Teen

Review: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

| Tasha

code name verity

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Verity has been captured by the Gestapo, who have tortured her and kept her without sleep for weeks.  Now she has agreed to tell them the truth, but as a British spy during World War II, that means putting many others in danger.  Still, it gets the torture to stop, and there are many ways to be truthful.  As Verity puts pen to paper, she tells the story of the friendship between two girls, Maddie and Queenie, who would never have met during peacetime, much less become best friends.  Maddie’s story is that of becoming a female pilot when there are very few.  It is a story of strong skills, good luck, and great mentors.  Along the way, she met Queenie, another strong girl, who spoke German, bluffed naturally, and loved fiercely.  This friendship is the heart of Verity’s story of truth, one written with details that are lingered over as if they transport her somewhere safe.  It is also the story that will keep her alive one more day, but eventually the story must end.

Wein is purely masterful here.  While I caught certain things in the story that pointed me to the right conclusions, much of it is so cat and mouse that it is a real pleasure to puzzle through.  That said, it is also a great story all on its own without the puzzle, something that is incredibly difficult to do.  Wein populates her story with so many strong women.  There are Maddie and Queenie, either of whom would have been heroine enough to carry their own book.  Yet there is the magic of having their stories told intertwined.  There are the other women who risked their lives against Hitler, women who defied by seeming to capitulate, women who fought with all their had.  It is the story of all of those women too.

Throughout the book there is an ache that will not go away.  That is the ache of Verity and her story of torture.  Every detail is rimmed with sorrow, with never seeing it again, with the knowledge that her days are so few.  This creates a fragility, a solid sadness, that is present throughout.  It is the world of war, the desperation and the death, and it lifts this book to another level that is beyond the pain.

Tremendously beautiful, achingly sad, and beyond brave, this book and these heroines are simply and utterly amazing.  This is a must-read book, one that I hope garners awards, one that will be a delight to share with others.  Oh, and I must mention that it’s a great crossover for adult readers too.  Trust me, get your hands on this one!

Appropriate for ages 16-18.

Reviewed from library copy.

Review: The Other Normals by Ned Vizzini

| Tasha

other normals

The Other Normals by Ned Vizzini

Perry Eckert loves to play Creatures & Caverns in all of his spare time.  He doesn’t have any friends to play the game with, so he just creates characters.  When someone inspires him to create a character based on himself, he does.  Of course the character differs in some ways, like his red skin, yellow hair and tail, but he is also not that strong, not that fast, but full of honor.  Perry’s parents are worried about him being a social outcast, so they send him to summer camp.  There, Perry is swept into a world where Creatures & Caverns is real!  Even better, they need Perry to help them save their world.  All it will take is Perry kissing the most popular girl at camp.  No pressure.

Vizzini is a master of misfit characters.  He takes Perry and throughout the book reveals much more about him than just his geeky exterior.  Instead, we all discover that Perry is a true hero, filled with honor, who is intelligent and very brave.  Vizzini throws in realizations that Perry has about modern American life, about thinking too much and acting too little, that will resonate with readers. 

Vizzini does not shy away from swear words in critical places.  There is also some nudity (on the part of Perry) but I won’t ruin those parts for you.  Vizzini brings lots of humor to the story, enough to bring out big guffaws of laughter at times.  There is also plenty of adventure, some death, enormous monsters, and everything that D&D players would want in a book. 

Get this into the hands of kids you know who game.  They will enjoy not only the game brought to life idea, but also the winning hero at the heart of a great adventure.  Appropriate for ages 15-17.

Reviewed from ARC received from HarperCollins.

Review: Every Day by David Levithan

| Tasha

every day

Every Day by David Levithan

A wakes up as a different person every morning.  All A knows is that it is going to be someone different and somewhat nearby the last person.  After living life this way for 16 years, A has gotten used to it and doesn’t know any other way of life.  A can jump into either a girl or a boy, straight or gay, abused or adored, each day is completely different and each life and family exists for just a day.  There is freedom in this life but also loneliness.  A has rules, trying not to do any damage to the person whose life is being borrowed, trying to pass tests and live a normal day.  But then A meets Rhiannon as A spends a day in her boyfriend’s body.  The two of them spend an amazing day together at the beach, skipping class.  A is in love for the very first time, but how can a person who moves from body to body even go on a first date? 

This beautifully written book is told in the first person from A’s point of view.  The concept of the book is immensely strong and makes for a read that is so strong and vibrant that it lingers with you and you think about it afterwards.  A is an amazing character whose life is wildly different from our own and yet it’s a life that also sheds light on what we should be celebrating as we live our more stable lives.  A manages to show how truly broad human experience can be.  Moving from body to body, there are no longer judgments about straight and gay, race or religion.  It is all about being immensely and breathtakingly human.

Levithan also examines many facets of being human, from family ties and relationships to being different in profound ways to self acceptance.  His writing is a gorgeous mix of fast-paced storytelling and lingering thoughts.  It is in those moments where he puts words to love, life and being human that his writing is transcendent. 

A strikingly bold concept, a vibrant main character who is impossible to define and amazing writing make this one of the best teen novels of the year.  Appropriate for ages 15-18.

Reviewed from digital review copy received from NetGalley.

Review: Drama by Raina Telgemeier

| Tasha

drama

Drama by Raina Telgemeier

The author of the award-winning Smile returns with another graphic novel that captures the turmoil and thrill of being a teen.  Here the focus is on high school theater.  Callie loves theater, but not being an actress, instead her passion is set design and working behind the scenes.  This year she gets her big chance with the production of Moon over Mississippi as the main set designer.  She has a big vision, the question is whether she can pull it all off.  In particular, the cannon scene proves very challenging, but Callie knows she just has to have the cannon really fire on stage.  In the meantime, Callie is getting to know two handsome twins who are also interested in theater, enjoying her friendship with the other stage crew members, and dealing with lots of drama onstage and off. 

Telgemeier has created a graphic novel that both actors and those behind the scenes will love.  It is great to see a book focus on the efforts that it takes to really get a show running, rather than just who gets to be in the spotlight.  The story is welcoming and inclusive, just like any great theater crew.  There are gay characters, crushes on both the right and wrong people, mistakes on stage, and much more to love.  She has captured high school without being fanciful at all.

As with her previous book, Telgemeier’s art has a combination of empathy and humor.  She laughs along with her characters and never at them.  It’s a crucial difference that makes her books all the more laudable and readable. 

Highly recommended, this is one for the Glee fans and also for all of those teens who work behind the scenes rather than dreaming of time on stage.  Appropriate for ages 13-16.

Reviewed from ARC received from Scholastic.

Review: My Life in Black and White by Natasha Friend

| Tasha

my life in black and white

My Life in Black and White by Natasha Friend

Lexi has always been known as the beautiful girl.  Her sister Ruthie is the smart one.  Her best friend Taylor is the fun one.  But that all changes when Lexi and Taylor go to a high school party.  When Lexi sees her best friend together with her boyfriend, she thinks her world has ended.  But then she is in a car accident and her face goes through the windshield.  Now Lexi has to figure out how to go on after losing the one thing that defined her beyond everything else, her beauty.  Plus she has to face it all without her best friend or her boyfriend by her side.  It’s like she lost everything in one single night, and maybe she did.

Friend excels at honesty in her teen novels.  Lexi starts out as a fairly vain young woman but after her series of disasters, readers are firmly on her side.  It is wonderful to see a book that takes the time to explore the process of grief, anger and finally acceptance so fully.  Lexi is a young woman who is strong, vital and much more than her face.  As the book proceeds, readers see beyond the beauty just as Lexi herself is discovering that there is more to her as well.

The writing here is clear and clean.  Friend explores not just Lexi’s relationship with her friends, but also how her sister is affected and how her parents cope.  There are no easy situations here, her father wants to fix everything and her relationship with her mother completely shatters.  There are sexual situations in this book, making it firmly a teen novel more appropriate for high school audiences.

There is plenty of pain in this novel, plenty of growth, but it is also smart and funny, just like Lexi herself.  Appropriate for ages 16-18.

Review: Zoe Letting Go by Nora Price

| Tasha

zoe letting go

Zoe Letting Go by Nora Price

Zoe has been placed at a treatment facility by her mother.  At Twin Birch, each of the six patients arrives on a different day, staggered so that they can have a personal intake.  When Zoe arrives, she has no idea why she is there.  It just gets more confusing as she meets the other girls who are patients too.  They are all skeletal and obviously suffering from anorexia, but Zoe is not like them.  She has never stopped eating, she is larger than all of them, and her body doesn’t shiver after eating like theirs does.  Most of all, Zoe misses her best friend, Elise.  Provided stationery by her therapist, Zoe writes Elise long letters about their friendship thinking back about all of the time they spent together and revealing slowly the nature of their relationship.  Elise, though, never writes back.  This psychological thriller will have readers eager to discover the truth about Zoe and why she is at Twin Birch.

I am torn about this book.  I could not put it down until I knew more about Zoe.  She is a fascinating protagonist, who is completely unreliable and yet very likeable.  Her doubts about why she is there serve as a very successful way to create tension and mystery.  Zoe is caught up in her own world that slowly crumbles as the book progresses. 

However, at the end of the book, the story itself falls apart.  I’m not a reader who has any problem with vague endings usually, but if you build a book around the question of what is wrong with Zoe and who she really is, you have to answer that question!  This book doesn’t do that and it is very disappointing to the reader.  I wasn’t looking for details about her life after Twin Birch, but I did want more clarity about her real relationship with Elise.  The few details offered were tantalizing glimpses of bullying, but only that.

This is a complex, riveting read that is also a fascinating look at grief, responsibility and eating disorders.  It just doesn’t coalesce at the end, sadly.  Appropriate for ages 14-16.

Reviewed from copy received from Razor Bill.

Review: The Girl with Borrowed Wings by Rinsai Rossetti

| Tasha

girl with borrowed wings

The Girl with Borrowed Wings by Rinsai Rossetti

This is a stunning debut novel that will have your heart beating fast for many reasons.  Frenenqer was created in the brain of her father, the perfect girl.  So she tries to be exactly that for him by following his long list of rules about how to hold her fork, close doors silently, and never embarrass the family.  But she can also feel the absence of wings on her back, as if she had been meant to have them all along but instead she has the pressure of her father’s finger there.  Her life is lonely and dull, not even allowed to walk outside on her own in the oasis where they live surrounded by desert.  Everything changes though when she rescues the dying cat in the market, against her father’s wishes.  That dull lump of fur turns out to be a boy who can shapeshift, who can fly and who can show her new worlds and remembered places.  As their relationship grows into something beyond friendship, Frenenqer has to face her own life of isolation and her part in her father’s controlling ways.

Rossetti’s writing is magnificent.  She creates such a sense of claustrophobia in Frenenqer’s life, such a world of stifling expectation, lack of humanity and perfectionism.  That feeling is amplified by the setting of the oasis, limiting even further her options of a different sort of life.  When her rescuer arrives he represents breaking those rules, throwing them aside, and a freedom that she had never dreamed of.  Here is where Rossetti makes a choice that sets her book apart from others.  Frenenqer does not tumble easily into that freedom, she fights it, struggles with it, and almost rejects it.  And it all makes wonderful sense.

Frenenqer is a unique character.  She is a mix of world traveler and solitary reader.  She yearns for freedom and shuns it.  She longs to be touched but rejects that too.  She is shown love of a new sort and doesn’t know what to do with it.  She is beyond brave but also terrified.  She is certainly abused mentally by her father, ignored by her mother, but also defies them in small ways that show you she is not cowed by them yet.  She is pure and lovely complexity that works.

Beautifully written, wonderfully sculpted, this novel is a fresh look at fantasy from a new author.  Appropriate for ages 13-16.

Reviewed from copy received from Dial Books.

Review: Small Damages by Beth Kephart

| Tasha

small damages

Small Damages by Beth Kephart

Kenzie is not the sort of teen who gets pregnant.  She has college plans, a boyfriend who is headed to Yale, but she took risks.  Earlier in the year, she lost her beloved father and now her mother just wants to move on.  Her mother wants to do the same with the pregnancy.  Kenzie decides to keep the baby and her mother creates a plan to keep the pregnancy a secret: she sends Kenzie off to Spain for the summer.  Staying with a friend of her mother, Kenzie is taken under the wing of Estela, a small, fierce woman who cooks for the ranch where they raise bulls for bullfighting.  Estela guides Kenzie through learning to cook, making sure that she also takes care of herself and the baby.  Kenzie meets the couple who will adopt her baby and also a young man who works on the ranch with the animals.  She slowly comes out of her shell, building relationships with those around her.  This book is an homage to Spain, an exploration of choice, and a delight of a read.

As always, Kephart writes with the voice of a poet.  Her language is especially effective here as she recreates Spain for the reader with all of its colors, scents and sounds.  There is a wonderful space to the novel, a quietness that is profound and amazing.  It too speaks of a foreign country, of being cared for by another generation, and of having time to contemplate and decide.  This book is also complex.  Decisions are made and reconsidered, lives are changed, and there is no surety to the final decision until the last page is turned.  It is a compelling dance between quiet desperation, beauty and real family and belonging. 

This is a book that you want to curl up and read and read as long as your eyes will let you.  It is a trip to Spain filled with all of the warmth, personality and impressive history of that land.  The play of the modern American teen against that timeless background is pure genius, giving a story that could have been straight forward a real depth and power.

This is an exceptional teen novel that will also be enjoyed by adult readers as a crossover title.  It is elegantly written and gloriously beautiful.  Appropriate for ages 15-18.

Reviewed from copy received from Philomel Books.

Review: The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

| Tasha

brides of rollrock island

The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

Released September 11, 2012.

Rollrock Island is remote and isolated with only one ferry connecting it to the mainland.  It is also a place of magic, magic that is less sparkles and fairy dust and more ocean currents, sealskin and lust.  It is where Misskaella the witch lives, a woman able to peel away the skins of seals and gather their energies together into a woman who is beautiful and biddable.  In this way, Misskaella takes vengeance upon the women of the town who never accepted her.   She charges the men for the honor of having a wife from the sea, taking not only the money they have gathered now, but future wages as well.  These men are just as dazzled and tamed by the magic as their once-seal wives.  The desperation and quiet horror of the selkie story builds steadily as the book continues, leaving it to the next generation, the children of these unions, to see if they can resolve this, or not.

I have long disliked stories based on selkie myths, so I read this because of my love for Lanagan’s work.  But Lanagan gets at the nastiness of these relationships, the sandy dirtiness of them that will not wash away.  Her writing is by turns ethereal and wondering and then turns to the baseness and cruelty of what is happening.  There is a strong sense of place woven into the story.  It simply could not take place anywhere else.  From the seals at the base of the cliff to the tiny town that is simple yet enticing, Rollrock Island is unique and astounding yet also grindingly normal.

Lanagan plays with contrasts throughout the entire book.  The women who rise from the ocean are compliant yet wrenchingly miserable, longing for a world that they have lost.  The men are dazzled and yet absent.  The children beautiful, part sea and part land, yet also unable to see the truth until it is forced upon them.  It is as much Misskaella’s story as it is the selkies.  Their destinies intertwined thanks to her magic.

Told in a series of short stories that show the different points of view, though never the point of view of one of the selkie women, this book is pure richness and beauty.  Lanagan takes a timeless myth and exposes it, yet leaves the reader hopeful in the end.  This is a glorious read.  Appropriate for ages 15-18 and a great crossover read for adults.

Reviewed from digital copy via NetGalley.