories. The main story follows Rigg, a thirteen year old boy on a planet that seems to be Earth, but has very different government, societies, and religious stories than the Earth we know. Rigg has a unique ability to see the “paths” that others have made. He is the only one he knows who has this ability. When his father is in an accident in the woods, his last words to Rigg before he dies are to instruct him to find his sister. This takes Rigg by surprise since he didn’t even know he had a sister.
So Rigg goes off on a quest, picking up a few interesting characters who tag along with him. One of these characters is another boy who has his own special ability. Turns out, his power and Rigg’s power work together to allow them to time travel. This comes in handy on their journey, but it must be used carefully since it can also get them in serious trouble.
A lot of the book is fairly standard quest material. Rigg and his crew run into a few bad guys, get captured by soldiers, are robbed, get in fights, have to steal things, and get caught up in royal politics. Along the way, there’s serious foreshadowing that there is much more to Rigg’s story than just this quest, and of course there is. Which brings me to the second story in the novel.
Each chapter in Pathfinder begins with a few pages about another young man named Ram. Ram is on a space ship on its way to another planet. He is the pilot/commander and the only human awake – the rest are in artificial sleep, and the ship is run by androids called expendables. A lot of these sections are conversations between Ram and an expendable. You’d think that nothing but talk would get a little old, but these sections were by far my favorite of the book. Perceptive readers will figure out how Rigg’s and Ram’s stories fit together early on, but they’ll keep reading to discover the details. I actually found Ram’s story more compelling than Rigg’s. (I fully admit that this is due in part to the fact that the man who narrated Ram’s story had a much more pleasing voice than the one who narrated Rigg’s.)
A lot of Pathfinder seems like fantasy initially, but Card has a scientific explanation for everything. Whether these scientific explanations are actually plausible is debatable, but they make for a fascinating read. It’s also part of the book’s downfall. Pathfinder is explanation-heavy. Don’t get me wrong, I like to understand the details of the world the author has created, and science without explanation is just frustrating, but Card takes it a bit far. Every time Rigg time-travels, there is a long explanation of how it works. And the explanations aren’t really different at each instance. It becomes repetitive, and it’s certainly unnecessary.
It’s not just the science that gets tedious. Whenever Rigg attempts to manipulate another character, the narrator goes on to tell the reader exactly how he’s doing it and why it works. I suppose what I mean here is that there’s plenty of showing, but then there’s a lot of telling too. Really, the showing was enough for the reader to understand what’s going on. Since I listened to the book on audio, these parts definitely dragged.
Pathfinder is a pretty unique book. Card uses some standard tropes, but he throws in plenty that I haven’t read about before anywhere.  It’s also smart. Despite the over-explaining, it doesn’t talk down to its readers. There’s a lot of complex science and multiple story threads that must be weaved together by the reader (or listener). It’s refreshing to read a story about a thirteen year old, written for kids/young adults, that is this smart. I would have dug it a lot as a teen. (I liked it a lot as an adult too.)

Audiobook borrowed from my local library.