Sarah Dessen’s popularity among the patrons who compete with me for YA materials at my library is evidenced by the amount of time it took me to finally get my hands on this book.  It’s been pretty much a year since publication, and I’m finally getting my grubby paws on a copy.

I count myself among the legion of Sarah Dessen fans and, as such, find little in her novels to really disappoint.  Sure, there was the cheesy artwork created by Wes, the love interest of The truth about forever, and the sometimes self-conscious hipsterness of Dexter, the love interest from This lullaby.  But then, there’s also the sense of place that Dessen is so adept at evoking, and the little details of everyday life that sneak into her prose in sometimes poignant ways.

At any rate, this (not really) latest novel begins with seventeen-year-old Ruby’s arrival at the home of her older sister Cora and her husband Jamie.  Following her substance abusing mother’s disappearance, Ruby had been attempting to live on her own.  When a neighbor discovers she is alone (and living in rapidly deteriorating conditions), Ruby is sent to the home of the sister she hasn’t seen in nearly 10 years.

What I thought was going to be a country-mouse-city-mouse story (Cora and her husband are well-off) complete with obligatory prep school trial by fire actually avoided all of those well-worn tropes in favor of a more subtle exploration of Ruby’s and Cora’s different understandings of their childhood and their mother.  Ruby’s growing friendship with a neighbor leads to the realization that he is being abused by his father and it is this awareness that causes Ruby to examine her own past with more critical eyes.

A longer novel that name-drops characters from earlier Dessen novels (Rogerson, anyone?), Lock and key is nonetheless a solid Dessen offering.  Girl-centric, introspective (but not annoyingly so), mildly romantic (but not in a cutesy way), and cautiously optimistic, this is another novel that sets the bar for would-be competitors like Maureen Johnson and Rachel Cohn.

After I busted through the first novel in Ness’s “Chaos Walking” trilogy (The knife of never letting go, 2008),  I was psyched to read the second volume and, in the end, not disappointed by the series’ continuation.  The second book begins mere hours after the first book ends:  the first novel’s narrator, Todd, has been captured in Haven, the town to which he and his friend Viola fled, and the two travelers have been separated.  This novel differs from the first in a pretty essential way, however.  This time, we, the readers, are privy to the thoughts of both Todd and Viola, as the story is told from the alternating first person perspectives of both characters.

Set entirely in New Prentisstown (formerly known as Haven), the second novel describes the town’s takeover by Mayor Prentiss (the big meanie of book one and the mayor of Todd’s home town) and the subsequent control measures imposed by Prentiss.  Beginning with the segregation of the town’s women from its men and continuting in a campaign to band the town’s native alien inhabitants as well as its women, Prentiss enlists Todd’s help in the establishment of his rule.  Meanwhile, Viola finds herself involved with a group of rebels known as “The Answer” who are attempting to overthrow Prentiss.

Although the novel is over 500 pages long, the continuous action and suspense keep the plot moving.  As in The knife of never letting go, a clear and almost supernaturally strong villain is established–in this case, Mayor Prentiss does the honors.  Against this image of horrific power, the protagonists’ own difficult, violent, impulsive and even deadly actions seem somehow less so until, by the end of the novel, a continuum of acceptable violence has been established that you find yourself almost agreeing with.  While the first installment of the series was invested in Todd’s and Viola’s search for a safe home, this second installment allows that such a home might well be an illusion and that true safety comes with mastery of one’s own destiny.  To this end, the novel questions the ethics of leadership, positioning control as something to be both desired and feared.  In this way, the series continues its sort of tenuous relationship with the model set up in Seelinger Trites’ essay (see my entry for Knife):  the novel seems to both argue for the necessity of benevolent leadership (under which, in Trites’ model, the teen protagonist might subsume him or herself) but (somewhat subversively)  suggests that such leadership might be impossible.

In spite of my populist ways and commitment to questioning the often elitist adolescent books awards, reviews and ratings systems, I was curious to read Stork’s well-reviewed novel for young adults.  Plus, it had a pretty cover.

Told from the first person perspective of seventeen-year-old Marcelo, a teenager with a challenge he describes as similar to Asperger’s Syndrome, Stork’s novel describes the protagonist’s first summer job outside the comfort zone provided by his special education school.  When Marcelo’s father convinces him to take a job in the mailroom of his law office, promising Marcelo that he can continue to attend his special education school if he succeeds in “the real world,” he discovers information about one of his father’s biggest clients that threatens a pending lawsuit.

Using Marcelo’s “almost-Asperger’s” as something of a metaphor, Stork describes his protagonist’s gradual disillusionment with a world he was never really interested in joining.  As Marcelo weighs his options with regards to his father’s case, he discovers that the mental music into which he often disappears is fading and the incoherence of the “real world” is taking its place.

While I did enjoy the book, I do wonder at the appropriateness of “Asperger’s as metaphor,” especially since the primary symptom that kept Marcelo from really interacting with the “real world”–the distracting and absorbing mental music–seemed to disappear as Marcelo’s awareness of the world increased.  In an odd way, the novel seemed to both challenge and preserve dominant conceptions of childhood, almost arguing that the innocence and self-absorption we associate with immaturity is necessarily abandoned on the path to growth while at the same time suggesting that we should work to retain aspects of this childishness (Marcelo’s sexual innocence and “pure” selflessness).  This reading places Marcelo into more of a children’s book camp than the one associated with the YA novel; however, can’t we argue that the YA novel means to do much of the same work that the children’s novel does?  The character of Marcelo, the “disabled” protagonist on his or her way to becoming a “type” in contemporary young adult fiction, represents the new adolescent ideal (as imagined by adults):  whip-smart and autodidactic, sensitive, innocent and, most importantly, different but “mainstreamable.”  Because isn’t “mainstreaming” the dominant theme of YA fiction?

I just don’t know what to think about Francesca Lia Block anymore.  I’ve always been a fan of her delicately gothic urban fantastic young adult novels; lately, however, I’ve felt a bit let down.  I had read an interview with FLB in Voice of Youth Advocates in which the author had discussed both The waters and the wild and a second upcoming book, Pretty dead.  Intrigued, I put both on hold at the library.  The Waters and the wild showed up first.

A short novel in Block’s more mythologically conscious style, Waters describes Bee, a thirteen-year-old girl more comfortable in the garden (where she contemplates ingesting the rich soil) than among others.  When Bee is visited by a doppelganger, she befriends two fellow outcasts–Haze, a schoolmate who belives he half alien and half human; and Sarah, who believes she is a reincarnated slave–and discovers that she is a changeling, the daughter of a fairy queen who has been swapped with a human baby.

The FLB brand of magical realism is here in spades but is tempered by what seems to be overt politicizing.  While FLB’s novels have certainly never been apolitical, in this latest short work, references to global warming and the twin towers pepper the prose and bits of poetry woven in the story.  These poetic images strike me as a little too much, a little too deliberately and delicately precious in their coy specificity.  While some might argue that FLB’s allusion to AIDS in Weetzie Bat makes a deadly disease into an inappropriate metaphor, I thought it was the fact that Block dared to evoke its metaphoric potential that made this political aspect of that novel strong.  Here, there are no metaphors, only the report of the didactic hammer.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep waiting for my copy of Pretty Dead, the novel FLB describes as a vampire novel deliberately written in a popular style.  I’m curious to see how it turns out.

As you know, I’m a sucker for a series; therefore, I was super stoked when I finally found the second installment of the “A-List” spin-off series, “A-List:  Hollywood Royalty,” at the library.  Set in the Hollywood/Los Angeles/Beverly Hills of the “A-List” series, “Hollywood Royalty” focuses more closely on a clique of privileged friends and classmates who have connections with the entertainment industry.  The series’ three heroines–Myla, the adopted daughter of a Hollywood super couple (think Brad and Angelina); Jojo, Myla’s recently discovered “sister” and the biological daugther of Myla’s adoptive parents; and Amelie, a teen starlet known for her role on a children’s TV show called “Fairy Princess”–get acquainted formally in this second volume.

The novel begins with the announcement that the male star chosen for the lead in the teen movie Amelie is co-starring in (and filming at Myla’s and Jojo’s high school, Beverly Hills High) has been let go from the project and that the production crew will be auditioning “regular guys” from the BHH student body to play the role.  Of course the role goes to the school nerd-turned-semi-stud, Jake Porter-Goldsmith (coincidentally, Jake’s also Amelie’s math tutor and is nursing a major crush on her), and a star is (sort of) born.  Meanwhile, Myla conspires to get her boyfriend Ash, who caught her kissing another boy in a fit of pique, to reconsider their breakup; Jojo enjoys a brief, albeit short, sisterly relationship with Myla; and Ash finds himself charged with ferrying around rock star client of his record label magnate father’s who has a reputation for excess.

Of course the plot is a little ridiculous:  Dean milks the “star is born” trope for (almost) all it’s worth and peppers the secondary plots with similarly corny cliches (Ash’s dad’s rock star client is only pretending to be rowdy; she’s just a regular girl!  Jojo–like any other fish out of water–just needs a new wardrobe and some lessons in social devastation to succeed in the shark-infested waters of BHH!).  That said, it’s the hackneyed content that you have to love:  these are our fantasies, laid bare and described with a precision and attention to detail that reveals them for the fantasies they are.  While the novels in this series’ attention to the detail of high status and brand name items seems to contribute to the illusion of these same items’ availability to us (the reader), this same description ironically underscores the very differences between our lives and the upper, upper-class lives of the characters.  That is, although the novels familiarize us with the trapping of wealth (and even teach us how to display the same), the particularity of these trappings make bring products’ inaccessibility to the forefront.  For example, instead of suggesting that a character drives a luxurious car (which we might imagine in our own terms), the description of this car as a fully loaded Escalade quantifies “luxurious” for us in a way that increases the distance between us and true luxury.  Pretty major, huh?

Fifteen-year-old Jessie has always suspected that she is, at heart, a nerd:  an ace in all the advanced classes at school, Jessie occasionally sits in on drums for her older brother’s punk band but attributes her ability to her math skills.  Somehow her best friends, the outrageous and charismatic Bizza and the gorgeous follower Char, have not only accepted Jessie since elementary school, they have also obscured her nerdiness with their friendship.  At the beginning of the girls’ sophomore year, however, things change.  Bizza and Char decide to “go punk,” adopting the style of dress and inviting themselves to hang out with Jessie’s brother’s band.  When Bizza hooks up with Jessie’s longtime crush, however, it’s the last straw, and Jessie attempts to find herself in a social world with out Bizza and Char.

I found Halpern’s second novel (the first of hers that I’ve read) to be a genuine and quirky read.  I’ll admit it:  I was concerned about the “my-best-friends-are-punk-posers” plot and feared that the book would disintegrate into a cooler-than-thou diatribe against Hot Topic and increasing citations of old school (and therefore cooler) bands.  Fortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the novel’s focus or even raison d’etre.  In fact, I don’t think that any bands were name dropped at all in the book’s 200 plus pages!  Instead, the novel’s plot turned on Jessie’s growing disillusionment with her friends and her subsequent involvement with (gulp) a group of Dungeons and Dragons players.

As far as I’m concerned, even though I’m not a D and D player, anyone who glorifies D and D and punk rock in the same book and with no shame or (worse) irony, has got it going on.  Into the Wild Nerd Yonder is one of few books that doesn’t simultaneously reify tropes associated with the portrayal of “punk” in teen novels while attempting to establish the extra-textual coolness and authority of its authors.  What a breath of fresh air.

So, you know how I tend to avoid both critically and popularly acclaimed (by my peers, at least) novels?  In the case of Patrick Ness’s The knife of never letting go, I’ve been proven a major rube.  I just finished the book–the first in a planned trilogy–this evening and I feel like a major loser for not having just listened to the critics (and prizegivers–Ness won the UK’s Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Booktrust Teenage Prize for the novel) and everybody else already.

Set on a planet settled in the not-too-distant past (in the teleological context of the novel) by humans, Knife is told from the first-person perspective of Todd, the last boy living in his settlement.  Following a war with the planet’s local “aliens” known as Spackles, all the female settlers have been killed and all the male members of humanity have been “infected” with the ability to see and hear each other’s thoughts.  The thoughts of animals are equally accessible and freely shared.  As Todd approaches his thirteenth birthday–the age at which all boys in his settlement become men–two notable events occur:  first, he discovers a source of Quiet within the Noise of men’s thoughts and, second (and related to number one), he is forced away by his guardians who warn him that his settlement town is getting ready to (metaphorically) explode.   A long (nearly 500 page) journey awaits Todd, the dog Manchee who accompanies him, and Viola, the source of the Quiet and the girl who ends up joining him.

Admittedly, Ness (or Candlewick) relies on my least favorite printing trope:  the use of a distinct and quirky font to capture some of the thoughts broadcast by men and beasts.  The novel is so otherwise rich, however, that I can’t call out the device as the cover for poor characterization is usually offers.  I hesitate to call this novel an adventure, mostly because the term has always implied optimism for me and Knife is definitely not optimistic.  It’s not super hardcore sci-fi, either, though the setting and technology (as well as the periodic lack thereof) are familiar conventions.  It’s no Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, to be sure, but it’s definitely not lighthearted.

As a young adult novel, Knife is invested in part in both challenging and reifying what Roberta Seelinger Trites wrote in her seminal (oval?) 2001 essay “The Harry Potter novels as a test case for adolescent literature” (Style, Fall, 2001) in which the critic argues that one of the functions of young adult literature is to urge its fictional characters (and, presumably, the teen reader) to accept their inferior position in the greater power system.  Ness’s novel both evades and confronts this, as in this quote from the middle of the book:

It’s like nothing that happened before really happened, like that was all a big lie just
waiting for me to find out.  No, not like, it was a big lie waiting for me to find out and
this is the real life now, running without safety or answer, only moving, only ever
moving (Ness, 2008, 230).

The first part of the quote–in which the narrator (Todd) realizes that childhood (”before”) and its lived conceits are lies seems to fit in with Trites’ theory.  The second, in which there is no “safety or answer, only moving” seems to evade the conclusion to which, Trites argues, adolescent protagonists are meant to come.  That said, perhaps the “moving” only postpones the inevitable, as the conclusion of this installment of Ness’s series might lead one to believe.  I’m waiting for the final act and keeping my fingers crossed.

This is another one of those books about which I disagree with one of the major review sources–in this case, Booklist–who gave Francine Prose’s third (I think) YA novel a starred review.  Here’s the thing:  I think that, in the case of Prose, the author’s reputation has preceded her.  Prose was nominated for a National Book Award and has received much  critical acclaim for her writing for adults; however, I’m just not sure she’s a good author of YA fiction.  I’ve read her previous two YA books (After [2004] and Bullyville [2008]) and I think that in her latest, Touch, she does what she’s done in the past:  addresses a social issue emerging around contemporary adolescence and tries to simultaneously politicize it and (and I’m not sure this is a word) “gothicize” it.

Touch is the story of fourteen-year-old Massie, a high school student who has always palled around with three male best friends.  Following a disasterous stay with her mother and her mother’s husband in the midwest, Massie returns to her father’s and stepmother’s house and is reunited with her erstwhile buddies.  In her absence, Massie has grown boobs and her friends have discovered their dicks and, after she begins a tentative physical relationship with one of them, the three boys sexually assault her.  Massie, confused about the incident and about her complicity, initially lies about one of the details of her account, but reassures herself that because the three boys also lied–they spread a rumor that she had asked them to touch her and that she wanted them to arrange for more boys to sample her wares–her lie is justified.  The narrative progresses chronologically beginning after the incident and is interspersed with conversations Massie has with her therapist.

As with After and Bullyville, I feel like Touch is a rather dressed up problem novel.  While the novel attempts to capture Massie’s growing confusion as to the truth of her own story–a compelling premise–the stock characters of Massie’s narcissistic stepmother, the hard-assed female lawyer the stepmother hires to sue Massie’s school (the assault happened on a school bus), Massie’s clueless father, and the young stepbrother who seems to be losing his innocence seem more like pawns than three-dimensional characters.  Coupled with a conclusion voiced by a slightly older Massie, looking back at this brief, confusing period in her life, the novel is like one of those spare but supposed-to-be-deep New Yorker short stories that I can never really stomach.

In many ways, Touch reminded me of Sexy (2005), by Joyce Carol Oates.  While I’ve never thought that Sexy was the finest example of Oates’ work, I do feel like she captured the ambiguity of a similar situation with much more menace.  In comparison, Prose’s novel comes in a distinct second place.

Does the fact that I didn’t fall in love with Laurie Halse Anderson’s National Book Award honor title mean that I’m a bad person?  To tell you the truth, I thought that the historical fiction was a bit manipulative (particularly the end of the first chapter, in which the race of the narrator is “revealed” in a sort of dramatic fashion) and that (God help me) M.T. Anderson did the whole thing better with his “Octavian Nothing” pair of novels.  The first person narrative of a female slave during the Revolutionary War, Chains follows Isabel, the novel’s narrator, and her sister Ruth who, following the death of their mistress, are sold to British loyalists who reside in Manhattan.  As one considered unworthy of notice, Isabel is privy to the secret plots of her master and she shares this information with a fellow slave and Washington supporter in hopes of earning back the freedom papers stolen from her and her sister.

While the novel was rather engrossing and moved quite urgently thanks to the short chapters featuring mildly cliffhanging endings, I didn’t feel like it added anything new to the genre.  Towards the end of the novel, when Isabel comes to the conclusion that though she is literally chained to her situation, her mind is unbound, it didn’t feel like the emotional climax I believe it was meant to be.  If I hadn’t read and thoroughly enjoyed and been challenged by the M.T. Anderson novels, I’m not sure I would be judging the L.H. Anderson novel as harshly as I am now.  Even the fact that Chained concludes with a cliffhanger and the promise of a further installment of Isabel’s trials sort of bothered me, if only because the first M.T. Anderson novel concluded on a similar (but, in my opinion, more nuanced) note.

I can’t really say how I feel about L.H. Anderson’s adoption of an historical black voice for her first-person narrative.  I’m not necessarily one of those people who insists on a “for us by us” ethic vis a vis writing Outside One’s Experience (and, I know, M.T. Anderson does the same with “Octavian”).  Maybe because L.H. Anderson’s fictional setting and situation remained traditional–versus the almost unbelievable situation of the narrator of M.T. Anderson’s novels–I sort of bristled at the cooptation of voice.

Then again, maybe I’m just trying to resolve my own issues with being a curmudgeon and with my growing identity as The Person Who Doesn’t Tend To Like Award-Winning Novels.

When fifteen-year-old Maddy’s parents divorce and Maddy, her eight-year-old sister and their mother move in with their grandmother in New Hampshire, Maddy is crushed to leave her Back Bay Boston brownstone, private school and gang of friends.  After a disasterous first day at school–in a funny scene, Maddy’s grandmother makes her wear a unicorn sweatshirt and “Mom jeans” instead of the punky first day of school outfit she had planned–Maddy decides that most of the denizens of her new high school are not really worth knowing.  Although she is eventually given permission to wear her own clothes, the damage has been done, and Maddy finds herself the high school popular clique’s target for teasing.  One member of the popular crowd seems sympathetic–and crush-worthy–though he never seems to break away from the thrall of the cool kids.  A new online role-playing game provides respite for the manga-drawing teen, and Maddy develops and online crush and weaves the imaginary narrative into a manga she’s creating based on her own life.

I can’t help but think I’ve read this story before.  I’ve encountered characters like Maddy in a lot of YA fiction–semi-disaffected alterna-teens who rage lightly against what Maddy calls “Aberzombies”–and her eventual discovery of her online crush’s identity (hint:  he’s from her town and goes to her high school) is pretty predicable (think You’ve Got Mail).  While the School Library Journal review of the novel touts the “manga and gaming themes” as unique selling points, I can’t help but think of these as just so much trendy decoration meant to distract readers from a recycled plot.  The end of the novel, which finds Maddy attempting to enter a manga-writing contest even after her slaved-over manga has been destroyed by the popular bullies, is particularly far-reaching.  I won’t spoil it for you, but I will tell you that it features a last-minute save by some new friends and a young, helpful teacher.  Gag.