Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

 

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares

by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Review by Kate

 

Publication Information: Knopf Books for Young Readers / 26 October 2010 / 272 pages

Format: Kindle edition, because that’s how I roll.

Where I heard about it: Elle, who at this point just needs credit for everything I read. (Though in my defense, the cover would’ve attracted me without her!)

Spoilers: A few more than average, but I am dedicated to keeping them vague.

 
 
Review:

“I’ve left some clues for you.
If you want them, turn the page.
If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please.”

Lily has left a red notebook full of challenges on a favorite bookstore shelf, waiting for just the right guy to come along and accept its dares. But is Dash that right guy? Or are Dash and Lily only destined to trade dares, dreams, and desires in the notebook they pass back and forth at locations across New York? Could their in-person selves possibly connect as well as their notebook versions? Or will they be a comic mismatch of disastrous proportions?

 

I’m a sucker for the non-traditional novel. You can blame Meg Cabot for this; during undergrad, I plowed through everything she’d written in about a six-month time frame, never once coming up for air. A variety of narrators? Letters, notes, and e-mails? Yes, please! I’m pretty sure this is what attracted me, at first blush, to Dash and Lily: by the end of the first Dash-narrated section, there are notes! In a notebook! With witticisms! Sign me up, I’m in for the long-haul!

But the non-traditional quality has almost nothing to do with why I love this novel. It’s like the white curlies on the top of a Hostess cupcake: you enjoy them, sure, but they’re not the reason you eat it. (And if they are, you’ve got a malfunction there, buddy.) No, the reason that this novel sucked me in and then kept me coming back was more than just notes in a red Moleskine. It’s the instant love-ability of the characters. Because I don’t care who you are, Dash and Lily will charm you. As proof, I offer up a segment for you:

 
 

And it’s not entirely true that I’ve never been in love. I had a pet gerbil in first grade, Spazzy, whom I loved passionately. I will never stop blaming myself for bringing Spazzy to show-and-tell at school, where Edgar Thibaud let open his cage when I wasn’t looking and Spazzy met Jessica Rodriguez’s cat Tiger and, well, the rest is history. Goodwill to Spazzy up in gerbil heaven.

 
 

I’ve probably said it before, and if I haven’t, let this be the first time: it takes a special author to create characters who sing from the beginning. I don’t know what kind of Bayou black-magic Cohn and Levithan do in their spare time, but both Dash and Lily are absolutely lovable and addicting from their very first pages. And, considering that their stories are parallel for a significant part of the novel, criss-crossing only through the notebook, I can go so far as to call this book extra-special in that both of them manage to be compelling in separate corners. They don’t need each other, like so many dynamic duos do; if they’d never met, and the book was Dash and Lily Go About Their Day, I would love each of them anyway. The You’ve Got Mail-type disconnect between them adds a layer to the story, sure, but they’re both strong characters with strong supporting casts and strong plots.

And both of them are undeniably teenaged. The attitude, the personal struggles, the ebb and flow of emotions – all are perfectly, unquestionably teenaged. Lily nicknames Dash “Snarl” based on his level of perpetual grump, but as the book wears on, we discover that there’s a lot more to Dash than his crankiness. And Lily, who is bubbly and lovely, reveals a less flowery inner heart as the story goes on. I’ve always thought that it’s hard to write a character who effectively “fronts” the way teenagers (and other humans) do, but these two are pitch-perfect almost always.

I’d go with a flat-out always, too, but Dash – Dash’s voice is sometimes a bit too verbose. Too old for a sixteen-year-old. And while this is partially explained through the story, it’s jarring early on to read a teenager going-off like an English major who gets a kick out of making people feel stupid by using big words.

 
 

“If you tell me, I will leave you alone,” I said. “And if you don’t tell me, I am going to grab the nearest ghostwritten James Patterson romance novel and I am going to follow you through this store reading it out loud until you relent. Would you prefer me to read from Daphne’s Three Tenders Month with Harold or Cindy and John’s House of Everlasting Love? I guarantee, your sanity and your indie street cred won’t last a chapter. And they are very, very short chapters.”

 
 

But Dash’s dictionary-spitting isn’t my only quibble. While I think Cohn and Levithan got it almost perfect, there’s an odd, uneven quality in the pacing. I admittedly didn’t notice it when I first read, but thinking back to the book, I can’t deny it. The first half builds in a fever-pitch, bringing you along on this roller coaster of emotion that actually made me answer a “What’re you doing?” text message with “Shouting at the book I’m reading because a character’s being stupid!” – and then the action hits an unnatural lull, almost as though the authors realized they were going too fast and had to slam on the brakes. Cruising along after such stomach-clenching, Kindle-shaking emotional investment is hard, and while the story recovers, I felt disappointed for the “eye of the storm” chapters.

Worse, though, is the pacing towards the end. One of my biggest frustrations in literature is when a story either rushes the ending or drags it out, and somehow Dash and Lily manages to have elements of each complaint. There’s an artificiality in the resolution, an open-endedness where I’m not sure there needs to be. It’s like a dinner of Chinese food without the fortune cookie, creating a little hole in my overall enjoyment. And while I won’t say it knocked the book from a keeper to something I will give to Goodwill after letting my cat claw it, it – could’ve been better.

I won’t be saying that about most of the book, though.

 
 

But isn’t this a dance? Isn’t all of this a dance? Isn’t that what we do with words? Isn’t that what we do when we talk, when we spar, when we make plans or leave it to chance? Some of it’s choreographed. Some of the steps have been done for ages. And the rest – the rest is spontaneous. The rest has to be decided on the floor, in the moment, before the music ends.

I am trying to embrace danger…

 
 

Pacing and Webster-regurgitation aside, Dash and Lily offers all my loves and so few of my hates that I can’t give it a truly negative review. Because at the end of the day, it’s a fresh, lovable, quirky look at being a teenager and figuring out who you are, and I wouldn’t trade it for a better-paced book in a million years.

 

Overall rating: 7 double-stuff oreos:

A book that comes with high recommendations.

(For more rating information see here.)

Interview: Ashley Hope Pérez

Interview:

Ashley Hope Pérez

 

Before we go any further, we’d like to congratulate Ashley on the release of What Can’t Wait – we’ve heard lots of good things around the blogosphere and we’re really excited to be able to have her on the The Book Memoirs today.

Be sure to stay tuned until the end of the interview, when we’ll be giving away a copy of Ashley’s debut to one lucky reader!

 

 

 

Elle: In my review, I mentioned that I was immediately struck with the authenticity of Marisa’s voice. How long did you have the idea for What Can’t Wait before you started writing and did you find that your characters changed on the page?

Ashley: First off, thanks for that loving review! It’s so exciting as an author to feel that my book has arrived into the hands of a reader who’s found something worthwhile in it. Marisa’s voice emerged gradually during the writing project, and it got stronger until it took over.

At first, I actually wrote What Can’t Wait in the third person, but as I was revising, I realized that Marisa’s perspective needed to color every aspect of the story. I think it was at that point that I really embraced her outlook, her speech, her hopes and frustrations.

Alan's cycle, a page from Ashley's notebook

 

Kate: JK Rowling famously started writing Harry Potter on napkins in a coffee shop. What’s your writing process like? Have you ever deputized a napkin?

Ashley: I use a writer’s notebook obsessively (it has a pocket for my lists and inspiration items). In a pinch, though, I will write on anything! These impromptu notes get taped into my notebook at the first opportunity. To me, the notebook is a kind of invitation to write, and having it near me reminds me that if I open to a blank page and put the pen in my hand, something is bound to happen. I try not to wait for inspiration; I chase it down.

 

 

 

Elle: How important was the romance element of What Can’t Wait for you? One of the things that I enjoyed was that Alan was such an engaging character in his own right (can you tell I’d like a sequel? Ahem, ignore me). Was his individual development important to you in the writing process?

Ashley: Alan isn’t perfect, but he’s pretty perfect for Marisa. I hope she appreciates him, but it’s possible that she might lose track of what a fine thing she’s got (no sequel yet, but if there were one…). I think I wrote Alan as the guy I wanted for a few of my female students, a man good enough not to be threatened by a strong woman and brave enough to support her dreams even when they might take her away from him. Still, Alan has his flaws, and finding and drawing out his weaknesses, not just his awesomeness, was an important journey for me in the writing of the novel.

 

Ashley and her son Liam - photo credit Alex Farris of the Indiana Daily Student

Kate: You were in school and, of course, had your family during the time you were writing What Can’t Wait. How’d you find time to devote to writing? We’re both students and we sometimes don’t have time to sleep!

Ashley: First off, I’m blessed to have a husband who’s very supportive of my writing and a super-engaged dad. He gets why writing is a priority over laundry and loves to hang out with our little dude. To be honest, I still struggle with finding enough time for writing. But what I learned from my students is that life isn’t going to get less messy tomorrow, so we’ve got to find a way to do something about our dreams today.

My best concrete advice is to set a small, daily goal for your writing (or really for any dream you’re working toward). Right now, I try to write 15 minutes a day. This might seem like ridiculously little, but I’ve discovered that 15 minutes a day is much more effective than skipping several days and waiting until I have an hour to write. (Especially since days can turn into weeks that way.)

 

Elle: You’ve mentioned in a few places that your students found their own experiences relative to What Can’t Wait – did the near-rape of Marisa become a topic of conversation for them? What kind of feedback have you had about the other harsh realities you portrayed?

Ashley: So far I have had only one negative reaction to the gritty realities in What Can’t Wait, and that was expressed to me privately by an adult reader pretty far from my target audience. There is always some backlash when writers portray realities that make people uncomfortable, but my feeling is, if my students have to find a way to live through these experiences (and they did), why shouldn’t they be able to handle reading them?

Now that I’m a parent, I do understand the desire to protect one’s kids, but I think the best way to do that is for parents to read the books that their kids are reading about and (gasp) talk about the challenging themes. This—and not simply avoiding unpleasant realities—is the best way to pass on values.

Many of my female students in Houston had experienced some kind of sexual abuse or assault. Because of this, Marisa’s experience was less shocking than it might be for some readers. It was particularly important to me to show that even an experience that is not “officially” rape can be debilitating for a young woman—and to show how she might put herself back on a path of healing by speaking out, at least to those closest to her.

 

Kate: Many (many!) experts in the field of English education are constantly talking about the struggle to encourage kids – especially minorities and boys – to read. Do you have any thoughts on how educators, parents, and just concerned members of the literature-loving public can encourage the young people in their lives to read?

Ashley: Hang on… let me get my soap box out… okay, now I’m in position. Yes, I have LOTS of ideas on the subject because many of my students were what we diplomatically call “reluctant readers.” I used lots of strategies—teaching students how to identify the kinds of books they were most likely to enjoy, having students recommend books to other students (way more meaningful than dorky teacher lady telling them what to read), arranging 2-minute “speed dates” between readers and different books, and having many, many conversations about students’ lives and interests.

Ultimately the best advice I have is to build on whatever positive experiences a young person has had with books. If they loved X, why did they love it? Was it the characters? If so, we look for a book that offers a similar character-driven experience. Was it the plot? Okay, we need another page-turner. The dystopian theme? Here come more catastrophes. The zombies? Bring on the zombies! This may seem shallow, but what we want to do first is to create a string of successful, positive reading experiences. Once they get hooked, they can branch out.

Of course, some young people will insist that there has never been any book that they liked. I don’t argue with them about this—I remain non-judgemental and focus on what kind of movies and music they like. There is always something we can connect to books.

Elle: What was your experience of growing up with literature like? Were you encouraged to read? Was it something you discovered yourself?

Ashley: I was blessed to be born into a family of readers. My brother and I were allowed to stay up as late as we liked as long as we were reading, and we spent our summers growing up at the library in a little town where our dad worked. In elementary and middle school, I read anything and everything, from The Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High series to Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. I became a huge Margaret Atwood fan in high school, and I remember reading and re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale and even copying out whole passages from it to see what it felt like to write them.

 

Ashley and some former students with What Can't Wait

 

Kate: Do you think you would’ve still written What Can’t Wait absent your experience as a teacher?

Ashley: Never! For lots of reasons. First, before teaching I hardly read YA, so I never would have written a YA novel. Second, my students’ stories inspired What Can’t Wait, so no students = no novel. Finally, all the work my students and I did on how to accomplish a big goal was what actually made writing a novel seem possible. Without what we learned together, I’d still be agonizing over the first chapter right now.

 

 

Elle: You’re stranded on a desert island (preferably with someone who looks vaguely like Alan – I’ve got a thing, okay?!): what three books are you taking with you and why?

Ashley: Hah, glad to know you love Alan! I’ll be taking my husband Arnulfo and little boy Liam to my desert island, but I’ll also take along the bible because it is full of enough stories, characters, and conflicts to give me writing material for life. My second book would be The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy because I have to have a good tear-jerker and it’s so gorgeously written I could spend years learning from it. My last book would be a magic writer’s notebook that would never run out of pages or be ruined by freak rainstorms.

 

Kate: If you had one book that you would mandate everyone to read, what would it be and why? Do you have a favourite literary character?

Ashley: Okay, shameless self-promotion (“My book, duh!”) aside, this first question is impossible to answer. But I’ll pretend that I would have this privilege every year for the rest of my life, which takes away all that unpleasant pressure to pick the book. This year’s selection would be The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Exquisite prose, cool drawings, moral quandaries, and a Holocaust setting to boot.

Favorite literary character? Possibly Dostoevsky’s Underground Man because he’s so unlovable. Or Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.

 

Ashley and her family

Elle: Please, please pretty please can you tell us a little bit about your second book The Knife and the Butterfly (which is set for release in 2012 from Carolrhoda Lab and anyone who is as excited as me can find an excerpt here). Would you say that The Knife and the Butterfly strikes different tone from What Can’t Wait? Was it a challenge to write?

Ashley: The Knife and the Butterfly is also set in Houston, but it definitely taps into a world that is much grittier than Marisa’s. It explores the aftermath of a deadly gang fight in two characters lives. Azael, the fifteen-year-old speaker, is the son of Salvadoran immigrants, but his mother has died and his father has been deported. He and his brother move from place to place and are basically outside of all systems (school, CPS, etc.). They are also members of MS-13.

Large parts of The Knife and the Butterfly are based on actual events in Houston. I also spent a lot of time researching MS-13 and gang culture. I speak Mexican/Mexican-American Spanish, so I also had to learn Salvadoran slang to accurately reflect Azael’s world. I think the biggest challenge for me was confronting some of the less savory things that go through a fifteen-year-old male’s head. At one point, Azael’s looking at a picture of his girlfriend, and well… you can imagine what comes next.

 

Kate: Finally – what other must-reads would you suggest to people who love What Can’t Wait?

Ashley: I think my readers would love Matt de la Peña’s Ball Don’t Lie and Mexican Whiteboy. Also Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood by Benjamin Alire Saenz, Every Time a Rainbow Dies by Rita Williams-Garcia, and Imani All Mine by Connie Rose Porter. And for stories, Brownsville by Oscar Casares and Drown by Junot Díaz, an early collection that is grittier than his recent novel.

Kate, Elle, thank you both so much for having me! Readers, y’all stop by and see me at www.ashleyperez.com/blog. I love talking shop and sharing the scoop on everything from why I dropped out of high school to how a tattoo helped me become a writer.

 

Giveaway!

We have one copy of What Can’t Wait to giveaway to one lucky reader.

The giveaway is open internationally and will run from Saturday 26th March – Thursday 31st March. The winner will be announced on Friday 1st April and we promise no April Fools jokes!

To enter simply leave a comment with your email address answering the following question set by the lovely author: What can’t wait in your life?

1 entry = comment

2 entries = Book Memoirs follower and comment

3 entries = Book Memoirs follower, comment and tweet

Only one comment per person, please.

Matched by Ally Condie

Review by Kate

 

Publication information: Dutton Juvenile / 30 November 2010 / 384 pages

Format: Kindle edition, because I am a heathen convert of the 21st century.

Where I heard about it: Found it when I was trolling Amazon for popular new releases.  Yes, yes, I am that kind of a reader.

Spoilers: No worse than on Amazon, I’m sure.

 

 

Review:

Cassia Reyes is a model student, daughter, and citizen. How could she not be when the Society has everything planned and functioning perfectly? All of her needs are met: food, shelter, education, career training, and even her future husband are selected by officials who know what is best for each individual by studying statistical data and probable odds. She even knows when she will die, on her 80th birthday, just as the Society dictates. At her Match Banquet she is paired with Xander, her best friend and certainly her soul mate. But when a computer error shows her the face of Ky, an Aberration, instead of Xander, cracks begin to appear in the Society’s facade of perfection.

 

I am all over the futuristic distopian novel.  No, seriously.  Ever since reading The Giver in fourth grade, I’ve been fascinated with stories wherein characters can’t make choices for themselves.  In everything I’d read, Matched was instantly compared to The Giver.  I can see the similarities: in the mysterious future, everything is controlled for Cassia, her family, and her friends, from morning into night and stretching until the very day they die.  Good!, I thought to myself.  The Giver is one of my favorite books.  How could anything go wrong with a best-seller that’s being compared to it again and again?

And you know, technically, nothing went wrong with Matched.  The story was interesting and well-paced.  The characters were likeable enough.  It wasn’t a long read, and I was surprised by a few twists and turns, but…  It reminded me a bit of the last time I went to Olive Garden.  I ordered my favorite dish on their menu, with mussels and shrimp in a cream sauce, prepared myself for an amazing meal – and only found it to be average.  Like the magic my memory and stomach promised me was missing.  It was good, sure, and I cleaned my plate.  It just wasn’t great.

That’s what Matched is for me, then: good, but not great.

 

I look at the seed resting in the palm of my hand.  There is still mystery in it after all, in that little brown core.  I’m not sure what to do with it, so I tuck it into my pocket next to my tablet container.

The almost-snow reminds me of a line from a poem we studied this year in Language and Literacy: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It is one of my favorites of the Hundred Poems, the ones our Society chose to keep, back when they decided our culture was too cluttered.  They created commissions to choose the hundred best everything: Hundred Songs, Hundred Paintings, Hundred Stories, Hundred Poems.  The rest were eliminated. Gone forever.

 

I think my core problem with Matched is that it’s a novel with two faces.  The core story is about Cassia, torn as she is between two boys (the inevitable love triangle!): Xander, her best friend who she’s been Matched with and will marry, and Ky, an Aberration who is not permitted to ever take a Match.  Cassia’s struggle is real and organic, and I can’t say I disliked watching her come into her own.  But I never really was gripped by her as an individual, and some of the teenage authenticity I make grabby-hands towards all the time was definitely lacking.  She worked, though.  Xander was likable, Ky was mysterious, and were this a teenage romance I could happily check all the must-have boxes.

But the problem with the book, and the one I keep coming back to, is that Condie wants it to be more than a teenage romance.  There are hints of it early on, and tiny Orwellian glimmers throughout that made my ears prick up, but I feel like she set the story on a treadmill that was running too fast for it and it never quite found its footing.  It wanted to run, and I could watch it struggle, little hints of something more substantial between Cassia’s nightly Xander-or-Ky debates, but it never really got there.

 

“It’s not screaming,” my mother says, her voice sad. “You’re hearing the saws.  They’re cutting down the maple trees.”

I hurry out onto the front steps where Bram and my father also stand.  Other families wait outside, too, many of them still wearing their sleepclothes like us.  this is another intimacy so shocking and unusual that I am taken aback.  I can’t thick of another time when I’ve seen any of my neighbors dressed like this.

Or maybe I can.  The time when Patrick Markham went out and walked up and down the street in his sleepclothes after his son died, and Xander’s father found him and brought him home.

 

Somewhere around halfway through the story, I commented to Elle that nothing in this book struck me as remarkable.  There were no “I want to write this down and keep it forever” quotes, no moments that I wanted burned in my memory, no characters so addicting that I wanted to keep them on my desk with my X-Men and Star Trek action figures.  This isn’t completely true, but I don’t want to take it back either.

Because here’s the secret of this book, hidden deep enough that even I had a hard time parsing it out: there is a better story hidden under the layers of Cassia and her boyfriend debate.  Deep within, there’s something intelligent and compelling, something I’m desperate to know more about.  The problem is that Cassia’s whining and the slow build-up shoves aside the more compelling story about the Society and exactly what is going on in Cassia’s world.  Only in the last fifty-odd pages do you suddenly get that belly-jerking need to find out what happens next – and then discover that in order to do that, you have to buy the sequel this coming November.

 

I let it go like a child with a handful of balloons on her First Day at First School.  They float away from me, bright and dancing on the breeze, but I don’t look up and I don’t try to grab them back.  Only when I hold onto nothing can I be the best, only then can I be what they expect me to be.

 

In November, there will be other books for me to love.  There will be characters who grab me from the first page, plots that don’t amp up so subtly that discovering them feels like a gut punch, hidden gems of stories that do so much more than Matched ever could.  And that’s a shame.  If it’d started on page 200 and went straight onto the sequel, I would be gripping you by the t-shirt and begging you to buy it.  Instead?  I’m suggesting another menu item:

If you really want a good distopian novel, do yourself a favor and just read The Giver.

 

5 sour gummy straws: A book with some definite issues.

(For more rating information see here.)

Review: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

Review by Kate

 

Publication Information: Speak (Penguin Group) / 1978 / 192 pages

Format: Paperback. Or rather, I should say, my fourth copy of the paperback?

Genre: YA (technically “middle grades”, meant for readers 7-12), crime, mystery, thriller.

Where I heard about it: In 3rd grade, while my gifted class read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the 4th graders were reading The Westing Game.  I, as only a nine-year-old can, became obsessed with the book, but my teacher told me I couldn’t read it because we’d be reading it next year… and then she changed the curriculum on us.  I ended up borrowing a copy from the classroom shelves and devouring it.  That was 17 years ago.

Spoilers: A bit more than you’ll find on the book jacket, but less than you’ll find on Wikipedia.

 

Review:

A bizarre chain of events begins when sixteen unlikely people gather for the reading of Samuel W. Westing’s will.  And though no one knows why the eccentric, game-loving millionaire has chosen a virtual stranger – and a possible murderer – to inherit his vast fortune, one thing’s for sure: Sam Westing may be dead… but that won’t stop him from playing one last game!

 

I am, as a rule, not a re-reader.  There are no more than a dozen books that I’ve read multiple times, and I can name almost all of them off the top of my head: Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, Lawrence Block’s The Burglar in the Library…  The list goes on.  I like my stories complete, finished, and filed away in my mind where they can safely stay the way I remember them.  There’s none of the ugliness that comes from meeting an old friend ten years later and discovering he’s developed a beer belly and a receding hairline.  I cherish my books that way.

But not The Westing Game.  The Westing Game is a book that I read at ten.  And at fifteen.  And at twenty.  And at twenty-two.  And, and, and.

 

Whoever, whatever else he was, Barney Northrup was a good salesman.  In one day he had rented all of Sunset Towers to the people whose names were already pretended on the mailboxes in an alcove off the lobby.

Who were these people, these specially selected tenants?  They were mothers and fathers and children.  A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge.  And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake.  Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person.

 

Ellen Raskin was an illustrator until the last eight years of her life and The Westing Game was her final (and most acclaimed) book.  It tells the story of sixteen strangers who are all invited to live in an all-new, exclusive apartment building…  And who are all drawn into the mystery of eccentric paper-goods giant Sam Westing.  When Westing dies suddenly, all sixteen residents of Sunset Towers are invited to the reading of his last will and testament and told that his fortune will go to the one who finds the answer.  To what, no one quite knows.  The whole story revolves mostly around Turtle Wexler, the shin-kicking, braid-wearing, mostly-forgotten resident of apartment 3D.  Turtle discovers the body.  Turtle, more than anyone else, wants to solve the mystery.  Or maybe, Turtle just wants to be noticed.

 

“Hey, look!  There’s smoke coming from the Westing house!”  Again, Turtle was late with the news.

“Oh, it’s you.”  Mrs. Wexler always seemed surprised to see her other daughter, so unlike golden-haired, angel-faced Angela.

Flora Baumbach, about to rise with the found pin, quickly sank down again to protect her sore shin in the shag carpeting.  She had pulled Turtle’s braid in the lobby yesterday.

 

To the uninitiated, then, The Westing Game sounds like a typical pre-teen mystery.  And admittedly, elements of it are.  But more than that, it’s a novel about sixteen people, their lives, and the way one crazy stranger draws them all together – for better, for worse, and maybe for better again.

It’s hard to describe to someone who’s not read this book exactly how human all the different characters are.  From Turtle to her pretty sister Angela, from good-guy Theo and his disabled (but also very able) brother Chris, from Doctor Denton Deere to recently-immigrated Mrs. Hoo, everyone has secret depths that slowly reveal themselves in the book’s 200-ish pages.  I cannot name a single character, from the doorman to the dressmaker and back again, who doesn’t evolve in the course of the story.  And I dare you to finish the book without loving every last one.

 

“Perhaps my fiancé can help.”  Angela bit her lip.  Theo was not asking for charity.  And fiancé, what an old-fashioned, silly word.  “I went to college for a year.  I wanted to be a doctor, but, well, we don’t have as much money as my mother pretends.  Dad said he could manage if that’s what I really wanted, but my mother said it was too difficult for a woman to get into medical school.”  Why was she gabbing like this?

“I want to be a writer,” Theo said.  That really sounded like kid stuff.  “Would you go back to college if you won the inheritance?”

Angela looked down.  It was a question she did not want to answer.  Or could not answer.

 

I lose my patience with a lot of modern literature, especially YA, because of its insistence on being contemporary.  So many books are so clogged with pop culture references, they essentially have a two-year shelf life.  I can’t imagine my children reading the books I grew up with because they’ll have no frame of reference.  The Babysitter’s Club books were written when some telephone exchanges were still represented by letters instead of numbers.  The Lois Duncan and Christopher Pike thrillers I inhaled are products of the pre-laptop, pre-internet, pre-cell phone world.

Raskin – maybe on purpose, maybe just out of sheer luck – managed to create a book so timeless, it takes my breath away.  I forget when reading that this story is older than I am, and that entire generations of pre-teens have grown up with Turtle. Her style (Raskin’s, not Turtle’s!) is simple and elegant, descriptive without being overwrought, and every plot point is perfectly placed.  There’s no dragging in the middle or beating you to death with the climax; instead, every last detail is placed with surgical precision, but still feels totally natural.

And even though it’s not meant to be a thriller, its that ease that spurs you on and keeps you glued to the page.

 

“He looked too peaceful to have been murdered,” Turtle said.  She sneezed and Sandy handed her a Westing tissue.

“How would you know?” Doug replied.  “How many people have you seen murdered?”

“Turtle’s right,” her friend Sandy said.  “If Westing expected it, he’d have seen it coming.  His face would have looked scared.”

“Maybe he didn’t see it coming,” Theo argued.  “The killer was very cunning, Westing said.”

 

When I was moving from Arizona to Kansas this past summer, the one book I made sure to take with me in the car was The Westing Game.  Somewhere past Denver, where the road flattened out into bare green, I pulled the book out of my bag.  My whole life was up in the air – I was moving to a new state, I was six weeks from starting law school, my cat was dying – but this book that I discovered when I was nine, it was with me.  I read it straight through, barely speaking to my mother while she drove, and when I cried at the end, they were different tears than the last half-dozen times I’d cried at the same lines.

You know, Elle made a comment in her Liars and Saints review about books coming at the right time in your life, and I think there’s a truth to that.  It can’t be the absolute truth, though, and The Westing Game is the reason why.  I’ve destroyed three copies of the book and this evening, before writing this review, went and purchased my fourth, a pristine, unopened version to sit with pride of place until I read it again.

Instead of there being a time in my life for this book, it is more that this book is just part of my life.

Full-stop.

 

Overall rating: 10 decadent chocolate bon-bons:
The best-of-the-best.

(For more rating information see here.)

Review: The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff

The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff

Review by Elle

 

Publication Information: Razorbill / 21 Sep 2010 / 352 pages

Format: Kindle edition – because we don’t have the pretty cover with the scissors!

Genre: Paranormal Young Adult

Where I heard about it: I first found out about The Replacement after reading Thea’s rocking review of the book here. Thea gives the book a kind of middling review (and I always trust Thea’s reviews!) but everyone else was raving about it so. Well. I had to read it for myself, didn’t I? Duh.

Spoilers: This review may contain some mild spoilers.

 

 

Review:

 

Mackie Doyle is a replacement – a fairy child left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago, to replace the baby when it was stolen away by the fey. So though he lives in the small town of Gentry, Mackie’s real home is the fey world of tunnels and black, murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. Now, because his fey blood gives him fatal allergies to iron, blood and consecrated ground, Mackie is slowly dying in the human world. Mackie would give anything just to be normal, to live quietly amongst humans, practice his bass guitar and spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate’s baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably back home to the fey underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem, where he must face down the dark creatures, rescue the child, and find his rightful place – in our world, or theirs.

 

I’m a hard sell recently for paranormal-anything these days. Oh, I love the genre. I love it with all of my heaving, beating little dead black heart (much more than Kate loves the genre). I always have. But, guys, there is a lot of tripe out there right now. A whole swelling, heaving, bursting-at-the-seams bucket of piglet swill which sparkles in the sunlight (sorry, that was somewhat of a low blow). I’m loving the alternative paranormal/supernatural genre right now with its ghosts and its Odd Occurrences (Nevermore, The Vespertine, Rachel Caine! Jaclyn Moriarty!) but I am not loving the influx of the fey and the fanged smack bang into my comfort-read genre (look, some people read Stephen King as a comfort-read, okay? Okay). More accurately: I love vampires and fairies but recently I’ve been in a garlic and cold steel mood. Get thee behind me, poorly written prose.

So, in conclusion, let’s just say I was a prime candidate for a well written and engaging paranormal read and leave it there, shall we? Grand. In all seriousness, The Replacement’s premise was right up my alley – swapped babies? Black tunnels? A town called Gentry? Gimme gimme in my sticky, grabby little hands. The Replacement was nothing like the read that I expected it to be and I am so pleased to say that the book managed to be both the genre-tonic I was looking for and as well as a huge, unexpected surprise all in one Kindle-shaped morsel.

 

All of us got very still. The dropped books shifted and slid over each other, coming to rest on the carpet. My mom looked like she wanted to cover her mouth with her hands, take it back before she went too far.

Suddenly, I was sure this was it. We were going to talk about all the nasty, screwed-up things in Gentry, like how nice, normal babies got switched out for freaks. Maybe even how I wasn’t really her son and a kid named Malcolm Doyle was dead because a bunch of people who lived underground got off on collecting blood.

 

Mackie Doyle is not your typical outsider protagonist. He isn’t a slayer who discovers he’s chosen, or a police consultant on grizzly murders. He isn’t The Reluctant Saviour but he isn’t The Forgotten Prince, either. In fact, Mackie Doyle isn’t even close to dipping his toe into Fantasy Trope City and never once plays the part of the Dumb Outsider who Shows The Audience what’s really going on in this here narrative (man, that was a lot of arbitrary capitals). Mackie Doyle is, in fact, the essence of what it is to be a teenage boy: he knows he’s different, he knows people think he’s weird, but he really just. wants. to. be. normal. No, seriously. He’s not courageous, he’s not anything special He wants Alice the Mean Girl to notice him (but not really), he wants to go to parties and he wants to be able to ride in his best friend’s car without feeling ill because it stinks of warm metal. But Mackie can’t have that because, as we quickly discover, Mackie is dying. Living in a world in which everything rejects him, from steel counters to tinned food, Mackie’s body is being slowly poisoned by the cold metal of the normal world, somewhere he is acutely aware that he does not belong. And it is for this reason that Mackie’s character sings.

 

I stood next to Alice, trying to look like the story was not completely embarrassing, but she just smiled up at me. I was surprised at how paranoid the years of keeping a low profile had made me. How every unusual occurrence was a threat and every encounter was suspicious. I’d spent so long protecting myself from everything that I didn’t even know how to tell the difference between what was dangerous and what wasn’t.

 

The question of what constitutes doing the “right thing” and the grey area of moral ambiguity where vampires and werewolves traditionally exist in the paranormal spectrum is what usually makes the genre work. But, for me, Mackie was a completely fresh take on old plot devices. He knows what’s right but knows he’s not really capable of doing it. He’s scared and not afraid to admit it but in such a genuine way that he had me choked up a handful of times. He perfectly encapsulates the teenage boy who is at once both full of opportunity and promise and who, at the same time, thinks his life is ending. It’s just that Mackie’s right.

There were a few niggly things here and there. I really think that, on the whole, The Replacement is a character-driven book. If you’re looking for character development, side-characters who rock (my eternal love for Roswell be known!), a delicately balanced love story of teenage regret, remorse and retribution that I can’t even allude to without giving major spoilers, and some kick-ass creepy, then you’re reading the right book. If, however, you’re looking for intricate plot twists, buckets of mythology and really intricate systems of magic, this isn’t the book for you. While I loved the world of Gentry that the author created, I felt like sometimes explanations were a little bit lacking. I think that this was part of the illusion and the mystery of the supernatural in the novel but while I love that the magic of intention was the flavour of the week and not some ancient textbooks or fey king and queen lording over it all, I do think that there was room for maybe another 100 or so pages of building on what was there ( though what was there was awesome-flavoured).

 

I looked away because it seemed impolite to watch them. When they kissed, it was completely unselfconscious, holding on like they loved each other. It bothered me to realize that my own experience, loving anyone, even my own family, just made me feel sort of awkward and shameful.

In the House of Mayhem, it was different. It wasn’t shameful to be strange or unnatural because everyone else was too.

 

This novel is an allegory for so many things. Adoption, terminal illness, religious impact on young lives. It deserves to be looked at for what it does with the characters and how Mackie’s plight becomes a metaphor for every year of teenage misery and every shocking teenage discovery about how not fitting in is more normal than being one of the crowd. I know the author says she doesn’t have a sequel planned but I’ll be very shocked if I’m the only one who isn’t hopeful for one!

 

Overall rating:7 double-stuff oreos:
A book that comes with high recommendations.

(For more rating information see here.)

Book Babble: Four Reasons Paranormal Fiction Makes Kate Sad

Review: Junk by Melvin Burgess

Junk by Melvin Burgess

Review by Elle

Publication Information: Puffin / 6 Feb 2003 / 336 pages

Format: Paperback reprint. Junk was originally published in 1996 and is a 1996 Carnegie Medal winner.

Genre: Contemporary Young Adult

Where I heard about it: I read this as part of my Open University Children’s Literature course for my ongoing Lit degree.

Spoilers: Nothing that you won’t get off the book jacket or Amazon.

 

 

Review:

Tar loves Gemma, but Gemma doesn’t want to be tied down—not to anyone or anything. Gemma wants to fly. But no one can fly forever. One day, somehow, finally, you have to come down.

 

I’m not sure why I’ve been so reluctant to talk about this book. I’ve had the header information ready to go for days and days and yet when I sit down to actually write, I find that my fingers have turned to jelly and every letter I type out is gibberish.

I don’t often find characters in the YA genre who are genuinely beyond any help or intervention. In fact, one of the things that I love about YA fiction (most especially contemporary YA) is that there is generally a lingering sense of hope in the narrative. Sometimes this hope is present simply by being something which is inherent in the teenage experience (as a teenager, at the very beginning of everything, there is always a chance things could get better) and sometimes characters will only find hope by going through horrendous hardships beforehand. But, for me, even books about teenage suicide in the YA genre generally leave behind something hopeful for the remaining characters. And just so there are no misunderstandings on this point: I’m not talking about happy endings (if every book I read finished with a happy ending, I’d be one very aggravated Elle) but for me there has to be a sense that it was worth it, that something can be achieved at the end of it. That, even if there wasn’t a point to the suffering, everyone grew and learnt from it.

Junk hit me between the eyes like a sledgehammer because I knew, from the very first chapter, that there was no hope for Tar or Gemma. That, no matter how much they learnt and grew from the experiences they are dragged through, there was an inescapable sense of the inevitable. It was inevitable that they would fall because down was the only direction they had. For that reason, the book (though absolutely excellent) has dragged up a lot of lingering emotions for me and it has stayed with me days after putting it down. I still think about the characters weeks later when I’m zoning out of life and Thinking About Things.

 

Dad used to really hate me doing the housework for some reason, so I used to try and get it all done before he came home. That way he might think she had done it. So Mum left more and more of it to me, and was getting drunk earlier and earlier and I felt guilty because I was giving her less to do. They were having more and more rows and I was getting beat up more and more often…

That’s why I left. The trouble is… she depended on me. See? I kept thinking of the rows they must be having. I kept thinking about how angry he was going to get, how he’d tell her she’d driven me away…

 

For Tar, leaving home is a way to escape the endless abuse of alcoholic parents, who are an excellent double-team consisting of a manipulative mother and a physically abusive father. He is a quiet, sensitive kid who has tried his best to hold his family together and makes excuses for them at every possible turn. After all, his father is a teacher! Why would he have problems at home? For Gemma, however, leaving home is a form of rebellion against all of the rules that her over-cautious parents have set down for her as a direct result of all of the various things that they think is wrong with her. And, oh, there is a lot wrong with her. Gemma is loud, belligerent, selfish and spoiled – the complete antithesis of Tar, who is in turns unsure of himself, friendly to everyone and eager to just have a fair go at life. Gemma is the party animal to Tar’s homebody. In fact, Gemma initially sounds like everything that readers should really recoil from… but not so! Burgess expertly weaves their duelling points-of-view together so carefully and so underhandedly that I loved Gemma as much as I disapproved of her, I wanted her to succeed as much as I wanted her to leave Tar alone and I never once felt like throwing the book away after one of her tantrums.

The plot is an examination of homelessness and heroin addiction but the heart of the book is a terrifying view of how life shapes you without your ever knowing it. Who would have guessed that beautiful, insecure Tar had a dangerously destructive addictive personality and who would have thought that Gemma could ever be the voice of reason? As the book picks up speed, other people’s points-of-view are woven into the narrative and we are able to see Gemma and Tar’s downward spiral through the eyes of their friends, acquaintances and randoms they bump into along the way. Burgess integrates these interludes seamlessly and I never once felt further away from the main characters for them. As we are introduced to the hypnotically self-assured Lily, who is like an addition in herself, and the optimistic anarchist Richard, someone who has no idea how much of a part he’ll play in his friends’ determination to chase the dragon, we start to realise that things are not all as they seem and that perhaps Tar and Lily are not who they think they are.

 

She had this black string vest on. That was it. It took a while to sink in.  At first glance you saw this vest, it was just clothes. And then suddenly your eyes went POP, right through it, and there she was, bare as a baby. But some baby. I mean, you could see everything. It was quite long for a vest but even so when she bent over to put on a new cassette you could see her bare bum.

Everyone was watching her but it wasn’t because she was more or less naked. She had the power. People were talking about this and that but they were all just pretending. She was everything that was going on in that room.

 

Above all, this book is about perception. It is about how you see yourself and how others see you. It is told through pages of broken loves stories. It is the desperation to be far away from yourself without the means to do it. I defy anyone not to see parts of themselves in this book. Gemma and Tar’s experiences, though polar opposites from each other, are representations first and foremost of the teenage experience and what happens when there’s no one there to care. The book made me think about myself and made me ask questions I’d perhaps been avoiding answering. It was powerful and painful and perfect.

 

A month ago, I could have done it, but not now. A month ago I didn’t love her. I didn’t care about anyone – my parents or my friends or Gemma; I didn’t feel anything any more. I thought it was me being on top of things, I thought not feeling anything was better. It was junk. The feelings are there, all right. I was just so smacked out I couldn’t feel the feelings.

 

There’s been a lot of talk recently (a lot of really, really good discussions) about what is appropriate for young adult readers to have in their literature. But I genuinely, whole-heartedly believe that every teenager should read a copy of this book.

It could very well save a life.

Dandelion, Tar. Dandelion.

Overall rating: 10 decadent chocolate bon-bons: The best-of-the-best.

(For more rating information see here.)

Book Babble: Elle’s Recently Snaffled Books

It’s a shame that the webcam cut off halfway through! It picked a timely bit for all of it to strangle me but nevertheless here we go. Elle’s pre-orders and a pimp from le Angie at Angieville. Enjoy!

The Great Big Sample Post: Part 1 ft. Kate

 

 

Over the last few weeks, while my school life was far too frantic to even look at my Kindle, I found solace in amassing samples. Non-fiction, YA, fantasy, sci-fi — you name it, I sent something in the genre to my Kindle in hopes of reading it later. As it turns out, “later” was a week of plowing through more than 40 samples, trying to decide what I did and did not want to read.

(I haven’t actually gotten through all of them, but non-fiction and books that are tangentially related to school can wait!)

For that reason, I present to you the five very best and five very worst samples I read, not necessarily listed in true order of preference. The top five is actually more a top 10 that changed every third time I looked at the list, but I think I’m solid now.

Maybe.

We’ll see.

Love It, Lick it, Buy it (Devour it, Never Let it Go):

 
 

 
 

Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares

by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

I think, rather than try to explain why I loved this sample (and in fact told Elle to read it immediately), I’ll let Dash do the talking:

Wherever I went, I was on the wrong end of the stampede. I was not willing to grant ‘salvation’ through an ‘army.’ I would never care about the whiteness of Christmas. I was a Decemberist, a Bolshevik, a career criminal, a philatelist trapped by unknowable anguish–whatever everyone else was not, I was willing to be.

I’ve always felt that teenagers in fiction have a habit of not coming across as teenagers. Their cynicism (and joy!) comes across as muted and disingenuous, reminding you constantly that this is an adult trying to recreate their younger years. Both Dash and Lily, from the first page, feel real to me. Damaged and genuine, which is just how I like my characters. Plus, the book’s set in The Strand, that famous New York City bookstore, and features the characters writing back and forth to each other in a red moleskine. C’mon, bibliophiles. How could I resist?

 

 

Heist Society

by Ally Carter

Here comes the big confession: I can be an incredibly shallow reader. Sometimes, I just need pretty-funny-shiny to grab me and suck me in. Combine this with my lifelong love of heist movies, and I think Heist Society was meant for me. The setup is laugh-out-loud funny even if the premise is a bit out there (teenage con artists?) and every word just sung. From the fate of the Headmaster’s car to the introduction of Hale, I was sucked in. Even if it won’t ever be the most heart-wrenching, life-changing read, I’m a law student. I appreciate flirty, frivolous, and fun.

 

 

 

 

Bleeding Violet

by Dia Reeves

It takes a special author to write a character who grabs you from the first moment. It takes an especially special one to do the same with a deeply damaged character. Hanna, from the first page, is broken. It’s not even a spoiler to say that; from the first instant, something is wrong with Hanna. Full stop. But somehow, despite that — maybe because of that — you want deeply to care about her while she tries to make a home for herself with the mother she doesn’t know.

I set my bag on the floor and unpacked: seven purple dresses, purple underclothes, my purple purse, the big wooden swan Poppa had carved for me, and my cell phone. Since the room had no closet, I placed everything on the built-in shelves along the wall opposite the door, including my pills, which took up almost all the top shelf. I put the few toiletries I’d packed into the medicine cabinet. And that was it.

I was home.

There’s something beautiful in the choppy, disconnected way Hanna tells her story. In her imperfections. And that’s special.

 

The False Princess

by Eilis O’Neal

Imagine a Disney movie made into a book. Now imagine it with fewer talking animals and a girl whose life is about to be turned upside down, and you have The False Princess. High fantasy can feel like a trope parade down main street, but something about Princess Nalia and her trouble-making best friend Kiernan is addictive from the first. What starts as two teenagers trying to keep themselves amused by looking for an invisible door leads to Nalia discovering her entire life is a lie. One part prince-and-pauper, one part just solid fantasy, this book promises to wrap me up in its world and I’m desperately looking forward to it.

 

 

 

The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin

by Josh Berk

Long before I met Elle, a friend accused me of preferring male characters over females. I’m sure Elle would agree. When a man (or boy!) is written well, when I feel he’s real — I don’t think I could really ask for more than that. And Will Halpin, a deaf boy who’s embarking on his journey to mainstream school, is written perfectly.

Arterberry keeps turning around or covering his mouth with his flabby arm while writing on the board. Plus, although I realize that the American with Disabilities Act can’t force him to get rid of his bushy lip beast, a basic sense of fashion and/or hygiene should compel him to at least trim his ‘stache.

The class ends before I have any idea what era of history we were even talking about.

Will’s disability, too, is dealt with realistically and feels teenage (like stashing the hearing aids he promised to wear). You might as well just call the book This Will Make Kate Shell Out Her Cash, because really, that’s what it is.

 

Honorable mentions (the rest of the “Top 10″, really):

Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A. S. King, Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott, Paper Towns by John Green, Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles and White Cat by Holly Black.

[Editor note: Elle would like to point out that 7 of these were recs by her and that she owns a pretty copy of White Cat, too. Neener.]

 

Burn it (and Then, Burn the Ashes):

 
 

 
 

Tutored

by Allison Whittenberg

I once read a book about a “fat” girl (bear with me) that promised to be an uplifting story but really focused on the horrors of being fat. This sample felt like that with poverty. Oh, the story is one of my favorites — bright girl from a good home, poor boy who struggles in school — but something about the tone of the book just made my skin crawl. Without going so far as to say poor people are icky, it felt that way and I couldn’t detach myself from that connection. There’s no sympathy for Hakiam, the “downtrodden” boy of the story, even from the prose itself, and that’s a problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elegance of the Hedgehog

by Murial Barbery

Elle informed me this was a translation from the original French after I read and loathed the sample, which explained a lot. Namely, why this book is so unreadably verbose. Every paragraph beats you over the head with ten-dollar words, which would be great if the story was about winning a Scrabble tournament but not so much when it’s about — uhm. Well. I’m not even sure what it’s talking about, half the time.

I then obligingly flaunt these pauper’s victuals–now much improved by the noteworthy fact that they do not smell–because I am a pauper in a house full of rich people and this display nourishes both the consensual cliche and my cat Leo, who has become rather large by virtue of these meals that should have been mine, and who stuffs himself liberally and noisily with macaroni and butter, and pork from the delicatessen, while I am free–without any olfactory disturbances or anyone suspecting a thing–to indulge my own culinary proclivity.

Worse, both the fifty-four-year-old concierge and the twelve-year-old who lives in the building sound exactly alike, florid language and too-long rambling about everything. I honestly couldn’t figure out that it’d moved from one character to another until the girl said she was twelve. I’d say this is either the world’s worst translation, or someone liked thesaurus.com a bit too much when writing.

 

The Adoration of Jenna Fox

by Mary Pearson

Elle told me this sounded like a me-book, and maybe it would be were it not so incredibly choppy. Reading the sample — which attempts to set up how Jenna lost her memory and remembers nothing of her life — is like trying to understand a television show by flipping the TV off every few minutes. The narrative is choppy and jumps around too unevenly for me to really engage. Really, that’s the issue: it’s not poorly written (though sometimes, the sentences are so short and jerky, I think Hemingway is probably rolling over in his grave) as much as it is distracting. Instead of being intriguing, the tiny-boat-in-a-storm feeling made me give up on the sample halfway through. I think I might’ve enjoyed it otherwise.

 

 

 

Willow

by Julia Hoban

If you’ve watched my Book Babble, you’ve heard this rant, but if not, it goes something like this: the introduction of plot shouldn’t feel like being beaten to death with a baseball bat. From the first page — literally, the very first page, this isn’t exaggeration (for once) — Willow is so obsessed with cutting and scratches and pain that the book might as well have a giant THIS IS ABOUT CUTTING! sign. Maybe with fireworks, just in case you missed it.

But Willow’s eyes are riveted by something else: an angry red welt, about three inches long, that runs from the girl’s elbow to her wrist. If Willow squints hard enough, she can just about make out a few flecks of dried blood.

How did she get it? She doesn’t look the type.

Maybe she has a cat. A whole bunch of kittens.

Yeah, that’s it. Playing with her kitty. That’s probably how it happened.

Willow slumps down in her seat.

(And in case that’s not enough blunt force trauma, she’s crouching in the school bathroom and cutting herself by the end of the first chapter.)

I’m not against books about timely topics, and definitely not about getting the issue of cutting out there, but this feels more like an 80s after-school-special than a book. Shallow and painful for it.

 

The Maze Runner

by James Dashner

I should love this book. A bit dystopian, a bit Lord of the Flies, about boys being taken to a strange place and forced to survive by cultivating land and raising animals. But in trying to make the reader feel what Thomas feels, waking up in the elevator that delivers him to his new life, the book ends up leaving the reader in the total dark. There’s no frame of reference or context for anything that’s going on, and the book isn’t written tightly enough for the reader to feel Thomas’s situation. It ends of reading like poorly-written YA fiction, all bombastic confusion and no real meat. I couldn’t even get through the sample, so what does that say for the whole book?

 

 

 

So what about you? Do you download the Kindle sample or does it feel like cheating like the gals from The Book Memoirs? Do you hoarde them? And what’s on your radar?

Review: What Can’t Wait

What Can’t Wait by Ashley Hope Pérez

By Elle

Publication Information: Carolrhoda LAB / 01 Mar 2011 / 234 pages

Format: Uncorrected eARC from Carolrhoda LAB (Carolrhoda LAB is am imprint of Lerner Publishing Group)

Genre: Contemporary Young Adult

Where I heard about it: I had no idea this book existed until I received it for review but you can bet your breeches I am off to buy the shiny and infinitely pretty hardback! And then some for my friends. And my friends’ friends. And their kids. (I already made Kate buy it. Herself.)

Spoilers: Nothing that you won’t get off the book jacket or Amazon.

Review:

“Another day finished, gracias a Dios.” Seventeen-year-old Marisa’s mother has been saying this for as long as Marisa can remember. Her parents came to Houston from Mexico. They work hard, and they expect Marisa to help her familia. An ordinary life–marrying a neighborhood guy, working, having babies–ought to be good enough for her. Marisa hears something else from her calc teacher. She should study harder, ace the AP test, and get into engineering school in Austin. Some days, it all seems possible. On others, she’s not even sure what she wants. When her life at home becomes unbearable, Marisa seeks comfort elsewhere–and suddenly neither her best friend nor boyfriend can get through to her. Caught between the expectations of two different worlds, Marisa isn’t sure what she wants–other than a life where she doesn’t end each day thanking God it’s over. But some things just can’t wait…

 

I feel like the blurb on this book is a little misleading. Sure, it tells you roughly what happens and it even manages to hit you over the head with the Cinderella-esque hook but… It doesn’t tell you the truth. And the simple truth is: there are no suddenly-ies in Ms Pérez’s novel. There are no shock cliff-hangers, no red-herrings, no ham-fisted, poorly juggled plot devices. There are no real villains and there are no real heroes. In short, What Can’t Wait is chock full of nothing but straight-up, no-nonsense, stunning story telling and its lack of conceit is possibly the most magical thing about the entire narrative.

I fell in love with Marisa, our narrator, in the first ten pages. Any author who can do that in ten pages deserves a little shiny row of gold chocolate stars to consume at their leisure. There was no period of waffling or trying to feel her out – I was there with her and invested in her story before the end of the scene. Marisa is undoubtedly a girl from the barrio and she has the sass to match it but while she is at once fiercely determined and made of candy-flavoured awesome, she is also in turns shy, frightened of the intense faith people have in her and painfully embarrassed about her very noticeable birthmark. As a reader, I found that I was as aware of the presence of the inevitable in Marisa’s life as she was and there were a handful of moments even very early on that I felt so deeply in my chest that I had to fight the urge to read through my fingers.

 

The snoring lump on the couch is my sister Cecilia, and the niña curled up on the couch cushions by the wall is my five-year-old niece, Anita. They show up like this whenever Cecilia has a throw-down fight with her husband, Jose. He’s definitely the bigger jerk but I don’t approve of all the screaming and door-slamming that she does in front of Anita. Or of how Cecilia drags her out of their apartment in the middle of the night, trash-talking Jose the whole time.

Cecilia is the last person I want to deal with right now, so there are some simple rules I should follow. Don’t close the bathroom door because it squeaks too loud. Wait until Cecilia is in the middle of a good long snore before slipping past. Avoid saying anything that sounds even remotely like “Jose” (that always stirs up the demon in her). And definitely do not stand around watching Anita sleep when I should be walking to school.

But I can’t seem to help myself. Anita is the best thing Cecilia ever did.

 

Marisa makes a lot of sacrifices throughout the novel: she works for her family and misses classes that she desperately needs to fuel her dreams, she babysits for Cecilia and she loses much of the teenage life she should be out experiencing and, above all, she caters to her father’s unreasonable demands and despot-like iron rule without a single murmur of protest. Despite all of this, I never once felt like Marisa was feeling sorry for herself. Instead, she manages to juggle all of these responsibilities with finding and falling for Alan Peralta, who is a good boy, good son and good baseball player… but also a bit of a flaky artist, never to be spotted without his Sharpies and more in love with Krispy Kreme donuts than any young athlete should be. (But more on that later!)

The thing that I loved most about Marisa was her heart-stopping honest. She’s good at calculus… but no one cares whether she excels at functions and formula or not. She wants to be an engineer… but she has absolutely no idea what being an engineer involves. She wants to make her teacher proud proud… but she can’t handle the intensity of her support and drive to make her be the very best version of herself that she can be.

 

In the kitchen, my report card is in the same place I left it yesterday, untouched. I’ve been doing this since middle school, hoping that one day my parents will say something. If I stick the grades right in my Mom’s face, she says, “Qué bueno,” but I don’t think the A’s even register to her. I grab the report card and toss it in the drawer with all the others they’ve ignored. Then I get to work.

 

I will admit to a small bias on my part towards books which portray genuine Hispanic and Latino Americans in realistic communities, dealing with the matter-of-fact challenges which make up such a big part of their culture. Kate rightfully pointed out not that long ago that while this sub-genre of YA is growing –it is not as painfully under-represented as it once was – it is still difficult to illustrate Hispanic and Latino teenagers’ experiences accurately without hitting people over the head with all of the issues inherent in their lives and turning them into tired tropes, rather than exposing them for the cancerous problems which they actually are. Poverty, drugs, gangs, teenage pregnancies and a generation which believes that there is nothing out there for them are all frequent flyers in the genre but, while What Can’t Wait features every single one of these issues at one point or another, it does it in such a subtle, carefully crafted way that I didn’t once feel like I was being told everything and shown absolutely nothing, or that I was being hit over the head with How! Bad! It! All! Is! Instead, the issues are dealt with as they should be: part of the every day environment that Marisa encounters. Part of the characters’ lives. Just another day. In this way, the issues were even more heartbreakingly appalling thanks to unbelievably normal everyone thinks they are.

 

“So what’s his story? Where’s he live?”

“Used to live with his dad downtown, but he got fed up with Lamar. It’s all preppy like people say it is, you know, all academic and shit. Too stressful. So he moved in with his mom. She has one of those nice apartments on Meadowbrook.”

“You already saw his apartment?”

“Oh yeah,” she says. She carries her burger over to the bed, closes her eyes and stretches. Her face says GUILTY x40.

I wad up one of the shirts from the floor and throw it at her. “You’re so bad, girl,” I say, because that’s what I always say. But I don’t worry too much, because I dragged her sexy self to Planned Parenthood sophomore year.

Brenda stares at her fingernails, and picks her cuticles a little, no doubt reliving some delicious moment with Greg. “Maybe, but being bad feels so good. You know what I mean.”

The thing is, I don’t.

 

The best thing about the entire novel was that every single character – even the side-characters – got some form of development. One by one, through Marisa’s eyes, these characters grew and learned and saw each other in many different lights. And every single one of those characters? Was flawed. Even the very best of them (such as Marisa’s beloved Alan, or the ever-loyal Greg) had their gnarly bits, ugly bits and the bits that you didn’t necessarily want to see but they were inevitably things that Marisa didn’t shy away from – because she couldn’t. Being unable to kid herself is one of her Marisa-isms, along with a whole host of other things, like feeling indebted to Anita, reaching her limit, and going through her own narrative like a boomerang.

I loved Marisa. I love this world.

Do you hear that, Ms Perez? I want more.

Overall rating: 8 frosted doughnuts:

If it’s a series, you want more, if its a stand-alone, you’re sad it stood alone!

(For more rating information see here.)