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Rival by Sara Bennett Wealer

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Kathryn and Brooke do not get along. The girls are seniors and both actively involved in the school choir. Calling it involved would be an understatement, actually: both are passionate about singing, and both have an opportunity to perform at the Blackmore Young Artists Contest, a huge honor that comes with an even huger check for the winner. For Kathryn, this money means the possibility of attending college to pursue her passion. For Brooke, it’s much less about the money and much more about proving to her family — especially her father — she’s got talent and that she’s worthy of their support.

But will their bitter rivalry be what causes both girls to falter on stage? More than that, though, what even caused the rift between the girls in the first place? Can it be repaired?

Sara Bennett-Wealer’s Rival has pulled me from a reading rut. I found this to be a refreshing book, and one that will resonate with readers strongly. First and foremost, what stood out to me was that the format served the story and the characters perfectly. This story is told in dual voices, beginning with Kathryn and then moving to Brooke, and it is also told through dual time periods: the girls’ senior year and their junior year. Setting the book up this way gives us their current moments in time but also leads us into understanding what created their bitter rivalry. It’s a slow reveal because of this set up, but it needs to be.

What I loved about the use of multiple perspectives in this novel is what usually doesn’t work in other stories set up like this: I felt like both characters had distinct voices. Both Brooke and Kathryn believed the other one had everything enviable. Kathryn believed Brooke to be made of money and privileged and Brooke believed Kathryn was beautiful and the kind of girl she’d want to be around to become much more than she could ever be alone. But the truth of the matter was Brooke was dealing with an absent father and aching heart because of it — not to mention one of the sourest best friends I’ve read in a long time in Chloe — and Kathryn’s challenged by money problems and the fact her only true friend is Matt. As readers, we get to see both sides of the story and understand why each girl envies the other and why neither is truly a mean girl or one without intention.

Any story focused on the idea of a competition has high stakes at play, and this one is no different. I’ll be honest in saying I was a little let down in the competition aspects; I would have loved more detail on the singing, the music, and the fierce vocal battling required to be a stand out singer. But really, this isn’t a story about the competition. It’s a story about Brooke and Kathryn coming to terms with the big rift that occurred between them. There is huge build up to this through the story, and it’s not until more than half way through we find out what caused the two of them to go at odds. And it has to do with both girls’ insecurities. I wasn’t as impressed with this as I wanted to be, but this leads me to my other big point in this story — voice.

Kathryn and Brooke might be some of the more realistic high schoolers I’ve read. Their dialogue, their rivalry, their interactions, and sheer insecurities mixed with their passion in social and artistic endeavors clicked. I know these girls working with teens today, and I knew these girls when I was a teen myself. So, despite being a little let down in what the big deal was that caused the two of them to be at war with one another, it’s extremely realistic and honest. Most readers won’t think twice about it because it’s an easy buy. It makes sense.

Something that resonated with me as a reader and made me so sympathetic toward Brooke were her father issues. I don’t feel like many books do a great job of capturing what it’s like to be the daughter of an absent, too-busy-for-you father; fortunately, I think Bennett-Wealer nailed it. I wish stuff like this had been there for me when I was younger. While it’s not the big part of the story, for those who are dealing with issues like this, Brooke’s emotional highs and lows and the conclusion she reaches at the end of the story will really resonate. It is extremely realistic and not once overdone, despite the fact it could have been, given her father’s career.

For fans of romance in their stories, there is a bit in Rival, but I appreciated this wasn’t really what the girls fought over. I almost could have done without it, but because of the book’s audience, I understand why it’s there. And boy, here’s another book where a guy best friend turns out to be the best kind of friend one can ask for. Matt gets crapped on and still stands by Kathryn’s side, and how I really loved him because of it. He’s a great secondary character and one I wouldn’t have minded even more of throughout the story.

Pass Rival on to fans of shows like Glee, but I think this book would go over quite well with those who enjoy Sarah Dessen or Elizabeth Scott. Sure, there’s the “mean girl” and “revenge” aspects to this story that don’t come out in Dessen or Scott, but the voices here will match quite well. I’d love to see this one read alongside Caridad Ferrer’s When the Stars Go Blue, too, if for no other reason than the heightened emotions and experiences that come through fierce artistic competition and pressure. Another interesting read with this one would be Siobhan Vivian’s Same Difference for the issues of friendship, competition, and the arts. I don’t necessarily think this is the strongest read alike to Pretty Little Liars, to which it’s drawn many comparisons. But try it — you might win over readers to stronger, less melodramatic contemporary.

XVI by Julia Karr

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In XVI, author Julia Karr creates a dystopian future familiar to those of us who have read 1984 or Feed (and countless other books I won’t name for the sake of brevity). In Karr’s future, the government has become big brother, although it is not referred to with those words. The Governing Council keeps track of all minors (those under 16) using a GPS chip embedded beneath the skin, keeps poor people off the street by forcing them to take part in medical testing, and gives girls from lower tiers (think socio-economic classes, but more rigidly defined) the opportunity to advance themselves by applying for the FeLS (Female Liaison Specialist) service.

The Governing Council goes hand in hand with the Media. The Media is ubiquitous, even more so than in our own world. Advertisements blare out of every single shop and are broadcast without pause on all public transit. People – and not just the young – are plugged in constantly to their PAVs (personal audio/video), whether they are home, at work, or out in public. The Media tells people, particularly young girls, how to behave – how to dress, how to flip your hair flirtatiously, how to act once hitting the age of majority.

Which brings us to the title. When girls turn sixteen, they are required by law to receive a tattoo on their wrists that reads “XVI.” This indicates that they’ve reached the legal age of sixteen and can now consent to sex. The Governing Council argues that this helps protect underage girls from unwanted sexual advances. You can imagine the effect it really has. I was initially put off by this aspect, since it seems so unpleasant and so very obviously a Statement About Our World Today. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is a small part of the story, despite the fact that it’s the only thing the book jacket discusses. It’s more of a background feature that helps to set the stage rather than the main plot thread.

Living in this world is our protagonist, Nina Oberon. She’s about to turn sixteen and is dreading the tattoo and all it represents. She lives with her mother and her half-sister, Dee, in Chicago. Then something terrible happens (fairly early on, but I won’t spoil you), and Nina learns that her parents (including her long-dead father) were part of an underground resistance group fighting back against the oppressive Governing Council and the omnipresent Media. This puts her and her sister in a dangerous position. Luckily, she has support in the form of a few good friends, a rather cute boy, and her grandparents. But the Governing Council is not going to leave Nina and her friends and family alone. What’s more, there’s the mystery of FeLS and what really goes on there to discover.

I really liked the world that Karr created. (Well, I didn’t really like it, but you know what I mean.) I like that she included some slang, and I also appreciate that she didn’t go overboard with it. I like that she included a lot of little details that really helped me to visualize the future world. The tiers, FeLS, Media, Moon Settlement Day, and so on worked together to make the world more complex, believable, and interesting than many I’ve come across in other recent dystopias.  I also really appreciated that she didn’t write down to the reader.  It’s initially a little confusing to decipher what all the unfamiliar words and acronyms mean, but Karr gives us the necessary information through context.  This is preferable to paragraph-length asides that tell, rather than show, the details of the world.  Lastly, I liked the characters, which were fairly distinct from each other and behaved in mostly believable ways throughout.

There were a few things that bothered me about XVI. The writing is mostly smooth, but there were a few clumsy passages and odd word choices. For example, cars and other modes of transportation are referred to as “trannies” – short for transits. This would make anyone do a double-take on first read.

There’s also a few worrying passages that veer pretty close to victim-blaming. Due to the XVI tattoo and other social ills, sexual violence is pretty common. Nina’s best friend Sandy has bought into the Media culture and likes to wear super revealing clothing and flirt up a storm. This leads Nina’s grandparents to remark to her “Does your mother know you’re wearing that? It’s too revealing. It’s not safe…dressing like that gives boys the impression that you don’t want to be [a virgin].” It’s not exactly “She’s asking for it,” but it’s close enough to make me uncomfortable.

Nina occasionally makes some dumb decisions that seem out of sync with her character but work well to drive the plot. On more than one occasion, Nina goes out alone when she knows that some very bad people are after her. I understand that the plot needs to be driven, particularly in a story like this, but it seemed disingenuous to make Nina’s stupidity the vehicle. Other than these blips, she seems to be a pretty intelligent girl.

Karr pulls no punches when it comes to the ending. It wraps up the main storyline – all of it – and only leaves a few minor threads dangling. In other words, I don’t mind that there’s a sequel in the works. I look forward to learning more about the world, in particular how the tier system works and what happens to Nina and the resistance after that killer ending. But I reiterate, the major threads were all resolved. I’m so grateful to Karr for this and wish more books took this approach.

Copy obtained from the public library.

What I’m Reading Now

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For your Friday reading pleasure, a few of my current reads and my thoughts on each thus far:
 
XVI by Julia Karr
The jacket synopsis led me to think this book would be a clumsy attempt to make a statement about our over-sexed culture.  Protagonist Nina lives in a future where girls get a tattoo at age sixteen designating them as legal to engage in sexual activity.  So not my thing to read about.  But I can’t resist the siren call of a dystopia, so I checked it out anyway.  And I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far – while the “sex-teen” aspect is a major thread, the plot is much more focused on Nina’s family and their potential involvement in an underground movement dedicated to toppling the government.  There’s a lot of made up slang and abbreviations, which I actually like a lot here.  It reminds me a little of Biting the Sun and Feed in that regard.  There’s also major world-building, and you all know how much I crave that.  Lastly, and most pleasantly for me, the plot is leading up to a major reveal about the dystopian world.  That was always what I loved most about dystopias as a teen and it hasn’t been present in most of the dystopias I’ve read as an adult (think Hunger Games, Wither, Across the Universe, Delirium – a few surprises, yes, but not on the scale of The Giver).  I’m eager to finish this one and see if the reveal is worthy of my admiration.
Secondhand Charm by Julie Berry
Kelly’s already reviewed this one here.  As a fantasy lover (and lover may actually be an understatement in this case), I’m always interested to see what non-fantasy lovers like about the fantasy books they recommend.  That’s the main reason I decided to pick up this one.  So far, I dig the fact that the story is set in a completely different world – I’ve read too many fantasies that are set in our world with magical elements sprinkled in.  Reading fantasy can be a great escape, and this one appears to fit the bill.  And speaking of stories set in our world with magical elements sprinkled in…
Tyger Tyger by Kersten Hamilton
I’m still not sure why I checked this one out.  The cover is really pretty, but that’s usually not enough to convince me to give it a shot.  I think I was drawn to it due to its unusual mythology.  Teenage Teagan is seeing goblins.  Finn Mac Cumhaill, her family’s mysterious visitor from her mother’s adoptive family of Irish travelers, warns her about them and tells her the sidhe follow him wherever he goes.  Danger and adventure ensue.  It’s not bad, but it’s also not a pageturner for me.
The Marvelous Land of Oz adapted by Eric Shanower
I loved Eric Shanower’s adaptation of the first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and am loving the second book in the series just as much.  It’s no surprise, considering my love for Oz in general.  I’m familiar with Shanower’s illustrations from The Wicked Witch of Oz by Rachel Cosgrove Payes, but hadn’t had a chance to read his writing before.  His adaptations of the books remain true to the originals, restoring a lot of the elements omitted from or changed for the movie (silver shoes, the Good Witch of the North’s kiss).  I like Skottie Young’s illustrations a lot, but I admit that I would have preferred Shanower’s (the first installment gives the reader a few examples of Shanower’s artistic interpretations of the characters).  I’m pleased that the duo intend to bring all of Baum’s Oz books into a graphic format.

Exposed by Kimberly Marcus

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Liz is a photographer. She captures things behind the lens, and it’s through this we understand her. But she’s not the center of this story — this story is about her best friend Kate and her brother Mike. Kate’s a mighty dancer and Mike a college boy but former athlete.

One Saturday night, during one of Kate and Liz’s regularly scheduled sleepovers, they have a fight. And it’s ugly. Things not meant to be said are said, and the two of them spend the night sleeping in separate ends of Liz’s house. When Liz wakes up the next morning, Kate is gone, and she accepts that this means there will be a lot of apologies to be made on Monday.

But oh, if it were only that easy.

What Liz comes to find out is that something much worse than a fight has happened. It involves Kate and Mike, and Liz has no idea whose side of this crime she’s on.

Exposed is told in sparse verse form, and though I went back on and forth on whether this style suited the story, I think in the end it really does. I’d have loved to have a better fleshed Liz and Kate, but because so much of Liz’s identity is wrapped up in being a photographer — a person on the periphery rather than the subject in focus — the story wouldn’t have been as powerful nor would we have so much investment in Liz’s internal thinking were it told more traditionally through prose. We want to know what Liz feels about this, but she can only give us so much. She has to tell Kate and Mike’s stories because she’s the photographer. The thing is, she can give us the angles and the perspectives and she can change up the lighting and speed as she wants to. And she does this through the verse. It’s both visual and linguistic. Stylistically, it’s spot on.

Although the book moves along at a speedy pace thanks to the verse, there are so many things packed into those lines that the reader is forced to slow down. I found myself at first a little unimpressed with the story. For the first fifty or seventy pages, I felt like nothing was really going on. But because I knew there was something big coming, I kept going, and when the big event happens, I immediately began the book over again. The light bulb clicked, and I made myself read things slower and piece the story together much the way Liz had to.

In finishing the book, I couldn’t help me reminded of Carol Lynch Williams’s Glimpse and what a fantastic readalike this is for that title. We have a very edgy topic at play, but it’s tackled delicately and through the eyes of a narrator who we come to trust quite well. This title will work well for fans of Ellen Hopkins, but I really think that stands out about the connection between Exposed and Glimpse is the narrator. In both, the narrator is both part of and not part of the central story, and we as readers are forced immediately to decide whether we believe them or want to believe them. Being able to convince your reader to buy the narrator through the use of verse is tough, and in both of these books, we’re not given tricks nor are we disappointed with our intuition at the end of the story. There is so much else at stake in the story and as a reader, I appreciate that I’m allowed to experience those along with the character and not feel betrayed. Of course, that’s not to say Hopkins does this in her stories — because she doesn’t — but her narrators are part of the story itself, rather than the vessel through which the story is told.

At the end of Marcus’s book, we don’t have a tidy clean conclusion. We’re still with Liz, behind the camera, trying to capture what it is we need to catch. I love these types of endings, and I think with the story itself, this is what we need.

I think this will be a book to watch — it’ll make a great readalike to not only the titles listed above, but also to Daisy Whitney’s The Mockingbirds. If you’ll remember, one of the key elements to this story was not on the victim but instead on justice; in Exposed, our main character goes through something quite similar. She’s not the victim, even though deep down she is and she, too, seeks justice for herself and her conscious.

Marcus’s debut is precisely what it promises: powerful. I cannot wait to see where this author takes us next. Exposed will hit book shelves February 22, so you have very little wait time left.

Chasing Alliecat by Rebecca Fjelland Davis

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Sadie’s parents have a bit of a strange relationship, and to figure out where they stand with one another, they’re spending the summer together in Egypt. Sadie, of course, can’t come with them, so they dump her with family in small town Minnesota, where she lives in a tiny room and finds herself bored. But then Sadie meets Joe and Allie — and it’ll be Allie who ultimately changes the course of her summer by pushing her to try something new: mountain biking.

Sadie finds she loves biking, and she gets good at it. So good, in fact, she signs up for a mid-summer race as a beginner. Even though her nerves shake and shake at the thought, she’s going to do it. This is going to be her summer escape.

Then things between Joe and Allie get tense, and Joe seeks the time and guidance of Sadie, who herself is confused about who or what either of her new friends are. She wants to get to the bottom of these two, but when Allie finds the half-dead body of a local priest then disappears mysteriously for days, that’s when Sadie knows there is something much deeper and darker going on.

Chasing Alliecat was a fast-paced read that I think really fills a niche in the YA market. It’s part adventure, part mystery, as well as part sports novel. There are killer racing scenes written with pure adrenaline, and even as a non-biker, I could feel those moments and they made me want to grab a bike and hit the trails with Allie.

I dug the way this book was set up and executed: immediately, we know that there is a mostly dead body and we know that Allie is somehow connected to this priest. Of course, we don’t know why, and we aren’t given the chance to know why for quite a while. As soon as the body’s discovered and Allie flees, we’re ripped from the moment and taken back a month in time to the beginning of Sadie’s stay with her relatives. This gives us as readers not only the opportunity to get to know the characters and the story leading to this life changing bike trip, but it also forces us to read a little differently than had we been given the story more linearly. I like that we’re trusted to play detective before Sadie can, since the story’s flashback point means she actually doesn’t know what’s going to happen is coming — this isn’t a story of her reflecting back on the events leading up to the discovery so it’s as if we get secret knowledge and we can pack it away and hope Sadie gets those clues along the way. This was a very smart tactic, and it really stood out to me as an offering of trust to the reader.

The relationships among characters are interesting, and I think that Davis does a good job developing full and dynamic characters. Allie is herself a bit of an enigma, but because we pick up enough clues through Sadie (and Joe’s) observations, we get a picture that there’s something broken about her. She’s a tough girl and not just because of her mountain biking. Sadie is, too, though she seeks the same sort of strength present in Allie. Joe is also a character of strength, but Sadie’s a little more reluctant to dig this from him; she knows there’s something buried inside him since the death of his brother, and when she finds it, her respect for him grows exponentially.

For me, the mystery of the story seemed pretty obvious. I had Allie’s game figured out early on, as some of her clues are huge, but I think for the average teen reader, this won’t be so obvious. The mystery itself reminded me a bit of the mystery in Mary Jane Beaufrand’s The River in that all of the pieces are there, but the actual point of the story isn’t to collect them to get from point A to point B. Instead, we’re supposed to stop and consider the bigger elements of the story itself: the characters, the setting, and the vehicles driving the narrative. That’s to say, the bigger mystery is unlocking these pieces. Once those unravel, the mystery works itself out.

I didn’t quite feel the romantic pull between Joe and Sadie as I believe I maybe should have, but that came down to also not believing Allie’s sexuality. We’re given hints — from Joe himself, in fact — that Allie is a lesbian. In fact, we’re led to believe throughout that Allie may have feelings toward Sadie; at the end of the story, we’re given Sadie’s insight into this and her reactions. I kind of felt this element was extraneous and served as a way to detract from the mystery. I think given the powerful aspect of mountain biking woven into the story, this could have been left out. I didn’t think romance or discussion of sexuality mattered in a story that really dug into much deeper family issues. I guess, too, I was a little uncomfortable with how Sadie handles this in the end, even if she is quite realistic. Most readers won’t give it a second thought.

Chasing Alliecat is an excellent pick for readers looking for a good story with solid characters that moves along quickly. I think this title would work for reluctant readers — this is plot driven, despite having strong characters — and the premise of the story involving mountain biking has instant appeal. Though don’t discount this as only a book for reluctant readers: your light mystery and adventure fans will love this, as will readers looking for teens who do teen things like learn to mountain bike during the summer. There’s not too much content wise to worry about in this title, aside from a little cursing (which is not in any way gratuitous but fits with the characters and the sport), so I think this is a title you could talk to upper middle school students and high schoolers without problem.