Teen

Illyria

| Tasha

Illyria by Elizabeth Hand

Maddy lives in a sprawling complex with her large extended family.  Descendants of a famous actress, the family members are dramatic, eccentric and interesting.  Maddy is wildly in love with her cousin Rogan.  As children they stole kisses under the porch, but it becomes more serious and complicated as they become teens.  During one of their secret trysts together in the attic, the two discover a tiny stage hidden behind the wallboards, complete with effects and lighting.  When Rogan and Maddy are both cast in their school’s performance of Twelfth Night the magic that is the two of them together is threatened. 

In a world of bloated, oversized teen novels, this short book is a powerful gem.  Hand has created a book that really shines with its strong setting of the family home where so much of the action takes place.  Hand’s descriptions bring the entire book to life as she paints a vivid picture for the reader.  What is amazing is that she has created a story with such depth in so few pages. 

The story is based strongly in reality, making the discovery of the tiny stage that much more special and strange.  The book is a beautiful realistic story with a strong thread of magic running through it.  This is helped by the romantic, beautiful writing that soars with detail. 

Some readers will find the two cousins in a romantic relationship to be confusing and startling.  Hand has woven this sort of deep feeling into the text in such a way that it feels very real, very honest.  This is not there for effect, rather it is an important, inherent part of their relationship and roles with one another.  Their closeness is deepened by their kinship.

A beautiful soaring novel in a tightly-written package, this book is sure to appeal to those who enjoy fantasy but also those readers looking for a great romance.  Appropriate for ages 15-18.

Reviewed from copy received from Viking.

Also reviewed by:

Accomplice

| Tasha

Accomplice by Eireann Corrigan

This book will be released in August 2010.

It was a perfect plan, but then it all went wrong.  When their college prep advisor tells them that it takes more than good grades and community service to get into the best schools, Finn and Chloe decide to make themselves and their college essays very special.  They stage Chloe’s kidnapping, hiding her in the basement of Finn’s grandmother’s house because she is out of town.  It was supposed to be simple, but their carefully staged deception starts to wear on Finn as she is forced to lie to everyone, carefully staging her emotions and reactions to not only keep the lie going but to make sure that they get enough attention from the media.  When CNN shows up to cover the kidnapping, Finn and Chloe know that it cannot end the way they had planned and are forced to make dreadful choices.  Don’t pick up this page turner without clearing your day first, it is impossible to put down!

With a great premise, the book opens with Finn in the midst of the situation already.  There is little time to draw breath as readers are immediately plunged into a faked kidnapping staged by two very smart but very naive girls.  The drive to have a bit of fame combined with the pressures of college applications make for a potent combination for a book. 

The story is told from Finn’s point of view as she deals with attending school and lying to everyone in her life, including Chloe’s parents and her own. Finn is in denial about a lot of things throughout the book, facing complicated feelings about her best friend.  This tension about their relationship and what is at the heart of it makes the book even more compelling as Finn tries to navigate a situation of her own making.

This riveting novel is tightly written.  The book builds tension as Finn struggles with her emotions and with the fallout from the kidnapping.  It is not breakneck paced, rather it is woven into an intense read. 

Ideal for booktalking to teens, this book will have everyone right from the premise.  It completely lives up to its promise as a thrilling look at lies and fame.  Appropriate for ages 14-17.

Reviewed from ARC received from Scholastic.

Picture the Dead

| Tasha

Picture the Dead by Adele Griffin

After his death, Jennie had always felt the spirit of her twin brother near her.  Now her fiancé Will has died in the Civil War.  His brother, Quinn, has returned with injuries.  According to the army, Will died honorably in battle, but his brother tells a different story of prison and Will being a criminal.  Jennie seeks out the help of a spiritualist photographer, who takes the family’s picture and edits it by adding another image of an angle.  Jennie is not fooled, but soon she experiences things that she cannot explain.  Images of her are edited without anyone touching them, clues lead her deeper into a mystery, and time is running out as her place in Will’s family is threatened.  This paranormal, spiritualist mystery will have readers enthralled.

This book is so beautifully designed.  Lisa Brown’s illustrations take the book to another level, ensuring that readers are completely surrounded by Jennie’s world.  Jennie keeps a scrapbook and often takes small items to add to her book without the owners knowing.  As she adds these bits and pieces to her scrapbook, a series of visual clues start to emerge.  At the start of each chapter, readers will see items that will be added to the scrapbook in the next chapter.  This way each chapter starts with the clues and continues with the story itself.  This is an immensely entertaining way to read a book.

Griffin has created a book that lingers, slowly revealing its secrets.  The book is beautifully written.  Griffin has intertwined Jennie’s brother’s voice in the chapters, his advice for spies always right at hand when courage is needed.  Jennie is an intriguing protagonist who is multidimensional with her small thefts, desperation for a home, and ability to love two brothers.  It is her complexity that makes the book so fascinating.

Eerie, haunting and mysterious, this book is one that takes over your world.  Bright summer sun dims into streets at night, heat becomes a chill, breezes blow on still days.  Griffin and Brown have created a book that is an immersive experience that readers will not soon forget.

Appropriate for ages 13-16.

Reviewed from copy received from Sourcebooks.

Check out other reviews at Bookalicious, Good Books & Wine, BookLust, Through the Looking Glass, Cindy’s Love of Books, and Poisoned Rationality.

Life, After

| Tasha

Life, After by Sarah Darer Littman

Released July 2010.

Dani’s life is changed forever when a terrorist attack in her country of Argentina kills her aunt and the baby she is carrying.  Adding to the misery, the country of Argentina is in the middle of economic collapse.  Her father has lost his job and his sister and is now unable to cope.  Dani and her mother keep the family going with Dani fixing meals and caring for her younger sister.  Many people are fleeing Argentina, heading to Israel and the United States.  When Dani’s uncle makes an offer to get them visas, there is little choice but to move to the United States.  Dani must now cope with going to a large American high school, speaking and learning in English, and her father’s continued anger and depression.  In a world changed by the effects of terrorism, Dani finds understanding in the most unlikely of people and realizes that there is life afterwards.

This novel is one of many branches that twine throughout.  There are many things happening here, many things for the main character to deal with.  It is down to the skill of Littman that the book remains so cohesive and powerful.  These many branches are what make this book special and interesting.  They help tell the tale of immigration but also terrorism and economic collapse.  It is a timely story for American teens to read, one that will resound in their lives.

Dani is a great protagonist to see this experience through.  She is bright, helpful, giving, and yet can be angry, sad and confused as well.  The novel spends time in Argentina in the beginning, setting the stage to show just how much the family gave up in their move to America.  Often immigration stories start with the family already in the United States.  This time spent in Argentina really makes Dani and her family understandable and relatable.

Highly recommended, this book will reach its braches towards you and hold you tight.  Appropriate for ages 13-17.

Reviewed from Advanced Reader Copy received from Scholastic.

Also reviewed by The Reading Zone and nomadreader.

A Blue So Dark

| Tasha

A Blue So Dark by Holly Schindler

Aura has a secret that is getting harder and harder to keep.  Her mother is suffering from schizophrenia and has become Aura’s sole responsibility now that her father has remarried and started a new family.  Aura must make sure her mother goes to job as an art teacher and tries to monitor her through the window.  But her mother is slipping further and further away, into her own world of delusions, fear and suspicion.  As if that isn’t complicated enough, Aura has other personal issues.  Her best friend just had a baby and can’t be as supportive as she once was.  She has fallen for a skateboarding boy but can’t seem to put two words together around him.  To top it all off, she has started to work for her grandmother, who doesn’t know who Aura is.  As Aura tries to save and protect everyone around her, who is saving her?

This book is an honest and brutal portrayal of mental illness and the toll it takes upon the caregiver, in this case a teen who just wants to be normal.  A large piece of the tension here is the relationship between mother and daughter, which teeters, tips and overturns.  There is such a sense of betrayal and loss in their relationship, powerfully combined with dread and fear.  Aura sees herself in her mother’s illness, certain that she too will eventually succumb to schizophrenia.  She believes it is tied to the artistic talent that both she and her mother have, so she tries to turn her back on art.

Aura is a well-drawn protagonist trying to cope with an impossible situation and fighting to keep up the pretense that nothing is wrong.  She is by turns in denial about the situation and drowning in it.  She is a strong, amazing character who is resilient and refuses to stop fighting for her mother and herself. 

Highly recommended, this book is dark, deep and haunting.  It speaks from the heart about matters that are too often hidden or whispered about.  Appropriate for ages 14-17.

Reviewed from copy received from Flux.

Holly Schindler has done several blog interviews: Cynsations, Bildungsroman and Bart’s Bookshelf.

The Cardturner

| Tasha

The Cardturner: A Novel about a King, a Queen, and a Joker by Louis Sachar

Bridge, the card game, in a book for teens?  Yes indeed, and done so well that you will wonder why more teen novels don’t center on chess and bridge.

Alton is looking forward to a bleak summer.  His girlfriend dumped him for his best friend.  He doesn’t have any money, so he will have to get a crummy job.  And now his aging blind uncle has asked him to be his cardturner in bridge.  With pressure from his parents, who are focused on the potential inheritance from his uncle, Alton takes the job.  As he spends summer days in a strip mall, turning cards for his uncle, Alton learns the logic and drama of bridge.  He meets his uncle’s former cardturner, the beautiful Toni, who helps him learn the game, even though his uncle believes it is best that he doesn’t know anything about it other than the names and suits of the cards.  In the middle of the bridge and his dull summer, Alton discovers a romance filled with secrets that is finally satisfactorily resolved.

Sachar has such an ear for dialogue that it is as if you are listening to real conversations.  There is never a stilted moment to pull you out of the novel.  He also creates unique and fascinating characters.  In this novel, the uncle, Trapp, is a great character.  He is very complex and multifaceted, one of the best and most human elderly characters I have read in YA literature. 

At the same time, Sachar is dealing with making bridge understandable and not dull for the layperson.  He does this with a device of a whale, warning readers that a section filled with game details is coming.  Readers can skip down to the boxed summary if they don’t wish to get all of the details.  Me?  I loved each and every detail of the game, even though I don’t play at all.  The Appendix filled with even more details of bridge, though, was a bit too deep for me.

This unlikely teen novel makes bridge interesting, offers great adult characters, and has a fresh teen voice.  Give it to fans of the author who will love the details and karma of the book.  Appropriate for ages 14-17.

Reviewed from library copy.

The Suburb Beyond the Stars

| Tasha

The Suburb Beyond the Stars by M. T. Anderson

Released June 1st, 2010.

This is the sequel to The Game of Sunken Places.  If you haven’t read the first, you really must.  Not only will you understand and enjoy this second one more, but they are both worth the time.

Brian and Gregory are hard at work designing Brian’s Game, but then Brian is attacked on the subway by a strange man and a monster.  When the boys try to reach Gregory’s cousin Prudence there is no answer.  The boys head out to find Prudence but they find much more than they or the reader ever expected: suburbia.  Now the two friends must battle their way past strange singing children, perfectly manicured lawns, and roads that lead nowhere at all in order to find out what happened to Prudence and what is threatening the existence of our entire world.

I was all set to read the second book in the series, knowing that it would be Brian’s turn to create his version of the Game.  Just as I was settling in with that as the main storyline of the book, Anderson took an unexpected swerve.  I was suddenly reading a book I had not expected, much to my great delight.  Anderson mixes humor with horror to jarring effect.  The running gags had me giggling aloud while at the same time the tension and eeriness of the novel was mesmerizing.  Anderson uses imagery to warn, shock and jab.  In suburbia, Anderson has found the perfect setting for both his humor and his horror.

Get this in the hands of the readers of the first book, but make sure that new readers find this series.  It is a marvelous mix of fantasy, science fiction, horror and humor that will appeal to middle school kids effortlessly.  Appropriate for ages 12-15.

Reviewed from Advanced Reader Copy received from Scholastic.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Little Blog on the Prairie

| Tasha

Little Blog on the Prairie by Cathleen Davitt Bell

When Gen’s mother signs the family up for Camp Frontier, they don’t know what they are getting into.  Now they must live like they are 1890s pioneers.  Which means wearing authentic clothing, cooking on a wood burning stove, milking cows, raising chickens, and living in a tiny cabin in the woods with an outhouse.  All of their electronics are confiscated when they enter camp, but Gen manages to sneak in her cell phone.  From there, she texts her best friends one of whom turns her texts into a blog for an assignment.  All is not dull work on the prairie, there is handsome Caleb who seems interested in Gen but might like Nora, the daughter of the owners better, and then there is the competition between the families and the drive to not keep being in last place.  Maybe this family bonding thing isn’t so bad after all.

Bell has created a book with a sharp wit and yet a homely warmth.  Gen is a great protagonist whose texts are fun to read.  Bell also has a feel for humor with the killer chickens and the cow milking scene.  Both are worth reading the novel for.  She writes best when dealing with modern teens juxtaposed with the world of 1890.  Bell’s writing is stilted in other scenes where there isn’t humor.  Her scenes with Nora and Caleb don’t flow with the same effortlessness as her humor.

Another issue is her characterization of the secondary characters.  Caleb, the love interest, is rather dull and quite normal though nice.  I don’t see why Gen who is bright, funny and complex would be entranced by this boy.  Nora, the homeschooled daughter of the proprietors, is also a disappointment.  Left to be rather cardboard and mean, she could have been a great example of a homeschooled kid.  Instead, she is envious and lonely.  What a missed opportunity she was a character!

One of the big successes of the book is that it never becomes a moral story about the dangers of modern technology and the isolation of modern family life.  Just as the book was approaching that, it veered into an unexpected direction that kept the novel fresh and interesting.

Despite the issues with the book, I could not put it down.  The humor and Gen kept me reading.  Recommended for readers who enjoyed Little House on the Prairie but also modern teens who wonder what would happen if their cell phones, iPods and computers were taken away.  Appropriate for ages 12-14.

Reviewed from ARC received from Bloomsbury.

Also reviewed by Semicolon.

Birth Marked

| Tasha

Birthmarked by Caragh M. O’Brien

This debut novel is an enthralling dystopian fantasy.  Gaia’s mother is a midwife and now at age 16, so is she.  Each month, the first children born must be advanced to behind the wall of the Enclave, escaping the poverty outside the wall.  It is Gaia’s duty to turn those children over just as her two older brothers were turned over.  Gaia herself was no advanced because of her scarred face.  But now Gaia’s parents have been seized by the Enclave and no one knows why.  When they do not return, Gaia decides to sneak inside the wall and see if she can find out what has happened to them.  Through her journey, Gaia learns that the lies being told to her and the others outside the wall are many and complex, but that one girl can still make a difference with one heroic act.

It took me some time to read this novel because I was savoring it.  The world building that O’Brien has done here is based on our own familiar world, but one that has suffered a climate catastrophe.  O’Brien offers just enough details about the world to make it clear, but concentrates more on the human situation than the environmental one.  Her society is complicated, fascinating and well rendered.  The same can be said of the heroine, Gaia.  She is bright though uneducated, defiant, clever and brave.  She is a great lens to view the society and her situation through.

There is adventure and romance in this novel, all told through the eyes of the girl who is a loner and outsider because of her disfiguring scar.  Get this into the hands of those who enjoy Tamora Pierce, because they will love this heroine and wait impatiently along with me for the next in the series.  Appropriate for ages 13-16.

Reviewed from copy received from Roaring Brook Press.