Teen

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors

| Tasha

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors by Francisco X. Stork

Released March 2010.

Stork returns with his second teen novel after Marcelo in the Real World.  D.Q. and Pancho could not be more different except for their focus on life and death.  D.Q. is dying of cancer and trying to understand how to hold onto life.  Pancho is healthy but everyone in his family has died, and he is now planning to murder someone.  When Pancho meets D.Q., he wants nothing to do with him.  But he gets paid to help D.Q. and when D.Q. is sent for treatment to Albuquerque, Pancho is eager to go along because the man he is hunting for lives there.  As he spends time with D.Q. and Marisol, a girl at the recovery facility, Pancho finds himself changing but will it be enough to prevent him from taking a life?

As with his first book, Stork excels at character development and the creation of people who are damaged, fascinating and vividly human.   Pancho is a boy filled with anger and denial who has so much going for him, but is unable to see it.  D.Q. is reaching the end of his battle to live but seizes every day with a fierceness and vigor.  This book is an exploration of two boys and their unique friendship that ends up changing them both.  It is a celebration of life, an honoring of death, and a tribute to faith in the broadest sense.

Fans of his first book will adore this second book.  This is another novel to linger in, dwell with and savor.  Appropriate for ages 13 and up.

Reviewed from Advanced Reader Copy received from publisher.

 

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Smile

| Tasha

Smile by Raina Telgemeier

Based on personal experiences, this graphic novel will speak to those of us who are teenagers and those who have survived that age.  Raina just wants to be a normal kid.  But one evening, she falls when running, tripping and damaging her front teeth.  This sets her on a journey of braces, dental surgery, and headgear.  On top of her dental issues, Raina also deals with the normal teen issues of friends, bullies, and crushes on boys.  Readers get to watch Raina grow up from a sixth grader to a high school student as she learns about acceptance, self-esteem, and the importance of good dentists.

Written with lots of humor, this book has a feel for what makes being a teenager both funny and painful.  Telgemeier’s writing is refreshing and fast paced.  Her art is friendly and silly.  With her art and writing combined, she has created a book with a fresh feel that has universal appeal.  While speaking of her own issues with teeth, she speaks to all of our strange teen situations and what each of us dealt with or is dealing with. 

A fresh, funny look at being a teen, this book will easily find a readership and be eagerly passed from person to person.  Appropriate for ages 11-14.

Reviewed from Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) where most of the illustrations were not yet in color.

Bleeding Violet

| Tasha

Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

Hanna has never really fit in.  She is distractingly beautiful, uses sex as a weapon, has been diagnosed as manic depressive, and hears her dead father in her head.  After bashing her aunt in the head and leaving her for dead, she heads to the home of her mother whom she has never even met.  But Rosalee is cold and aloof, nothing like the mother that Hanna pictured.  Rosalee gives her two weeks to see if she can fit in with the other people in town, or she will have to leave.  Hanna heads to school and immediately finds herself surrounded by bloodthirsty monsters, glass statues that used to be people, and other teens who dismiss her as a transient.  But Hanna is determined to find a place for herself in this odd town that just might be even more strange than she is.

Hanna is a character who is easy to dislike immediately, but throughout the book readers get to see beyond her outer shell and to the girl who is desperate for a mother who cares for her and for a place where she belongs.  Reeves writes with a flair for horror.  This book glories in gore, is filled with eye-widening moments, and will have readers turning the pages breathlessly.  This horror is right in your face and almost tangible.  The pacing is also done very well, with moments of stillness nicely contrasted by frenetic action scenes.  The world Reeves has created will remind readers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Hanna as heroine takes the novel in a different direction.

I must also mention after so many questions about YA covers and protagonist’s skin tones, that Hanna is bi-racial.  The is half Finnish and half African-American.  On the cover, her skin is a caramel which is just right. 

Get this into the hands of Buffy and Twilight fans and they will be delighted with a new heroine who isn’t afraid to get her hands bloody.  Appropriate for teens aged 14-18.

Reviewed from copy received from publisher.

Also reviewed by TheHappyNappyBookseller, Pure Imagination, Frenetic Reader,

Plus you can see an interview with Dia Reeves at WriterJenn or you can visit Dia Reeves’ blog.

Cosmic

| Tasha

Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Liam is a twelve-year-old who looks like a he’s thirty.  He’s the tallest in his class and even has a wispy beard growing in.  So Liam is able to do things that other kids his age can’t.  He rides carnival rides that they are all too short for.  He is mistaken for a teacher on his first day of school.  He pretends that a girl in his class, Florida, is his daughter.  And he almost test drives a Porsche before his father stops him.   Thanks to these mistakes, Liam lives in a place between childhood and adulthood.  So when Liam is asked to bring his daughter on the trip of a lifetime to the best theme park in the world, Liam easily decides to do it.  He needs to pose as one of the world’s best dads to get on the spaceship, and it just may take a child to be the best father in the bunch.

I love Boyce’s books because you never know what journey you are about to start out on.  The book will seem to be one thing and delightfully morph into something else along the way.  Readers will start out thinking this is a book about space travel, but it is so much more.  It is an exploration of what age means, a novel about what it takes to be a parent and what it takes to be a kid.  It is a deep book that never loses its light heart and sense of fun.

Liam is a great character who even when he is acting like a great father never could be confused with an adult.  Boyce has written a wonderful hero here who is smart, intuitive and thoroughly juvenile in a great way.

I only have one teeny quibble with the novel.  Boyce uses World of Warcraft as one of Liam’s main interests.  I play WOW and so will many of the kids who read this novel.  The problem is that Boyce gets a lots of the details of the game wrong.  Some he has right, but others are really jarringly off.  This doesn’t detract from the book’s quality, but it may really bother some young readers.  I know that whenever he got a detail wrong it pulled me right out of the story, which is unfortunate.

Highly recommended, even for WOW junkies, this book is a beauty of a novel filled with humor, grace and a hero for our times.  Appropriate for ages 10-14.

Reviewed from library copy.

Also reviewed by Nayu’s Reading Corner and Fuse #8.

Magic Under Glass

| Tasha

Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore

Release date February 1, 2010.

Nimira dances for a pittance as a trouser girl until she is hired by Hollin Parry.  Parry, a sorcerer, hires her to sing with his newly acquired automaton which plays the piano when wound by a key in its back.  Nimira is the last in a line of girls that have been hired to be the singer, but the others fled because they thought the automaton was haunted.  Left alone with the automaton, Nimira discovers that it is trying to communicate with her though it cannot speak and cannot move unless wound.  Through the use of an alphabet chart on the keyboard, Nimira realizes that the automaton contains the trapped spirit of an elven prince.  Though Parry is courting her, Nimira and the fairy prince become closer and fall in love.  But more danger is swirling around them, as political intrigue, personal danger, and horrors of the past come together.

This slim volume holds an enticing story of love, betrayal and magic set in an alternate historical world.  Nimira is a wonderful character who hails from another land and offers great perspective on the setting.  She is feisty, intelligent and caring, just what any heroine of a love story should be.  The love triangle of Parry, Nimira and the elven prince is delightfully drawn against the setting of danger and sorcery.  To its credit, this book is wonderfully light despite its dark content.  It reads quickly and will have readers looking for the next book in the series to find out what happens.

A light fantasy of magic and love that explores dark desires and sinister motives at the same time.  Appropriate for ages 13-16. 

Reviewed from ARC received from publisher.

The Maze Runner

| Tasha

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

The only thing Thomas remembers when he wakes up on the lift is his name.  When the doors open, he is in the Glade where he is greeted by many other teen boys who also don’t remember anything beyond their names and the Glade.  The Glade is a community based on order and structure. Every morning the doors open to the maze, every evening they close.  Though some boys have been there for years, they have never solved the maze and found an exit.  There are monsters in the maze, creations of flesh and metal that roam the maze and attack any boy they find there.  Thomas finds himself wanting to be a Runner, one of the boys who tries to solve the enormous maze, even though commonsense tells him not to do it.  The day after Thomas arrives, everything changes when an unconscious girl arrives on the lift, and deep inside Thomas recognizes her though he can’t remember anything else.  Could she be the key to the maze?  Could he?

Grippingly written, this book grabs the reader from the moment the lift doors open and never lets go.  Dashner has created a wonderfully conceived compact world that really works well.  The reader knows no more than Thomas, making it a book with constant questions and tensions.  One of the only issues I had with the book was Thomas himself.  I would have enjoyed a more regular protagonist rather than a boy who is braver, stronger, and more clever than any of the others.  The book has great pacing which is headlong and wild, fitting the subject perfectly.  And though Thomas may be a bit to super, his character has a strong inner voice that works well.  The setting is written with such clarity that readers will feel they know the space well by the end of the novel. 

Highly recommended, the next book in the series will be eagerly awaited by those who read it.  Recommended for fans of The Hunger Games series, this book is appropriate for ages 13-16.

Reviewed from library copy.

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One of the Survivors

| Tasha

One of the Survivors by Susan Shaw

Joey’s mother died in a fire a little more than a year ago, so when the new fire alarm system at his school starts to go off, it makes him jumpy.  Finally, when the static combines with the alarm to garble the message from the office, Joey insists that his class has to leave the building.  But no one listens to him except for his best friend Maureen.  They are the only two in their class to survive the fire.  Now Joey and Maureen are being accused of setting the fire by those who lost family members.  Joey begins a journal to try to get some of the images out of his head, hoping that he can start to heal himself even as he struggles with the grief of an entire community.

Shaw, author of The Boy from the Basement, writes spare, electric prose.  She has an ability to take an overwhelming subject and tame it enough for readers to truly understand the emotional wreckage left behind.  Joey and Maureen seem younger than high schoolers in this novel, something that makes them read as even more vulnerable and damaged.   Joey is a fascinating lens to see the events through, as he battles the guilt and loneliness of being a survivor.  Joey’s story is told with honesty and great strength.

Highly recommended, this novel is a gripping and also thoughtful book about the consequences of small choices and the bravery it takes to survive them.  Appropriate for ages 12-15.

Reviewed from copy received from publisher.

 

Last Night I Sang to the Monster

| Tasha

Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Zach is in rehab with no memory of how he got there.  His therapist tells him that he was going through alcohol withdrawal so severe that he could have died, but all of the other details remain hidden in Zach’s mind.  As Zach goes through therapy, learning from therapists and others going through rehab, he learns to feel emotions again even though he longs to stay in the cocoon of amnesia that he has built.  This powerful novel shows the unpeeling of denial and addiction to reach the essence of memory and humanity. 

This book reads like a poem, a prayer.  The language is by turns languid and thoughtful and then raging and taut.  Readers are not spared from the emotional onslaught of recovery and truth as Zach slowly realizes what has happened to him.  The prose is an inner dialogue, a wandering but purposeful journey through memory.  It is a stream of consciousness that flows like a raging river, cleansing and correcting as it goes.  Zach is an amazing character who even when in denial and doubt, shines like a beacon.  He is strong in the face of such overwhelming change and brave as he faces his demons. 

This is a book filled with such truth and honesty that it is searing and painful to witness.  It is a book that will capture teen readers and not let them loose even when they finish the novel.  Highly recommended, this book is appropriate for ages 15-18.

Reviewed from library copy.

Also reviewed by La Bloga and The Picnic Basket.

Incarceron

| Tasha

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

Released February, 2010.

I first heard of Incarceron during the 2007 Cybils where the two panelists who had read it made such a strong case for the book that it became one of the finalists.  (It is a British import and the two panelists had read the British version.)  It had a lot to live up to after that strong an endorsement and then after I waited two years to read it!   I am very happy to say that it lived up to it and then some.

Incarceron is a prison for the worst criminals, but it is more than that.  It is a second chance, a sealed community that was planned as the perfect society.  A prison that is alive, that looks after its charges, that nourishes them.  But after being sealed for 150 years, the prison is far from idyllic.  Finn was born in the prison, from the prison.  He awoke in a cell as a teen ager and he has visions of the outside, of the stars.  That makes him one man’s way out.  Claudia is the daughter of the Warden of Incarceron.  She lives on on the outside as a member of the highest society.  Her wedding day is nearing to a prince she does not love, giving her a monarchy she does not desire in a court bound by entrenched protocols that keep them from using any technology.  Everything changes when both Finn and Claudia manage to gain access to a Key that lets them communicate together.  Now Finn must escape Incarceron and all of its traps while Claudia navigates the complicated and treacherous world of the court.

This fantasy is deep, dark and complex, just like Incarceron itself.  The two protagonists are very different from one another and yet drawn to each other.  Due to the prison, Finn has had to become someone he would never be while Claudia has to play her own role and not give away anything to her father or those around her.  As readers learn about the characters and the roles they play and who they really are, they are also learning the complexities of the world, of a prison that thinks and acts and of a society so bound by tradition it is spinning out of control. 

Fisher has built a world and characters of contrasts and similarities.  We have the wealthy juxtaposed with the most penniless, but their societies are so similar.  We have two types of prisons, side by side.  We have heroes in both, villains in both, and in both is Incarceron as a pivotal, physical being. 

This book is a puzzle, an enigma that is a delight to figure out, to wander through and to wonder about.  It is unflinchingly brutal, beautiful, hopeless and hopeful.  The pacing too is varied and adds to the tension and excitement as it rushes then lingers as time likes to do.

Highly recommended, this book is filled with great world building, fascinating characters and the wonder that is Incarceron.  Appropriate for ages 13-16.

Reviewed from ARC received from publisher.