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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

May21

Good story. Annoying political agenda.

The story is about seventeen year old San Francisco high school student Marcus Yallow, who in the wake of a terrorist attack is arrested, held and tortured by the Department of Homeland Security. Marcus is a techno-geek and a smart-aleck, but he’s no terrorist. Well, at least he’s not a terrorist until he comes close to crossing the line when he makes it his goal to thwart the increasingly repressive and totalitarian methods of the DHS in their abortive and draconian attempts to find and arrest the real terrorists.

If you’re a techno-geek, interested in web security, surveillance systems, privacy issues, etc., you’ll enjoy this book. Doctorow explains some of this stuff, but manages to keep the pace of the story moving for the most part. (There were a few pages about something called “keysigning” where my eyes glazed over, and I never did get it.) I was intrigued by the thriller aspect of the story, and I read the book in one sitting to find out what would happen to poor, mistreated, genius Marcus and his war on the DHS.

However, if you’re easily annoyed by an attempt to propagandize for liberal politics, don’t start it. You won’t be able to put it down, but you’ll find the exaggeration and mischaracterization and lack of nuance and balance irritating. Yes, this book is set in a fictional dystopian future, but it’s quite heavy-handed in its blatant attempt to make sure we get the message: “Be careful! This kind of repression could happen here! Especially if those right wing repressive Republican types are in charge!”

I don’t doubt that tyranny and the abrogation of our civil rights could take place in the United States of America, but I don’t see the moves in that direction coming mostly from the right. It’s the leftists who want to define certain words and ideas as “hate speech” and control what we can say and when we can say it. And it’s the Democrats who keep manufacturing and using crises to further their own agenda and take away our freedoms.

The Global Warming Crisis is being used to restrict our freedom of movement and our freedom to live our lives as we see fit, buying and using the energy resources that we want and need to make our lives easier and more enjoyable.
The Health Care Crisis is being manipulated to take away our commercial freedoms to see whatever doctors we choose and pay for whatever health care we can afford.
The Economic Crisis has become an excuse to take away the fruits of our labor in taxes and to mortgage the labor of our children and grandchildren in order to pay off massive debts to China and other lender countries and banks, debts that I did not want to incur and that my representatives in Congress did not vote to authorize. And my children and grandchildren certainly were not consulted about having to work for their entire lives to pay back money that they didn’t ask to borrow.
The So-Called Population Explosion has been for the last forty some odd years one justification for denying the basic right to life (without which there can be no liberty or pursuit of happiness) to millions of unborn babies.

And Doctorow is worried about The Patriot Act, which is, I agree, flawed, but quite under-utilized and largely ineffective?

OK I didn’t mean to get so politically strident in a book review, but well, my excuse is: Mr. Doctorow did it first!

George Orwell (whose novel 1984 is the obvious inspiration for at least the title of Mr. Doctorow’s book): “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

“Liberal: a power worshipper without power.”

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

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

May14

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork was one of my favorite reads last year. I loved the story of an autistic young man learning to relate to and live in a complicated world full of fallen people.

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors has the same theme without the autism. As the story begins, Pancho, a seventeen year old orphan, whose only other family member, his sister Rosa, has just died, is headed for the Catholic orphanage St. Anthony’s Home to complete his high school education and his minority. At St. Anthony’s Pancho meets D.Q., a cancer victim and author of The Death Warrior Manifesto. D.Q. talks a lot and writes when he’s not talking. Pancho isn’t much into words; he uses few, reads not at all, and thinks D.Q. is a freak. As the story progresses, the two young men are thrown together in a journey of healing and growth and just living, choosing life in a complicated and death-filled world.

One of the choices D.Q. has to make in the book is whether or not to continue undergo the experimental chemotherapy treatments that his mom desperately wants him to take. The choice is not simple and not really presented as simple. D.Q. wants to live. The chemotherapy makes him sick and unable to think clearly. But it might cure him (probably not). D.Q. wants to live fully for whatever time he has left. It annoyed me a little that he didn’t see the spiritual healer/shaman that his mom also brought into his life in the same terms as the chemotherapy. Yes, Johnny Corazon, the shaman, might cure D.Q. of cancer (very probably not). However, the spiritual confusion and sickness that Corazon’s dubious treatments would also bring into D.Q.’s life were not worth the small possibility that there was something worthwhile and healing in the mix.

Pancho also has choices to make, and although it’s clear from the beginning of the book that Pancho is on the wrong path, it’s not so clear whether or not Pancho will realize his error and choose life instead of death and revenge. Pancho has reason to be angry, but he’s about to ruin his life out of sheer anger and vengeance when he meets D.Q. And nobody can talk Pancho out of his self-destructive course because Pancho isn’t listening to anyone. Pancho is a man of action, not words. He needs healing, too, but doesn’t realize he’s actually sick, sicker than D.Q. who’s dying.

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors is a good story, one that I would recommend to anyone, especially guys, confronting death in their own life or in the life of a friend or relative. It’s also a story about revenge and forgiveness, and on that theme Stork hits all the right notes as far as I’m concerned. Death Warriors will give readers a lot to talk about and process, as well as a good story, and what can one ask from a piece of YA fiction?

Willow by Julia Hoban

Apr24

Willow is a book about self-injury, cutting, but it’s also about how something like cutting doesn’t really define a person. Willow, the heroine of the book, is much more than just a cutter. She’s a beautiful girl, who blushes easily. She’s an imaginative girl who loves Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. She’s capable of sacrificially someone else, even though she’s in such pain herself that it is all she can do to survive each day, sometimes hour by hour, even minute by minute.

On a rainy March night, Willow’s parent asked her to drive them home after they had a little too much wine at dinner. Willow tried, but she lost control of the car in the driving rain, and her parents, both of them, died in the ensuing accident. Willow survived, but her pain was too much to bear. So she began cutting to relieve the pain. The principle is that physical pain cancels out emotional pain, and Willow doesn’t know how to stop.

Enter Guy (yes, his name is Guy). Guy accidentally finds out Willow’s secret, and he considers himself responsible for Willow after she convinces him that telling her older brother/guardian about the cutting would destroy him. Slowly, Willow and Guy begin to trust one another, and then fall in love in spite of the barrier stands between them—Willow’s inability to allow herself to feel and her love-hate relationship with self-injury.

The book mostly eschews easy answers (just quit! why hurt yourself like that?) and goes for the power of love and patience to heal all wounds, even deep trauma like Willow’s. I was quite impressed with the author’s ability to get inside the head of deeply hurting seventeen year old like Willow and find not only the emotional pain hidden there, but also the personality and strength that it takes to overcome that pain and live through it. This book would be an excellent read for teens dealing with this issue in their own life or in that of a friend or relative.

Unfortunately, the author felt it necessary to have the teen couple in the book engage in premarital sex, an act that brings healing in the book, but that I think would be more confusing and unsettling to a teen who’s already dealing with serious emotional problems. I’m also not sure that telling teens that all it takes to overcome a serious addiction like cutting is the persistent love of a good man is quite the right message. Even though the patience part is emphasized, it still comes across as redemption by true love within 300 pages.

Some other resources for reading about and coping with self-injury and depression:

To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery.

Blade Silver: Color Me Scarred by Melody Carlson.

Little Blog on the Prairie by Cathleen Davitt Bell

Apr24

I read an ARC of this YA/middle grade title, and I thought it was just OK. Gen’s family goes to a “frontier camp” for vacation, and they are expected to live like people in the 1890’s (ala PBS’s Frontier House, which the author acknowledges as inspiration at the end of the book). Unfortunately, Gen’s broken the rules by bringing along her new cell phone, and her friend back home has set up a blog to record all of Gen’s impressions of the place and the people in the “frontier” community.

Several of the characters were unbelievable. Gen’s dad goes on a three month vacation, not only not having read the brochure about the camp, but also not having listened to anything Gen’s mom told the family about the camp. He’s completely blindsided by the idea that the family has agreed to live like the pioneers, and he doesn’t know what to do about the entire experience. But he stays anyway and spends his days cutting down trees to scare away the bears. Really? Would anyone set off on a three month vacation without knowing anything about where he’s going or what he’ll be doing?

Norah, the daughter of the camp’s proprietors, is incredibly sheltered and naive and at the same time, she acts as if she knows all about human nature and modern technology. Norah isn’t a very likable girl, and she comes across as one of those stereotypical over-protected homeschoolers that I only find in books, not in real life. Only Norah’s so isolated and the friendships she’s made have been so transient that she has become bitter and disagreeable. That’s what life in the 1890’s will do to a healthy American teenager.

Caleb, Gen’s “love interest”, is so nondescript that I have trouble saying anything about him. He wears a leather necklace, and Gen thinks he’s cute.

Watch Frontier House if you want to see what radical historical reenactment will do for and to a normal American family. Read the book as a way to pass a few hours, but not for history or for character development. Publication date for this title from Bloomsbury is May 11, 2010.

For the Love of Venice by Donna Jo Napoli

Apr19

I picked up this YA romance novel at a used book sale because I’ve read other books by the author and enjoyed them. This one was quite readable and will be recommended to the older urchins as entertainment.

Seventeen year old Percy (bad choice of name for the protagonist, by the way, sorry if your name is Percy) is forced to go to Venice with his family because his dad has a summer job there. As Percy begins to explore Venice on his own, he meets a girl (of course!) in a gelateria, an ice cream store. Graziela, the girl, is lovely and interested in Percy, but she has secrets, and there are cultural differences that threaten to end the relationship before it can properly begin.

The book is fairly clean; premarital sex is implied but not described. Percy is an atheist; Graziela is Catholic, but not too involved in Catholicism other than as a cultural tradition. The couple ends with a philosophy of love and life that I disagree with, but it’s fairly common. The book would be a good discussion starter. Is it possible to have an intense summer romance that you know will end without someone’s getting hurt? Is it desirable? Why? How do Europeans see Americans? How do American young people see Europeans? Is there prejudice on both sides? If so, how can the prejudice be overcome? The book was published in 1998; have things changed since then? Better or worse?

The book reminded me of Madeleine L’Engle’s teen romances, a bit dated, set in Europe with American characters interacting with Europeans and the resulting stereotypes and misunderstandings. Ms. Napoli is a good writer, and her book made me think about why Americans and Europeans have such different outlooks on the world and politics. Eldest Daughter experienced quite a bit of European/American cultural clash and misconstruction when she was in Italy for a summer, then France for a year. Some of it was humorous; some, not so funny. However, there’s no doubt that They don’t really understand us, and we probably don’t get them very well either.

I really like the cover, don’t you? With the Venetian canal and bridge scene and then the boy and girl, it gives a good taste of what’s inside.

Boarding School Books

Feb19

25 Best Boarding School books by Sara Ebner at The London Times. This list is very British, as might be expected given the source, although Ms. Ebner does include the Americans, Catcher in the Rye and Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. I’ve read neither of the American selections, nor have I read many of the other books on the list. However, I do have a few ideas of my own about good boarding school books:

The Secret Language by Ursula Nordstrom. As far as I know this story of friends at a boarding school who make up their own secret language is the only novel written by the famed children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom. If so, it’s a one hit wonder. This picture of the insular world of boarding schools made me want to attend one just so I could make up my own secret language. MIddle grade fiction.

The Small Rain by Madeleine L’Engle. Young Katherine Forrester, daughter of two famous musicians, discovers in herself her own musical talent and deals with misunderstanding and prejudice in her Swiss boarding school. And Both Were Young is another of L’Engle’s early novels set in a boarding school. Young adult/adult.

Old School by Tobias Wolff. I read this one last year but never got around to reviewing it. This subtitle/blurb should suffice:” A scholarship boy at a New England prep school grapples with literary ambition and insecurity in this lucid, deceptively sedate novel, set in the early 1960s and narrated by the unnamed protagonist from the vantage point of adulthood.” Young adult/adult.

Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. This one is the grandaddy of all boarding school books; the setting is Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School in Victorian England. Tom Brown is a typical English boy who grows up to epitomize the virtues of a British public school education and the essence of British manhood.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. Semicolon review here. “This novel is a FInding Yourself story, a Coming of Age tale, a Boarding School genre entry, and an all-round good time book. Frankie is typically insecure and desirous of acceptance by her peers, and yet she finds the inner resources to break out of the mold and become someone that no one would expect her to be. The story is comedic, but it has serious undertones and themes.” Young adult.

Additions?

Janice Meredith by Paul Leiscester Ford

Feb15

OK, so older is not always better. The bestsellers of today are sometimes full of gratuitous sex and violence, without much depth of character and devoid of significant meaning.

Janice Meredith, one of the ten best selling novels of 1900, didn’t have any sex, other than a few stolen kisses, and the violence of the American Revolution was described somewhat obliquely through the eyes and experiences of the noncombatants, Janice and her mother. For example:

“Only with death did the people forget the enormities of those few months, when Cornwallis’s army cut a double swath from tide water almost to the mountains, and Tarleton’s and Simcoe’s cavalry rode whither they pleased; and the hatred of the British and the fear of their own slaves outlasted even the passing away of the generation which had suffered.”

Nevertheless, the character development in Janice Meredith is poor, and by today’s standards, the book could have been edited down from 503 pages to about half that. Janice herself begins the novel as a giddy teenager reading romance novels and indulging in romantic fantasies, and she ends the novel, after having bounced from one suitor to the next and back over a dozen times, indulging in her new romantic fantasy of marriage to dashing young officer with her father’s reluctant permission.

The characters of the Revolution –George Washington, Cornwallis, General Gates, General Lee, and others—appear with as much historical accuracy as can be expected in a romance novel. The battles and the deprivations that the people experience as the war drags on seem real, and if the language is little flowery, the descriptions are at least based on fact.

The main problem with the novel was that I never really liked wishy-washy little Miss Meredith. She never knew what she wanted. SHe ran away with one man and was fetched back by her parents. She promised herself in marriage to at least four different men over the course of the novel in return for their help to her and her family as they attempted to navigate the vicissitudes of war. Janice’s father promised her to several different men, usually the same ones Janice affianced, but at differing times. It made for several confusing reversals of plot, and Janice ended up seeming fickle and willing to give herself in marriage to the highest bidder.

If all of the bestsellers of 1900 are like this one, I feel sure that:

a) most of the books on the bestseller list must have been purchased and read by women. I can’t imagine any man reading through 500 pages of this.
b) surely Dickens’ and Thackeray’s heroines were a relief to the ladies of 1900 after reading about Miss Janice. At least Dora (David Copperfield) knows she’s found a good man in David, and Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair) could have transplanted herself to the New World and had a whopping adventure in the time it took Janice to dither around, flirt with half the British army, and then end up where she began with a penniless and somewhat immature American fiance.

Footnote: I looked up the author, Paul Leicester Ford, and his life, or more particularly his death, would make a rather lurid novel. (In fact this NY TImes article about Ford’s death reads like a novel. Ah, the good old days of yellow journalism!) Ford wrote biographies as well as novels, and his subjects were several of the founding fathers, including Washington. So I’m guessing his facts and characterizations are, as I said, quite accurate.

Cybils YA Fiction Finalists

Feb11

Blue Plate Special by Michelle D. Kwasney
Chronicle Books
I haven’t found this one yet.
Others who have read it: Frenetic Reader, Pop Culture Junkie, Sarah’s Random Musings, Amanda at A Patchwork of Books.

Carter Finally Gets It by Brent Crawford
Disney Press
Carter is a typical male, I guess. I also guess I don’t want to read about every thought that goes through a typical male’s rather mundane and typical mind. Locker room humor disguised as reality/comedic fiction. Didn’t finish.
Lots of other people loved, loved, loved it.

Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
Macmillan
With the f-bombs and other crude words dropping at a rate of one or two per paragraph, and the crude, rude, and socially unacceptable “situations” multiplying, I found it difficult to get to the actual story. So I didn’t finish. School Library Journal’s review says it’s “marked by explicit language and frank sexuality.” Yeah. It is–and not much else, at least as far as I got into it.
Again it was quite popular with other reviewers and bloggers.

How To Say Goodbye In Robot by Natalie Standiford
Scholastic
This one was both quirky and fascinating. I loved “listening” in on the late night radio call-in show, Night Lights, in which lonelyhearts and conspiracy theorists and assorted oddballs called to share their thoughts, feelings, and warnings about the apocalypse. The teen protagonists of the novel, Bea and Joshua, aka RobotGirl and Ghost Boy, share an addiction to late night radio, especially Night Lights.
However, even though I enjoyed the book, read it in one afternoon, I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. I found much of it, plot and characters, quite unbelievable. In fact, the Night Lights callers were some of the more believable characters in the novel. I mistakenly thought Joshua was a liar, making up stories to get attention, for about half of the novel. The truth was a little too fantastic to be believable. Then, Bea’s mother seems at first to be merely eccentric, but she quickly moves into the realm of insanity. However, Bea and her father expect Bea’s mother to function as a sane person, and eventually by the end of the story Mom wanders back to the sane side of the street. Finally, Bea and Joshua come up with a plan so fantastic and so completely unworkable that it’s hard to believe any two halfway intelligent high school seniors could even entertain the notion.
And yet . . . with a high tolerance for strange, odd, and even looney, a reader might really grow to love this novel of two teen in search of an identity.
Becky, and Jen, and Amanda, and Tirzah all liked it.

Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern.
Feiwel & Friends
I actually read several chapters of this story of Jessie and her friends, Bizza and Char. First of all, Char doesn’t do much of anything except bake a few cookies, so I’m not sure why she’s in the story. Bizza on the other hand is an expletive deleted, and I’m not sure why she and Jessie are friends in the first place, or the second place, or any place. While Bizza proceeds to contract VD from Jessie’s crush, Jessie considers joining the nerd crowd playing Dungeons and Dragons. Blech.
Several bloggers disagree with me and give it a thumbs up.

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen.
Little, Brown. Semicolon review here.
“North of Beautiful transcends the problem-of-the-week genre, and it’s a truly beautiful novel. The strength of the book is in its treatment of relationships and family dynamics. Terra Cooper, the protagonist of the novel, isn’t just a girl with low self esteem because of her facial disfigurement and her controlling dad.” Not my favorite of the year, but it’s a good solid pick.
North of Beautiful got lots of good buzz from everywhere: Teen Book Review, Presenting Lenore, S. Krishan’s Books, Miss Erin, and many others.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
Viking. Semicolon review here.
I read this one earlier last year because I usually like Ms. Anderson’s books. However, I really think Wintergirls was just O.K., nothing special, another problem novel, this time about anorexia. And the plot sometimes gets obscured by an attempt to be poetic, or fanciful, or something.
You can find lots of much more enthusiastic reviews of this one by a very talented author.

These are the books that won out and made the finalist list over Marcelo in the Real World and Flygirl and What I Saw and How I Lied and Secret Keeper? I don’t get it. I don’t mean to diss the committee, but can I respectfully disagree? Tell you what, I grant you the right and privilege of reading all of the nominees yourself and forming your own opinion. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you about some of them.

And I almost hate to mention it, but in light of discussions about the dearth of characters and authors who are not white, not one of these books has a protagonist who is anything other than white-bread-white, and only one of the authors could be called a Person of Color. I don’t believe in quotas, but actually many of the YA books I thought were outstanding in 2009 featured persons who were Asian, Hispanic, and African American (see preceding paragraph).

If I were on the committee to pick the Cybils Award winner for YA fiction, and I had to choose from this list, I’d go with North of Beautiful. The Cybils winners will be announced on Valentine’s Day.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Feb4

Connie Willis has a new book out called Blackout. No, this review is not supposed to be about Ms. WIllis’s new book, a book that I am not going to buy even though I’m a big fan of Ms. Willis’s writing. This post is about the reason that I’m not going to read Ms. Willis’s new book anytime soon. The last line of the Publisher’s Weekly review of Blackout says, “Readers allergic to cliffhangers may want to wait until the second volume comes out in November 2010.”

So. This review is about The Maze Runner and why I’m frustrated with authors and publishers who publish cliffhanger novels and tell us to wait until six months from now, next year, who knows when, for the next installment, which may or may not resolve and complete the story. I already watch LOST, for pete’s sake. Do you know how many unresolved stories I already have hanging around inside my head waiting for the author and the publisher (or TV producer) to get around to finishing the story?

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins “leaves enough questions tantalizingly unanswered for readers to be desperate for the next installment.” (Publisher’s Weekly) Semicolon review of the first book in the series, The Hunger Games.

The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness. Sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go. However, we’re not finished yet. Resolution is yet to come. The story is not over . . .

Don’t Judge a Girl By Her Cover by Ally Carter. The third book in the Gallagher Girls series about a girl who attends a secret school for spies. This one is not so very cliff-hanger-ish, but I still have to carry the details of who’s who and what’s going on around in my head until the fourth book comes out.

The Roar by Emma Clayton “should also feature at the very least a warning label: ‘YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FINISH THIS STORY FOR AT LEAST TWO YEARS. READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL.’ The Roar is a very good story but it doesn’t end so much as it stops, in mid-story.” Semicolon review here.

Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. The sequel, Forge, is due out this month. Will the second book complete Isabel’s story or not?

And these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. Some books for which I very much wanted to read “the rest of the story” have faded into the dim mists of my 52 year old memory, and I wouldn’t know what was happening to whom if I did happen upon the sequel(s).

The Maze Runner is a good book. It reminds me of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. It has tension, suspense, dystopian undertones, a bit of romance, and lots of action.

However, the ending is not, an ending that is. If you want to know what really happens to Thomas and the rest of the kids trapped in The Maze, you won’t really be able to find out until . . . Well, the sequel, The Scorch Trials, is due out in October, and Mr. Dashner is still working on the third book in the trilogy, The Death Cure. I don’t think I’ll last that long.

I have a suggestion for publishers and authors. I know that getting readers hooked on a series sells books. I know that you can’t fit all of that wonderful epic novel into just one five hundred page book sometimes.

1. Finish the story before you publish anything. Write all three or all five or all ten volumes of your story before you publish the first one.

2. Publish one book per month or every two months, kind of like Dickens and Thackeray and those other Victorians did when they published their novels in installments. I might be able to remember what happened in the first book long enough to read and enjoy the second.

3. At least, warn us when your novel ends in a non-ending cliff-hanger.

I don’t think anyone is listening. But I only have room for one LOST never-ending series of questions, partial answers, more questions and unresolved relationships and plots in my life. If you warn me that you will be finishing the story in the next decade or so, I might make room in my brain for it as soon as LOST ends in May.

Texas Tuesday: Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith

Jan26

What an inspiring and absorbing book! Ms. Smith writes about Ida Mae Jones, a self-identified “colored girl” who is light-skinned enough to pass for white. The book begins in late 1941, and of course, that means Pearl Harbor, and World War II. Ida Mae learned to fly airplanes from her daddy, who was a crop duster. So when she hears that the U.S. Army has formed a group called the WASPs, Women Airforce Service Pilots, Ida Mae Jones is determined to sign up, even though she lives in Louisiana and the training is to take place in Sweetwater, Texas, two places where the very idea of a young black woman serving alongside white women is sure to be anathema. So in order to get into the WASP’s, Ida Mae basically pretends to be white.

A lot of the book is about the training and the dangers these pioneering women pilots faced as they bravely gave themselves and their abilities to the war effort. I don’t know much about flying airplanes, so although I thought the parts of the book that described the training and the women’s heroics were wonderfully written, I don’t know how accurate they were. I assume Ms. Smith did her research since the book Flygirl started out as a master’s thesis.

Another aspect of the book is the discussion and treatment of race and skin color. I thought this was fascinating, especially in light of recent discussions in the kidlitosphere. What does it mean to be black or to be a person of color? How do POC themselves see the variations in skin color? Is it wrong to pretend to be white and leave your darker-skinned family and friends behind? Even for a good cause?

One of the scenes in the book reminded me of Esther in particular. Ida Mae, like Esther has hidden her heritage and her connection with her people, but she is asked by her mother to go to the military authorities and ask for help in finding her brother who is MIA. Ida Mae knows that if she asks about her brother, she may be discovered and sent home. Her story doesn’t exactly parallel Esther’s, but it is similar. And Ida Mae shows similar courage.

All the issues, discrimination against women and against people of color, the varied reasons that people have for volunteering to fight in a war, misunderstandings and rifts between family members and friends, the cost of following one’s dreams, are explored with both sensitivity and humor. I would recommend this book to all young women who are in the middle of deciding who they are and what they want to be. And as an older woman, I enjoyed reading about Ida Mae Jones and her adventures. I wanted her to be able to “have it all,” even as I knew that the time and place where the story was set wouldn’t allow for a completely happy ending.

Reading in Color: “Flygirl made me want to go out and learn how to fly an airplane (or at least fly in one so that I can sit in the front and observe the pilot). The way the characters describe their love of flying makes you want to try it.”

One Librarian’s Book Reviews: “The setting is absolutely perfect, with the details from the time period completely enhancing the whole feel of the book. I absolutely felt like every part of it seemed like it could be true.”

Liz at the YALSA blog: Flygirl examines universal questions of identity, family, and growing up, with flying being both what Ida Mae wants to do, as well as working as a metaphor for a young woman trying to escape the limitations her country places on her because of her race and her sex.

Interview with Sherri L. Smith at the YaYaYa’s