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Good Girls, Bad Girls, Real Girls: WLA Presentation

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Yesterday, I presented with author Carrie Mesrobian at the Wisconsin Library Association’s annual conference up in the Dells. We talked about teen girls in YA fiction and in the library to a full room of librarians who were really excited to talk with us about this topic. We started out asking for names of strong female characters in YA and got a nice response — then we flipped the switch and asked what the hell “strong female character” even meant. We had a great conversation about how we define strong female characters in YA and how names of heroines in fantasy or science fiction come to mind quicker than those in realistic YA.

Perhaps the best quote was one Carrie tossed out when we were talking about how today’s teens read and how they think about their reading: where we as adults are trying to program the VCR, today’s teens are already streaming the content they want and like.

Rather than try to box teens in, it’s our job as adults who work with teens or who care about them to continue giving them diversity and to quit thinking about them and their interests in binary ways. They don’t think that way, and we shouldn’t either.

For those who attended and asked about our presentation — or those who are interested in it — here’s a link to the Prezi. The books we talked about are included with covers, and you can zoom in as much as you need to to grab titles/authors. There are links to a couple of surveys of teen girls, as well. I’m happy to answer any questions or for those who attended and can’t remember the name of one of the books we talked about, I’m happy to help out.

YA Review Round-up: 100 Sideways Miles, Tell Me Again How A Crush Should Feel, and Press Play

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I’ve come to realize that I can either write lengthy reviews and read fewer books or I can read more books and post fewer reviews. I don’t think I have to choose one over the other. I’ve found there’s a need to just strike some good balance between the two, meaning that when I’m in the mood to just read, then I need to do that and when I’m in the mood to really dig into the books I’m reading, then I need to just do that.

I’m putting together a couple of review round-up posts for recent reads to talk up some of the things I have been reading. There’s nothing thematically similar about these books, other than they’re all titles I’ve read recently and are worth talking at least a little bit about.

My experience with Andrew Smith’s books are a mixed bag. Sometimes, I love them and sometimes, they’re really not my thing at all. I found Grasshopper Jungle to fall into the “not my thing at all” category this year, especially as I felt that the way females were depicted in the story was problematic. I don’t expect a book that’s through the eyes of a teen boy to always be perfectly respectful to female characters — that’s unrealistic — but when every female in the story has some kind of problem or is depicted as merely there as a side item, it starts to grate on me.

Enter 100 Sideways Miles.

The story centers on Finn and his experience as an epileptic. Or, well, it’s less about his experience as an epileptic as his experience being a teen boy trying to figure out what’s next in his life. It so happens he has epilepsy, due to a bizarre accident involving a horse that subsequently killed his mother. Finn’s goal at the end of this school year is to travel outside California with his best friend Cade. They want to check out a potential college in Oklahoma together.

In the interim, a new girl moves to town and quite literally meets Finn as he’s in the midst of a seizure. It’s completely embarrassing to him to have the new girl — who he can’t help but have his eyes on out of curiosity, if not more — walk in on him like that. But Julia isn’t fazed by it. In fact, it’s that event that brings them together and forges a satisfying relationship between the two of them. Smith offers up a solid female character in Julia, but more than that, he shows a really great romantic relationship between the two that feels real and more, feels real to who Finn is.

But this isn’t really about the romance. This is a book about guy friendship and about figuring out the questions of “what’s next” in life. I’d call this a straight up adventure story, especially in the second half, and it’s the kind of adventure story that seems to be lacking in YA. It’s two guys, on the road, figuring out not just who they are, but how they can solve big problems outside themselves while they’re on the road. 100 Sideways Miles also features what readers have come to expect out of Smith’s writing: it’s not necessarily straightforward and there are plenty of straight-up weird and bizarre plot elements. But those are part of the story and make sense within it. This is a much more accessible and, I think, enjoyable read than Grasshopper Jungle was this year. It features a diverse cast and a really authentic look at male friendship.

Tell Me Again How A Crush Should Feel is Sara Farizan’s sophomore novel, and it repeats some of the same writing-related things that I found didn’t work for me in her first book, If You Could Be Mine. In Tell Me Again, main character Leila — who is Iranian — has never had a crush before. It’s something she is almost a little proud of, or at least it’s something she’d be more proud of if it weren’t for the fact this is because she’s a lesbian. Her parents, who are strict and religious, can’t know about this, as they have very high expectations of her to follow the straight-and-narrow in the same way her older sister is. Leila feels the pressure, even if she doesn’t necessarily pursue it.

When new girl Saskia comes to Leila’s school, though, suddenly, she finds herself falling. Saskia is gorgeous and she appears to be very open and honest about her feelings. Leila can’t believe that someone as attractive and cool as Saskia could be the kind of girl she’d be able to call a girlfriend. Between their getting together after school, their intimate moments in a dressing room, and their shared kisses, it feels all but certain Leila now has her first real girlfriend. How will she tell her friends? Can she tell them? And what about her parents?

It’s not what it seems though, and Saskia isn’t the cool girl or girlfriend Leila thought her to be. She’s taken huge advantage of Leila and her naivety, leaving her hurt and confused. But when a long-time friend reenters the picture, perhaps things aren’t as bad as Leila thinks they are. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll be able to come out to her parents.

The writing in this one drags a bit and there are times where info dumps not only slow the pacing but they also sometimes seem to contradict themselves. We don’t get a super clear picture of any of the characters — including Leila — though Farizan does an outstanding job rendering Saskia as a toxic, manipulative girl who uses others for her own gain. At times, little to nothing happens in the story, and I felt like this moments deserved some higher stakes, both for the plot and for the characters so they could be more rounded and clearly depicted. I also wish there’d been a little more economic diversity within the story; this was a book featuring a lot of privileged characters and after a while, reading that got to be a little too much.


Tell Me Again reads younger than a lot of YA out there, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While there’s talk of sex and there’s drinking, I think this would be an okay book to hand to more mature middle school readers, as well as younger high schoolers.

If you’re looking for a book that’s a hard look at “dude culture” — something perhaps not explored as much as it should be in YA — then Eric Devine’s Press Play should fit pretty well.

Greg Dunsmore has earned the nickname “Dun the Ton” because he’s a big guy. A very big guy. But he’s using this as an opportunity to develop a film to gain him admission into a top film school. His plan is to film himself through intense weight-loss workouts, as well as the sort of bullying and teasing he gets for his body.

When he’s doing his workout in the weight room after school, he accidentally overhears and oversees something going on with the lacrosse team. It looks and sounds like bullying and hazing on a level he can’t stomach. He doesn’t have quite the solid proof that he’d like to to turn this into something bigger, but Greg knows now he has to pursue what it is he thinks is going on in order to shed light into the brutal hazing culture at his school. It’s not easy, and he’s not above seeing further bullying for what he’s trying to do, but Greg understands this is beyond him . . . even if he is also aware this could be an opportunity for his own future, too.

Devine’s book is a fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled book along the lines of Joshua Cohen’s Leverage. While there’s not a lot new offered to the fat kid being bullied angle in the story, Greg is authentic and honest in a way that many of these kinds of stories don’t allow their main characters to be. He’s not a perfect character, and his flaws are what make him a character worth following. Because he’s sometimes unlikable, stubborn, and frustrating to readers and to those who care about him, he’s almost the exact right person to be attempting to out the hazing going on with the lacrosse team. He doesn’t start out with an agenda, and when he decides he does have to pursue this, his dedication to it becomes something that both impresses and annoys those around him.

At times, Press Play went a little long and it could have maintained its intensity with a little tighter editing, but this is the kind of realistic YA that should appeal to both teen boys and teen girls who are interested in unflinching, stomach-twisting looks at the underbelly of high school and high school athletic culture. It’s a story that’s exceptionally timely and, unfortunately, exceptionally timeless.

Guest Review: The Silence of Six by E. C. Myers

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Frequent guest contributor Matthew Jackson – freelance writer, film & book critic, and professional nerd (plus Kimberly’s cohabitator) – is back with a review of E. C. Myers’ latest book, The Silence of Six. In 2012, Jackson reviewed Myers’ Norton-winning Fair Coin for us. He has also written frequently here at Stacked on the subject of horror.

One minute, 17-year-old Max Stein is sitting in his high school auditorium, watching a live presidential debate. The next, he’s watching – along with everyone else in the room – as his friend Evan hacks into the debate’s live video feed and shoots himself after uttering a very cryptic question: “What is the silence of six, and what are you going to do about it?”

That this is how the new novel from E.C. Myers – the Andre Norton Award-winning author of Fair Coin, which I loved – opens is compelling enough. That it happens within the first 15 pages of the novel is something I found outright gripping. Myers rockets the story from establishing scenario to brutal catalyst almost immediately, trusting his readers to take his hand and follow him on what will be a bullet-train of a techno thriller. Handled clumsily, this kind of set up might make the reader skittish. In Myers’ hands, though, it sends a message: All will be revealed if you just hang on for the ride.

Because Evan made contact with him shortly before his death, Max is suddenly at the center of a government manhunt, and a conspiracy that he can’t possibly begin to comprehend. Reeling from his friend’s drastic act, and desperate for answers, he must dive back into his own previously abandoned hacker identity, and navigate a complex online world of aliases, back doors, secrets and lies, before it’s too late to find out what Evan really gave his life for.

I remember all-too-well the emotionally harrowing feeling that everything when you’re a teenager, even the most mundane thing, is a high-stakes moment, so I’m a sucker for stories that take that all-or-nothing rollercoaster of adolescence and morph it into an adventure where the stakes actually are high. In the world of The Silence of Six, the secrets teenagers harbor really are worth dying and killing for. The government really is out to get you. Every keystroke really can be watched over by someone else. This is a world of whispers and codes and masks, both physical and virtual, a world where you sometimes have to lie and steal to survive another day, a world where the truth could mean permanent silence. It’s got all the trappings of a government conspiracy blockbuster, but instead of a renegade cop or a paranoid reporter, a handful of resourceful teenage hackers are in the driver’s seat, and that makes it all the more engaging.

One of the things I found most impressive about Fair Coin was Myers’ ability to simultaneously deliver the goods we’ve come to expect from a story of that kind, and subvert those expectations. He does it again with The Silence of Six. It’s a techno-conspiracy-cyber-thriller, with everything that implies. It’s a search for the truth, a story about making it to the center of this knot of secrets no matter what, and to that end it’s a breathlessly entertaining page-turner that darts artfully forward from page one and never lets up. But that doesn’t mean Myers won’t to stop play with some of the conventions he’s working in. His hero is not an action star or an always technically precise supergenius. He’s a gifted, scared kid determined to find whatever right he can in a world that’s just gone wrong for him in countless ways. What looks like it could be a romantic subplot evolves into something else entirely, as Max forms a connection with another hacker that’s built more on personal stakes and, perhaps, a mutual sense of mischief than something romantic. The hacking done by the characters isn’t a few quick keystrokes of brilliance, but rather a series of clever, yet often imperfect, ploys to get to the next clue. The hacking in this story is both messy and satisfyingly geeky, giving it a realism that nerdier readers will happily get lost in. Perhaps most importantly for a thriller, though, the solution to this puzzle is both satisfying and surprising. Even if you actually do think you see the end of this book from a mile away, how Myers and his characters arrive at it, and what happens when they do, still manages to defy a few of the rules set forth by so many stories of this kind.

With The Silence of Six, Myers has again proven his gifts as a storyteller who both celebrates the tropes of genre fiction and wants to pick them apart and stitch them back together into a new creature. It’s a lightning-fast thriller with other, darker themes lurking beneath, and even if you think you’ve read books like this before, it will find a way to surprise you.

Review copy received from the publisher. The Silence of Six is available today.

A Few Cybils Reads – Part IV

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Burn Out by Kristi Helvig
Part of the reason I love SFF so much – and always have – is how fun it can be. Authors can really let their creativity fly and not worry so much about trivial things like “Could this actually happen?” Burn Out is probably the most fun Cybils nominee I’ve read so far. It’s set 300 years in our future, after an asteroid that was heading for Earth was deflected and hit the sun instead, causing it to advance much more rapidly through its life cycle. It’s now a red giant, all the oceans on the planet have dried up, it’s too hot to go outside for more than a minute or two at a time, and most humans live underground or in protected pods, using a machine to drag the last bit of moisture out of the air in order to survive. (You could ask me if this could actually happen and I could honestly say I don’t know, but my first guess would be “probably not.”) Tora lives underground, alone, after her mother and sister were killed by the sun and her father was murdered by the people he worked for after he refused to hand over the powerful weapons he built for them.

Tora has resigned herself to probably ending her own life eventually. The air soon won’t have enough water left in it and she figures it will be less painful to overdose on pain pills than die of dehydration. Then an old family “friend,” Markus, comes knocking on her door. He says the Earth’s leaders have found another planet where humanity can live. He can take her there. The price is her dad’s weapons, left in Tora’s safekeeping. Tora knows they were made to be used on other humans, which is why her father refused to give them up in the end. Tora says no. Markus leaves, but he returns, and he brings friends. Not the nice kind.

This is an action-packed story, told in Tora’s funny, sarcastic voice that kept me flipping through the pages. The plot has a hole big enough to drive a truck through, but that didn’t dampen my enjoyment. The setting is unique and the futuristic concepts are interesting, including a gun that can be keyed to a person’s particular vibrations, allowing only that person to use it. Each of the characters have ulterior motives, and Helvig teases these out over the course of the story, providing the plot with plenty of twists and turns. Some questions are answered by the end, and some aren’t, clearly leaving an opening for a sequel. You can bet I’ll be reading it.

The Truth Against the World by Sarah Jamila Stevenson
Olwen Nia Evans, Wyn for short, is moving with her family for a few weeks to Wales, to a little town called Cwm Tawel. The trip is her great-grandmother’s dying wish. She grew up in Cwm Tawel and wants to die there, among the peaceful scenery and familiar surroundings. Before the move, Wyn starts to have strange dreams of her great-gran and a little girl, which she blogs about. Another boy, an English boy with his own family ties to Cwm Tawel, stumbles across Wyn’s blog after a recent visit to his great-grandfather in Wales, where he found a headstone bearing Olwen’s name – and had his own run-in with a strange little girl. The two eventually meet up in Cwm Tawel and set about solving the mystery of the ghost Olwen Nia Evans, which involves digging up painful family history that some residents of the town would prefer stayed buried.

Stevenson’s book is unique for its setting; Wales doesn’t get a lot of love in the YA world, especially compared to its UK counterparts. I can easily see the descriptions of the country’s natural beauty encouraging readers to seek out more information or dreaming about visiting themselves. This is a gentle story, perhaps too gentle, as the stakes never seem very high. The solution to ghost Olwen’s mystery is too simple and will be easily deciphered by readers familiar with ghost stories. This would be a good pick for younger, patient readers who may not guess the connection between the ghost and Wyn’s great-grandmother from the start. (A pronunciation guide would have also been helpful for the nerdy readers.)

Messenger of Fear by Michael Grant
Grant’s latest is a series opener, though it stands on its own easily. Mara wakes up without any knowledge of who she is, other than her name. (Yes, it’s another amnesia book.) She’s greeted by someone who tells her he is the Messenger of Fear, and that before she lost her memories, she agreed to be his apprentice. Their duty is to confront those who have done wrong and present them with a choice: play a game, win it, and go free; or refuse or lose the game and face their worst fear. Messenger starts by showing Mara a teenage girl’s suicide, then rewinds time and shows her the events leading up to it. None of the events can be changed, but they must learn from what happened in order to present an appropriate game – and mete out the appropriate punishment if the wicked person loses.

This is not as much of a horror novel as the title or the cover would have you believe, despite a scene where a person is burned alive (described in detail). Fear is not really its goal. Instead, it’s more of an exploration of guilt and atonement, of the choices we make and how – if – we can make reparations. The idea behind the Messenger is to restore balance to the universe. Those who have not been punished by a human court must suffer a visit from the Messenger of Fear, in hopes of preventing the wicked from committing the same actions in the future. The situations Mara and Messenger view are realistic and presented with shades of grey. More often than not, multiple people are at fault rather than a single individual. It is left up to the reader to determine if the wrongdoer’s interactions with Mara and Messenger have set the balance right – if such punishment is justice or if it’s merely cruelty.

There’s a twist to the story that sharp readers will see coming, though the hints sprinkled throughout start light and grow heavier as the story progresses. It will take a truly eagle-eyed reader to spot the truth from the beginning, keeping tension high through most of the novel. Picking out the twist before the end isn’t always a bad thing, provided it doesn’t happen too soon (as I think it would in the book above). There’s a certain satisfaction in putting the pieces together yourself over several chapters and then learning you were right in the end. At times gruesome, the book is also thought-provoking and smoothly written, easily absorbed in an afternoon.