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Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler

Jan21

I’m not sure where to start with this YA title, nor where to end. First of all these thoughts from a blogger named Amanda on sex and marriage directly relate to my appreciation or lack thereof for Ms. Ockler’s book, so read what Amanda says first.

Then, I’ll tell you up front that I agree with Amanda. Sex within marriage is a wonderful, blessed thing. Sex outside of marriage is, at the very least, a dangerous and bad idea. With that perspective in mind, it was difficult for me to read about the decisions the girls in the book Twenty Boy Summer make, even though the book portrays accurately a certain mindset and cultural norm that is all too common these days.

To be clear and concise, Anna and her best friend Frankie make a pact to meet at least twenty boys during their summer vacation, “do a little test-drive”, and maybe manage to get rid of the problem of Anna’s virginity in the process. The reasons leading to and surrounding this little challenge are a little complicated, and since those reasons are the best part of the story, I won’t give them away. Suffice it to say that Frankie’s gone wild for a reason, and she’s trying to get Anna to join her. The problem is that these girls have a skewed perspective about sex and love and boys and virginity. Virginity is an albatross that must be consigned to oblivion as quickly as possible. It probably won’t be that pleasant, but it must be done. Then, life, and perhaps good sex, can commence.

One problem I have with the novel is that no one ever expresses an opposing viewpoint. Neither of the girls thinks to look at sex and virginity in a different way. The boys they meet are fairly decent, but definitely place a priority on sex. The girls don’t talk to their parents and in fact, spend the entire summer vacation deceiving Frankie’s parents into thinking they are total innocents. Instead, they’re really sneaking out at night to meet boys on the beach and going to a wild party and visiting San Francisco alone. Not one person over the course of the entire novel tells Anna and Frankie that “having sex permanently alters your relationship with someone: makes you connected to them forever in a really transformative way” and that perhaps virginity is a gift to be guarded and saved until marriage instead of an albatross to be discarded ruthlessly.

In other words, I get it that the way Frankie and Anna think in this book is the way lots of teens in our culture think. I get that they are hurting and longing for any kind of connection, and I don’t want a preachy kind of book where the two girls end up in major trouble because of their bad choices or where they’re lectured by someone older and wiser. But I do wish that somehow an alternate view of sex and commitment could have been presented.

The other half of the book is about friendship and grief recovery, and that part was quite poignant and moving and real. However, the two halves aren’t really halves, and the illicit sex part sort of spoiled the story for me. I’ve been accused of not wanting my (YA) books to have any sex in them at all, but I really don’t think that’s it. I just want the author to be honest. And I don’t think it’s honest or helpful to tell young people that sex is something you’ve got to experience in order to grow up, the sooner the better, and there are no emotional or physical consequences connected with premarital, promiscuous sexual relations.

Not true. Not even in New York or on the beach in California.

Here’s a lovely video at Amazon with the author, Sarah Ockler, telling what she was trying to achieve with Twenty Boy Summer. She talks mostly about the “half” of the book that I liked.

The Best YA You Haven’t Read

Jan21

Kelly of YAnnabe is hosting a blog blitz to highlight our favorite YA titles that need a little more buzz. Check out her round-up of the Best YA You Haven’t Read for bloggers’ lists of books that deserve a second look.

Relatively new, and not as well known as they should be:
Unsigned Hype by Booker T. Mattison. Semicolon review here. “Tory’s rise to fame as a rap/hip hop producer is fraught with temptations and with danger to his reputation and even his life. But Tory’s “moms” is praying for him, and he finds a friend who keeps him grounded.” For those who are looking for more books featuring People of Color, this one ought to be on the radar.

I really didn’t think Secret Keeper by Mitali Perkins got nearly enough attention when it came out last January, even though everyone loves Mitali and her blog. Semicolon review here.

Isle of Swords by Thomas Wayne Batson. Semicolon review here. I loved this 2007 pirate adventure, and it has a sequel, Isle of Fire that’s just as good.

The Homeschool Liberation League by Lucy Frank. Semicolon review here.

After by Amy Efaw. Semicolon review here.

Oldies but Goodies:
Escape from Egypt by Sonia Levitin. Semicolon review here.
The Faraway Lurs by Harry Behn. Semicolon review here.
A Winter’s Love by Madeleine L’Engle. Semicolon review here.
The Moves Make the Man by Bruce Brooks. One of my favorite YA titles of all time is a basketball book about two boys. And I don’t even like sports. But this book is about so much more than just sports; it’s about friendship and authenticity . . . Well, read it , and tell me what you think it’s about.
The Hawk and the Dove by Penelope Wilcock. This book and its sequels should have sold a million copies, but it’s a quiet little book, not one to jump onto the classic or best-seller list by itself. The books are made up of stories that a mother tells her daughters about a monastery and the monks who live there. All I can say is that’s a deceptively simplistic description, and the book has some profound insights into the meaning of mercy, and vocation, and repentance, and lots of other stuff–not to mention some great, very sticky (as in, will-stick-with-you-for-a-long-time), stories.

Printz Predictions

Jan15

The Michael L. Printz Award is an award for a book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature. The Printz, along with its more famous counterparts the Newbery and the Caldecott, will be announced on Monday, January17th at the ALA Midwinter Conference.

Last year’s Printz award went to the book Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta. I tried to read it both before and after the award was announced, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. My thoughts at the time.

The honor books last year were:
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II, The Kingdom on the Waves by M.T. Anderson. Definitely deserving and astonishing.
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. I liked this one, too.
Nation by Terry Pratchett. I’ve never read any Terry Pratchett, not sure I’d like it.
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan. I’m sort of afraid to read this re-telling of the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red because I get the idea that she turns the story into something nasty. But I don’t really know.

So, I didn’t enjoy or finish the Newbery winner last year nor the Printz winner either, so why am I predicting the winners this year? I don’t know; it’s an irresistible game, I suppose.

The book I hope, predict and expect will win the Printz: Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork. Semicolon review here. If there is any justice . . .

The books I think might win instead:
Going Bovine by Libba Bray. (Blech)
The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams. OK, Semicolon review here.
Fire by Kristin Cashore. Pretty darn good, but not as good as Marcelo.
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson. If it wins it will be because Ms. Anderson has such a great body of work. I don’t think WIntergirls is her best. Semicolon review here.
North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley. Semicolon review here.

And no one I’ve seen has mentioned it as a contender, but my second choice for the Printz award would be Secret Keeper by Mitali Perkins. (Semicolon review here.) In fact, that book is so profoundly respectful of the choices people make and the cultures that shape them; it would make a wonderful award-winning book. So it probably won’t win.

Yes, I’m hedging my bets by giving you a whole list of possibilities. It’s the only I might possibly get one correct prediction and thereby earn bragging rights.

Semicolon’s Top 12 Young Adult Books Published in 2009

Liar by Justine Larbalestier

Jan13

This book is seriously warped. Which I guess is the point.

The premise is interesting: Micah Wilkins is a compulsive liar, the ultimate unreliable narrator who promises at the beginning of the book that she’s finally telling the truth. At best, she tells half-truths.

“I’m undecided, stuck somewhere in between, same way I am with everything: half black, half white, half girl, half boy; coasting on half a scholarship.
I’m half of everything.”

It’s safe to say that Micah has some identity issues. She doesn’t know who she really is; her life feels out of control. Unfortunately, the idea of having Micah be completely untrustworthy, with the reader never knowing when she’s lying or what is truth, works against the story finally. Fiction is ultimately not about lies, even though it’s made up; fiction is finally about Truth, or else it’s bad fiction.

I’m not saying Liar is a bad book. But it’s a book that I could never get too close to or identify with completely because I never knew whether any given detail or scene in it was true, true in the world of the book itself. In fact, Micah, the narrator, tells us over and over again that at least some of the story she tells isn’t true. But she also says that she mixes a thread of truth into her lies. Well, of course she does; I couldn’t even trust her to be completely unreliable —or completely insane.

The book does have some offensive sexual content, the requisite dollop of violence, and a bit of bad language, but the part that really annoyed me was this almost offhand scene near the middle of the book:

“What do you think?” Lisa interjected, addressing the class. “What is it about writing for teenagers that leads to so much censorship?”
I knew the answer to that one but I didn’t raise my hand. It’s because grown-ups don’t remember what it was like when they were teenagers. Not really. They remember something out of a Disney movie and that’s where they want to keep us. They don’t like the idea of our hormones, or that we can smell sex on one another. That we walk down halls thick with a million different pheromones. We see each other, catch a glance, the faintest edge of one, that sends a shiver through our bodies all the way down to the parts of us our parents wish didn’t exist.

Nonsense. I don’t know whether those are just Micah’s warped thoughts or whether that explanation for the controversy over the sexualization of young adult literature is the author’s own interpretation. Either way, most book censors aren’t trying to infantilize teens, and neither are those who simply observe that the over-sexualization and the crude language found in many YA books is pandering to their (our) basest instincts. In fact, those who say that we should give teens something besides raging hormones in their books, that teens themselves are more than just their hormones, are showing respect for young adults. If anyone is trying to dupe and dumb down teens and keep them in a Disney movie world, it’s those authors and others who tell them that they’re too young for a committed relationship (marriage) but they’re also too immature to control their sexual appetites. So they have no other choices besides sexual promiscuity, guilt, heartbreak, and please-at-least-practice-safe-sex. Infants and young children have limited control over their needs and desires. Adults, even young adults, can choose to delay gratification, or they can choose to gratify their desires within the safety of a loving committed relationship (marriage). As one who thinks we can do better than pander, I don’t want to deny that young adults are sexual beings; I want us to be mentors who help them to discipline and express their sexuality responsibly rather than panderers who leave them to burn uncontrollably with no hope of having a fulfilled and healthy marriage and sexual relationship.

And I’ve gone off on a ranting tangent. Liar is maybe a study in insanity, maybe a picture of a very conflicted and confused young lady, maybe even an indictment of our society’s failure to give young adults clear messages about their sexual, racial and moral identities. But it doesn’t quite work for me, and I suspect won’t for most of its teen audience, because the whole thing may just be One (very artful) Big Fat Lie.

What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

Jan11

I just got around to reading Ms. Blundell’s National Book Award-winning young adult novel this weekend. If it wasn’t a 2008 publication, I would add it to my list of Best YA Books of 2009. It was nominated for the 2009 Cybils in the YA Fiction category, probably because it was published toward the end of 2008. And I’m not second guessing the panelists, but there must be some extra-fine books on the finalist list to have beaten this one out.

The setting and atmosphere reminded me of Mad Men and The Great Gatsby, although it takes place about a year after the end of World War II, in between Jay Gatsby’s follies (1922) and Don Draper’s escapades (1960’s). The setting and characters feel historically authentic, kind of film noir, with lots of cigarettes and Scotch and red lipstick and dancing and full skirts like those in White Christmas. I could imagine Alfred Hitchcock making a movie of this book, but I don’t know of anyone nowadays who could do it with the right touch.

The story itself is Hitchcock-ish, with “adultery, blackmail, and possible homicide,” very much dependent on the reader’s point of view, with a few surprising twists and turns along the way. I can imagine a very young Grace Kelly playing the lead part, a fifteen year old named Evie who has a crush on a twenty-three year old ex-GI named Peter (Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant?). There are a lot of scenes in which it’s obvious that something else is going on underneath the surface of the dialog, but it’s not so obvious just what that something else is. Hitchcock would have had a blast with camera angles and the characters’ complicated interactions.

The book is quite well-written. Evie, the narrator, has a voice that is vintage 1940’s and typical fifteen year old girl, going on forty, anxious to grow up and unsure of how. I chose a few lines to whet your appetite, almost at random:

“Now I recognized that other woman, the one I’d seen angry and turning her face away. All that pizzazz and underneath it was a whole lot of sad.”

“Ugly. Once in the schoolyard Herbie Connell threw a rock and it hit me in the back. This felt like that, ugly hitting me in the back. . . . I wanted to put my hands over my ears. I was gulping my tears into my mouth. I didn’t want to hear any more ugly tonight. So I ran.”

“I looked like a doll, a dish. The image in the mirror—it wasn’t me. If I had the clothes and the walk, I could make up a whole new person. I wasn’t who I used to be, anyway. A different me would do the thing I had to do today. The dish would do it.”

What I Saw and How I Lied is well worth your reading time as a coming-of-age novel, or a psychological thriller, or a study in family dynamics, or just a thoughtful, insight-filled romance. I found it intriguing, hard to put down, and fun to try to figure out.

Other bloggers said:

Bookshelves of Doom: “Evie Spooner’s story is a coming-of-age story. Like a lot of coming-of-age stories, there is a tragedy. Like a lot of coming-of-age stories, there is a first love. Like a lot of coming-of-age stories, our heroine learns that the adults in her life are not the shining stars she has always believed them to be. There are lies, there is betrayal, there is injustice, and Evie sees it all. Heck, as the title suggests, she participates in some of it.”

The Reading Zone: “I hate to summarize the book, because Judy Blundell has woven an intricate story, full of dark twists and turns down paths you can’t even imagine. There is murder, intrigue, a fascinating backdrop of World War II, racism, classism, and a classic (but dark) coming-of-age story. To summarize more would give away too much of the plot and I would hate to ruin it for anyone.”

The YA YA YA’S: “Blundell did an amazing job creating a moody, atmospheric, noirish novel. You can practically see the action unfurling before your eyes, complete with cigarette smoke wafting toward the ceiling. The atmosphere is so evocative that it elevates the quality of the book.”

At 5 Minutes for Books they’re inviting you to share a review that you read at anyone’s recommendation. I read What I Saw and How I Lied because of the many, many reviews I saw in the Kidlitosphere and because it won a National Book Award.

Semicolon’s Top 12 Young Adult Books Published in 2009

Jan7

Catching Fire by Suzane Collins. Sequel to The Hunger Games. Semicolon review of The Hunger Games here. Suffice it to say that Catching Fire was a worthy successor to the first book,and I’m looking forward to the next book from Ms. Collins due out in August.

Secret Keeper by Mitali Perkins. Semicolon review here.

If the Witness Lied by Caroline Cooney. Semicolon review here.

The Homeschool Liberation League by Lucy Frank. Semicolon review here.

After by Amy Efaw. Intense and heart-rending. Semicolon review here.

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. Pure fun.

Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George. Semicolon review here.

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork. Semicolon review here.

Ice Shock by M.G. Harris. Semicolon review here.

Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson.

Fire by Kristin Cashore. Semicolon review here.

That’s actually eleven. I’m saving the last space since I’m in the process of reading the finalists for the YA Cybils Award. I can’t believe none of my top eleven made the finalist list. Those must be some seriously good books. Maybe one of the finalists will be my final “best YA book of 2009.”

(I was mistaken. One of my books, Chains, is on the Middle Grade Fiction finalist list, a list I helped choose, even though I think Chains is more suited to young adults. And another of the books I chose, Fire, is on the Young Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction finalist list.)

Fire by Kristin Cashore

Jan6

Graceling was Kristin Cashore’s first novel, published in 2008, and it received quite a bit of acclaim. (Semicolon thoughts on Graceling.)The follow-up to that book is Fire, not a sequel but a “companion to Graceling.” Fire takes place in the same world as Graceling, but in a separate and distinct country, the Dells, that has little or no communication with or knowledge of the seven kingdoms of the first book. Instead of gracelings, people with special talents and abilities, the Dells has monsters, people who are especially attractive and have special abilities. Actually, our heroine, the eponymous Fire, is the last of the monsters, and she’s determined to keep it that way. No monster, or half-monster, babies for her even though she longs for a child to love and nurture. However, not only are Fire’s abilities to influence and read thoughts much too dangerous to pass on to another generation, Fire is much too busy saving the kingdom from monster raptors and assorted rebels and bad guys to get married or care for a child.

If that last sentence sounds condescending or scornful, I didn’t mean it to be. Fire is a fantasy romance, and it’s a good one. Even though it was obvious who ends up with whom from the beginning of the novel, I found myself rooting for Fire and her romantic interest even as the age old boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-misunderstand-each-other, true-love-wins-out, plot wound its way through the fantastical elements of princes and powers and magical thinking and monster kittens and giant raptors.

In fact, I liked Fire even better than I liked Graceling. Fire was a more intriguing character than Katsa, whose main issue is figuring out how to use her grace without being controlled by other people. Fire’s focus is self-control and how and when to use her special mind control abilities for good without taking away the freedom of others. I was glad to see that Fire, unlike Katsa, wasn’t afraid of love and commitment, only worried that she might not be able to live with the man she loved and communicate freely and openly.

If you liked Graceling, read Fire. If you haven’t read Graceling, read Fire first. It’s the better book. If you didn’t like Graceling, you might enjoy Fire anyway.

What other bloggers are saying:
Steph Su Reads: “When an author’s second novel far surpasses her already critically acclaimed debut novel, you know there’s something special going on. Kristin Cashore is such an author, and FIRE is such a book. Not since Robin McKinley has an author written so convincingly of a politically charged fantasy world.”
Persnickety Snark: “Fire could quite easily become an unsympathetic character as she’s irresistibly attractive, princes and lords falling over themselves in love with her and the power of persuasion. Instead Cashore has created a character who’s consistently struggling with the direction of her moral compass in terms of her ability to manipulate others whether with good intentions or not.”
S. Krishna’s Books: “Kristin Cashore has really matured as a writer in this book. Though the world has already been established in Graceling, Cashore doesn’t assume her readers have read that book. Additionally, the parts of the world the two books take place in are extremely different – even readers of Graceling will be introduced to something completely new.”

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Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork

Jan5

Two of my favorite books from this past year are narrated by young men with autism: Anything But Typical by Nora Leigh Baskin and this one, for an older audience, about Marcelo Sandoval who describes his condition thus:

“The primary characteristics of AS, which is what Asperger’s syndrome is is called for short, occur in the areas of communication and social interaction, and usually there is some kind of pervasive interest. The AS person is different than most people in these areas.”

Marcelo’s “pervasive interest” is “religion. What humankind has experienced and said and thought about God.” He says, ” I like to read and think about that.”

What this interest means for Marcelo in practical terms is that he meets frequently with a Jewish rabbi to discuss God and religion. He also goes to mass regularly and prays the rosary. And he has memorized large chunks of Scripture, from the Old and New Testaments and from the sacred books and prayers of other religions.

Although the religion thing is a fascinating sub-theme (if you can have a subplot, why not a subtheme?), the book is mostly about coping in the real world while remaining true to oneself and about father/son relationships. Marcelo’s father, Arturo, is a high-powered lawyer who denies that there’s anything really different about or wrong with Marcelo and who wants his son to eventually attend college and become a lawyer like him. As far as intelligence goes, Marcelo is certainly capable of following in his father’s footsteps. However, Marcelo is different. He thinks differently from most people, and his social skills and ability to understand complicated social interactions are limited. When Arturo insists that Marcelo spend his summer working in the mailroom at Arturo’s law firm, everyone involved learns something about the “real world.”

I like these books about autistic children and young adults because they take some of our basic assumptions about the world and how it works and shake them upside down and reorganize them into new ways of thinking about people and about our expectations of them. Some of us just got through watching most of the first three seasons of the TV show Bones, and I see Temperance Brennan and her assistant Zach doing much the same thing. Both of them are probably “on the spectrum,” especially Zach, and both characters are quite intelligent, literal-minded, and find it difficult to pick up on jokes and figures of speech and double meanings. They see the world in a different way from the rest of us, and what books like Marcelo in the Real World and Anything But Typical show is that although the autistic person’s way of seeing the world may be limiting in some ways, it may also free the autistic person to see things that the rest of us miss.

I highly recommend Marcelo in the Real World for mature readers. As do the characters in the Bones TV series, the narrator of Marcelo speaks quite frankly about sex and sexual matters in an innocent, almost childlike, way. I didn’t find anything in the book offensive, but some people might.

Other blog reviews of Marcelo in the Real World:
Becky’s Book Reviews: “Meet Marcelo Sandoval. Read his story. Witness first-hand the transition from dream world to real world.”
Confessions of a Bibliovore: “But the real world is full of traps and pitfalls even for the people who spend all their time in it. Before the summer is out, Marcelo will discover that the good and evil exist together in ways that all his religious studying has never prepared him for, and that the only way to find the right path is by discovering where his own faltering steps lead him.”
Reviewer X: “This book is almost a study on humans through the mind of a guy who is the pinnacle of “socially awkward“. Marcelo’s precise, but for obvious reasons clueless, lacking completely in street smarts.”

Other books featuring children and young adults “on the autism spectrum”:
London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd. Semicolon review here.
Rules by Cynthia Lord. Semicolon review here.
Anything But Typical by Nora Leigh Baskin. Semicolon review here.
Al Capone Shines My Shoes by Gennifer Choldenko. Semicolon review here.
Emma Jean Lazurus Fell Out of a Tree by Lauren Tarshis. Semicolon review by Brown Bear Daughter here.
The Very Ordered Existence of Marilee Marvelous by Suzanne Crowley.:
The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon. Semicolon review here.
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon. Semicolon review here.
Daniel Isn’t Talking by Marti Leimbach.
A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards by Ann Bauer.

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Cybils YA Fiction

Jan4

I’ve read eighty some-odd of the books nominated for the Cybils Middle Grade Fiction Award, and although I enjoyed the experience immensely, I’m ready to move on to fiction about and for some other age group. So I’ve been sampling the nominees on the YA fiction list and some other YA fiction published in 2009.

Living on Impulse by Cara Haycak. Mia’s impulsive nature leads her to shoplift, go clubbing, try out alcohol, and generally make a mess of her life. The book sees to imply that all teens have to go through a stupid decisions phase before they can become truly mature, but I’m not sure I believe that. Mia is also the child of an alcoholic mother and an unknown father, and those liabilities factor into her poor decision-making skills. Still, Ms. Hayak tells a good story, and Mia is an interesting character.
Other reviews: Liz at Tea Cozy, Serenehours.

After the Moment by Garrett Freyman-Weyr. Female author tries to tell the story of a young man’s first love form the male point of view. I think she does a fairly good job, but then, what would I know about it? Leigh is seventeen, and he’s a people-pleaser. Maia is sixteen, and she’s a “cutter, self-mutilator, anorexic, crazy, anxious, drunk girl.” They fall in love. Something bad happens to Maia, and Leigh does the wrong thing in response to her crisis.
I don’t know if it’s because they’re part of the Eastern prep school tradition or just that they’re out of my cultural milieu, but Maia, and especially Leigh, think and act in ways that just felt odd to me. Small example: “For the first time, zoning out with soccer failed him, forcing Leigh to turn his attention back to the war.” What? The only possible things to occupy Leigh’s attention are soccer and the Iraq War? The author made a big deal about how the war doesn’t really touch Leigh’s life, how he is insulated by background and privileged status from the war, and yet the only thing he can find to occupy his attention is Iraq? Just one example, but these people didn’t feel real to me. I couldn’t figure out why they acted as they acted. Still, I kept trying because the author did make me care what would happen to them.
Other reviews: Harmony Book Reviews, A Striped Armchair, Bart’s Bookshelf, Steph Su Reads.

Going Bovine by Libba Bray. I only made it through about 200 pages of this 480 page surreal adventure about a self-centered jerk named Cameron who has mad cow disease and goes on a road trip to save the world and find a cure. I gave up around the time we got to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I take it back; I kept reading and actually liked the part about the Happiness Cult. Then, when I got through rooting for one of the guys (Cameron picks up a sidekick midget named Gonzo) to take down the Happiness Cult, all I had left was the simulation of a bad acid trip with Cameron and Gonzo. And Gonzo is only a little less jerky than Cameron. So, I gave up and turned to the last chapter. WARNING: I write spoilers for books I don’t like so that you don’t have to suffer through them: Cameron dies. I think.
All the other bloggers who loved, loved , loved this book: Em’s Bookshelf, The Book Reader, A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy, Mrs. Magoo Reads, Juicilicious. I could keep linking, but you get the idea. I’m the odd man out, and you can all go bovine together if you want. If it comes in parts, as my daddy used to say, you can leave mine out.

Comfort by Joyce Hostetter. This sequel to Hostetter’s Blue, about a girl who is recovering from polio in the aftermath of World War II, suffered from the opposite problem from Going Bovine. Everyone in the novel, especially the young heroine, was so-o-o sincere, and patient, and understanding, and Good. The protagonist, Ann Fay, spends some time at Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia, and that section of the book felt like a fictional advertisement for the polio rehabilitation center. All of the “polios” are good, and happy, and dedicated to working hard to be rehabilitated. And I sound really snarky and condescending. Actually, I liked the book, and the part about Ann Fay’s daddy’s experiences with post -traumatic stress from the war was interesting and more believable. But overall the book was just a little too sweet and serious and humorless.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. This one was great —until I got to the end, which wasn’t an ending at all, just a “To be continued” cliff-hanger kind of ending. Chapters that end in cliff-hangers are O.K. I get the point which is to keep the pages turning. Books that end with lines like the following are annoying, even though I will read the sequel, published this year and entitled The Ask and the Answer. The ending of The Knife of Never Letting Go:

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper to her. “I’m so sorry.”
We’ve run right into a trap.
We’ve run right off the end of the world.
“Welcome,” says the Mayor, “to New Prentisstown.”

End of Book One.

You can read more about the book (which was exciting and absorbing and quite violent) at: Becky’s Book Reviews, Presenting Lenore, Lazygal, Bib-Laura-graphy, or Things Mean a Lot.

So, this post turned out to be about the YA books that I thought were O.K., so-so, or really bad. I did find a couple of gems. Reviews of the really good ones coming soon.

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A Timeline of Cybils Historical Fiction

Dec28

1540: The King’s Rose by Alisa Libby. (YA)

1776: Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson.

179?: Den of Thieves: A Cat Royal Adventure by Julia Golding.

c1800: Rapture of the Deep: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber, Soldier, Sailor, Mermaid, Spy (Bloody Jack Adventures) by L.A. Meyer.

1840-1854: A Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson by Barbara Dana. (YA)

1846-1848: Anna’s World by Wim Coleman. Semicolon review here.

1850: Newsgirl by Liza Ketchum. Semicolon review here.

1860-1865: Lincoln and His Boys by Rosemary Wells. Semicolon review here.

1863: The True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick.

1864-1874: Black Angels by Linda Beatrice Brown. Semicolon review here.

1898: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. Semicolon review here.

1917: The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had by Kristin Levine. Semicolon review here.

1918: Winnie’s War by Jenny Moss. Semicolon review here.

1930’s: Strawberry Hill by Mary Ann Hoberman.

1936: Al Capone Shines My Shoes by Gennifer Choldenko. Semicolon review here.

1938: William S. and the Great Escape by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Semicolon review here.

1939-1941: Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba by Margarita Engle. Semicolon review here.

1941: Born to Fly by Michael Ferrari. Semicolon review here.

1941-194?: Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith.

1943-1949: When the Whistle Blows by Fran Cannon Slayton.

1945: Comfort by Joyce Moyer Hostetter. (YA)

195?: The Year of the Bomb by Ronald Kidd.

1958: A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck.

1963: Road to Tater Hill by Edith Hemingway. Semicolon review here.

1964: Sahwira: An African Friendship by Carolyn Marsden.

1968: The Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon. (YA)

1969: Neil Armstrong is My Uncle and Other Lies Muscle Man McGinty Told Me by Nan Marino.

197?: Secret Keeper by Mitali Perkins. (YA) Semicolon review here.

1976: Eli the Good by Silas House. (YA)