What Have I Missed? Review: How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

This is supposed to be my February book...but I ran out of days in February, thanks to my vacation/honeymoon. So here's the anxiously-awaited (if responses to my Goodreads review tweet are any indication!) of 2005 Printz Award winner How I Live Now.

In an attempt to escape her father and her horrible new stepmother, Manhattanite Daisy is spending the summer in rural England with family she hardly knows - her mother's sister and her four children. What is supposed to be a boring and relaxing summer takes a turn for the unexpected when, a day after her aunt has left the country on business, war breaks out in England.

Alone in the countryside, the five kids band together as a family in ways Daisy never imagined possible - from becoming so close they're practically telepathic to the decidedly more than familial love she shares with Edmond. But as the danger moves closer to their secluded outpost, Daisy must draw on reserves of strength she hardly knows she has to try to keep the little family together.

Pretty much every review of this I saw before going in brings up the incest - and now I guess I'm guilty of that too. But all of those reviews made such a big deal out of it I was sure I was going to end up with a romance story with some vaguely dystopian feelings. Let me assure you, that's totally not the case. Really, I'm kind of surprised that cousin-incest really gets people up in arms at this point. Just because you don't want to bang your cousin doesn't mean it's actually the grossest thing in the world. Much grosser: undead boyfriends that watch you sleep and try to control who you can spend time with. Or kidnappers. Abusive relationships of any kind, really. Priorities, people.

What this is, is a survival story. This is about how Daisy finds the strength, through extraordinary circumstances, to stop beating herself up and rediscovering her family and her will to live.

But ultimately, that wasn't quite enough to keep me riveted to the story. I put the book down a couple of times and wandered away to read something else. It may have had something to do with the writing style - it's very postmodern what with its complete absence of quotation marks. Considering the kids are pretty much psychic that makes it very hard to tell what is actually spoken and what is thought. The psychic-abilities were a bit random themselves - the whole of the writing just felt rather unsettling and unjustified.

What I did like was how Rosoff was able to subtly show how Daisy evolves over the course of the novel. There are hardly any moments when these changes are stated outright and instead they're left for the reader to pick up on and contemplate. An excellent example of an author trusting her audience to get it without hitting us over the head with character development or Messages.

Review: Nothing by Janne Teller, translated by Martin Aitken

Nothing wasn't on my radar at all. And then it walked out of ALA with a Printz Honor, along with the Batchelder award for best translated novel. Suddenly it was a must-read, and that was even before I saw the summary

Set in a fictional town in Denmark, the lives of a class of seventh graders is turned upside down on the first day of school when Pierre Anthon seems to suffer an existential crisis. He stands up and declares that "nothing matters" so he isn't going to continue going to school. Instead he starts spending his day in a plum tree, pelting his former classmates alternately with plums or barbs about the uselessness of life.

So the class decides they need to prove to Pierre Anthon that there is meaning in life. They start collecting items that have meaning to them, and piling them up in an abandoned saw mill. When the heap of meaning doesn't seem to be impressive enough, the real challenge begins, as the students individually challenge each other one at a time to give up something meaningful. It starts small and simple - a pair of earrings, a pair of shoes, boxing gloves - before quickly escalating into hair, pets, adoption certificates and beyond.

The writing in this is just devastating and absolutely beautiful. The design is also top notch, as space is used with great effect. Every couple of chapters there's a page where Agnes foreshadows or drops a bomb on the reader that is only a line or two long and centered in the middle of the page. It's like a punch to the gut. Nothing good comes from of these pages.

Agnes is an excellent choice for a narrator. She is at once an outsider and a complicit accessory to the collection of meaning - her tribute is made fairly early so she gets off relatively easily, but she also plays a part in ramping up the escalation. She has a somewhat distant voice, and about halfway through she starts unexpectedly engaging in silly word play that made me wonder if a psychotic break was imminent. And then there's her aforementioned empty pages. An excellent and haunting choice.

The number one comparison this book seems to elicit is to Lord of the Flies, and I have to admit I haven't actually read that one. But from what I've heard, the comparisons are accurate. "The Lottery" is another one, though at least the violence in this one is explained, if no less senseless. It's not a happy book. I had to put the book down a couple of times, just for a moment to compose myself, as the tributes to the heap of meaning escalated. This is a book that will haunt its readers, and it's no wonder it was showered with multiple awards this year.

What Have I Missed? Review: A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

Recommended by: Bob

A Northern Light is one of the books that inspired me to start this challenge. Bob had recommended it to me ages and ages ago, but I never got around to it because I wanted to keep up with all of the new titles coming out. When I started seeing people rave about Jennifer Donnelly's Revolution I knew her name sounded familiar...all because A Northern Light was still in the back of my mind as a book I needed to read! So I decided this needed to be the first book I challenged myself to - and that my reward for getting this challenge under way would be getting to read Revolution next!

In 1906, in a small farming community and summer tourist town, Mattie Gokey dreams of going to New York City to study writing, to share her stories of everyday life with the rest of the world. But realistically, Mattie knows she's never going to leave North Woods. Her mother has recently died, leaving Mattie and her three sisters alone with their father, who can barely bring in enough money to keep food on the table through the winter. Even if she could get a scholarship to cover her tuition, where would she get the money for lodging, clothes and books? And then there's the fact that handsome Royal Loomis has come courting, and Mattie is feeling a surprising impulse to stay at home and settle down.

Taking a summer job at a big tourist hotel to help out her family and put away a little savings for herself, Mattie is implored one day by guest Grace Brown to burn a bundle of letters. Mattie takes the letters, but keeps them hidden, just in case Grace ever asks for them back. Until Grace's drowned body is pulled from the lake, the apparent victim of a boating accident. The young man she was traveling with is nowhere to be found. Mattie begins reading the letters, hoping for a clue as to who Grace was, and maybe for a little guidance from beyond the grave for who Mattie should be.

Donnelly weaves lots of complicated themes into what is on the surface a basic coming of age story with a bit of mystery. Classism is big, ranging from the rich tourists coming in to land that's been settled by poor farmers, to the poor farmers looking down on those who are even poorer. Sexism is the other big one, and all the myriad ways it rears its ugly head. There's the expected views that women shouldn't be educated, but also ideas about what is appropriate for women to be writing about and how to handle sexual harassment. Mattie's best friend is African-American, and she gives us a first hand look at the ugly realities of racism in a Northern state 40 years after the end of th Civil War. Want more? There's also wonderful questions about decency and obscenity, both in people's actions and in literature through the books Mattie's beloved teacher surreptitiously loans her.

My one irritant in this book is the use of Mattie's dictionary word of the day. On the one hand, it's a fun trope and is used well to indicate when a particular chapter is set (the story goes back and forth between the discovery of Grace's body and the months leading up to Mattie taking the position at the hotel). On the other hand, the bit began to wear thin about halfway through the novel as Mattie often would struggle with how the word did or didn't fit how her day was going. I felt that the idea was well established enough at that point that it could have been left to the reader to figure out how a word did or didn't fit thematically, and only have Mattie mention it when it was an important comment on the story.

Huge thanks to Bob for recommending this to me! Next on my list? Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, winner of the Printz in 2005 and recommended by Rachel!

Book Thoughts: 2011 Awards

So yesterday was the big day in kidlit land - the announcement of the ALA's Youth Media Awards. It's already been pointed out that I was way off on YALSA's nonfiction award, but how did the other awards shape up?

Now, if I ran through every single award and honor presented yesterday, we'd be here all day. So instead, I'm going to comment on the most notable (to me) awards for the YA contenders, as well as link to my reviews when applicable, but direct you to the list of all the winners.

Big winner: One Crazy Summer. I clearly made a mistake in not writing up a full review for One Crazy Summer because that was the book to beat this year. A National Book Award honoree, Scott O'Dell award for historical fiction winner, Coretta Scott King Author award winner, and Newbery honoree. It's a small book - where on earth are all of those medals going to fit?!

Awards that made me squee at my desk: Five Flavors of Dumb winning the teen Schneider award and Almost Perfect winning the Stonewall award. I totally didn't expect either of these titles to get any awards attention - Five Flavors of Dumb because of its November publishing date and Almost Perfect because it's actually a 2009 book (and was on the 2010 Best Fiction for Young Adults list). So these were both very pleasant surprises because of my absolute love for both of these books.

Award that made me fistpump: Ship Breaker winning the Printz award. In movie-land, science fiction gets the short end of the stick. Thankfully, YA book people know an awesome book when they see one and gave this epic environmental dystopian tale the top award in the field. SO EXCITING. Also awesome? Our collective excitement got both Ship Breaker and Printz to be trending topics on Twitter. The #alayma hashtag also ended up trending for awhile near the end of the ceremony. Book geeks are loud and proud on Twitter.

The only other award I'm on record predicting and getting right: Firefly Letters getting a Pura Belpre honor. Over at Reading in Color I predicted that The Red Umbrella and Efrain's Secret would be recognized and Firefly Letters would get at least an honor, since she won in both 2008 and 2009. The Belpre committees clearly enjoy Engle's work!

Award that seemed to come out of left field: Moon Over Manifest winning the Newbery. I'm far from an expert on MG fiction, but I hadn't even heard of this one (despite its three starred reviews). I don't think I even saw it on any mock-Newbery lists, and no one mentioned it in last week's Twitter kidlitchat!

Was the National Book Award a predictor for ALA awards? Well, half of the NBA honors won big prizes, and a third honor was also honored at ALA (Lockdown by Walter Dean Meyers is a Coretta Scott King award honoree). Dark Water was completely left out, as was the actual NBA winner, Mockingbird. In the kidlitchat, it was mentioned that the NBA winner never wins the Newbery, and that has held true for another year - seems like it's almost preferable to just get the NBA honor!

Book that left Angela alone in the cold: Stolen. Clearly I'm alone in how this title underwhelmed me (and I still haven't found anyone who can adequately explain why Ty is at all desirable for anyone not suffering from Stockholm Syndrome), given that it received two starred reviews before getting a Printz Honor. I don't want to be unnecessarily negative here, but I just had to say something on this one.

Wait, what didn't win an award?! Out of My Mind. Seriously. Nothing. What on Earth happened there? I acknowledged in my favorite books of 2010 post that some MG experts had problems with the title...but were so many opposed that it didn't get any love? Hopefully it's a book that will get enough word-of-mouth attention to keep it finding new readers for a long time.

This week we should also be seeing what the longer book lists selected as the top books of the year. I can't wait to see what the Best Fiction for Young Adults and Amelia Bloomer lists come out with!

Review: Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes

Found via: BBYA 2010 nominations
Winner: Printz Honor 2010

This book is 532 pages long and it covers one week in 1973. Harry Potter books that are almost twice that length cover an entire school year. Of course, the Harry Potter books skip over vast periods of time in the course of the school year, whereas almost every minute of every day is accounted for here.

In other words, this is a rather detailed book.

Tales of the Madman Underground starts on September 5, 1973, the first day of Karl Shoemaker's senior year of high school and the start of Operation Be Fucking Normal. A tall order for someone who's been in therapy since middle school thanks to his dad's death from cancer and his mom's reputation as a drunken slut.

But Karl has a plan for senior year: if he can be normal one day at a time (a lesson learned from his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings), he can last long enough into the semester to make sure none of his teachers recommend he return to therapy.

But being normal is harder than it looks. After all, if you've never been normal, how do you know what you're supposed to do? Should he continue to hang out with all of his old friends, his fellow therapy members that make up the so-called Madman Underground? Or should he turn his back on all of them, including his best friend since forever? Matters are complicated by the appearance of Marti, a new girl with frizzy hair and no boobs - definitely not the sort of girl a "normal" guy would be hanging out with.

Plus there are some parts of Karl's life that are decidedly not normal, like working five jobs in order to ensure he and his mom can continue to eat. And having to hide that money in various stashes around the house so his mom can't find it and use it to go on a booze and pot bender while looking for her next hook up.

Karl has to balance home and friends, pushy and obnoxious teachers, small town and internal prejudices. All in his quest to be fucking normal.

This book was a little tough to get into, because I kept waiting for something to happen. Nothing major ever does, so if you're looking for a mind-bending thriller, look elsewhere. This is very much a week-in-the-life book - it doesn't even appear to be an out of the ordinary week, aside from Karl's attempts to be "normal" and the introduction of new-girl Marti to the small town school. Less than half way through however I began to enjoy the ride for what it was, liking this glimpse into the past.

Barnes deals deftly with a lot of the social inequity of the time. Casual racism and homophobia run rampant in this small Ohio town, even among friends. This isn't the wild and crazy and totally open 70s we often think about, but small town 70s where people looked upon the changes going on in the wider world with suspicion. Karl's mother is a total hippie in some ways, calling Karl a "special child of the universe" and saying that the age of Aquarius truly is coming upon them, but it's also clear most of the town thinks she's a nut.

I would imagine it might be hard for younger readers to comprehend the large amount of casual abuse in this story - lots of kids are regularly beaten by their parents or sexually abused by family members or locked out of their houses, and "everyone" knows about these incidents but no one really tries to stop them. They just throw the victims in therapy and call it good. The only reason I could buy it is Lightsburg, Ohio doesn't sound too different from the town my parents grew up in and Mom used to tell me some sad stories about kids showing up in school with black eyes and broken arms and everyone would know it was the mom or dad hitting the kid, but it was considered a private family issue. So kudos to Barnes for capturing a lot of the small but major tragedies of the time.

I couldn't tell you exactly why this was a Printz honor book. It's certainly very good, but I don't think I'm the best judge of what makes a Printz-worthy book. I tried reading Jellicoe Road after it won last year, and couldn't even get a third of the way through it. I can definitely, however, see this appealing to adult readers of YA, as the style feels very much like adult literary fiction. At least the little adult literary fiction I've read - have to admit, my reading tastes are definitely stalled at where they were when I was 16.

On the jacket copy: I have no idea why the jacket is designed with big old censor bars. It kind of implies the book is going to be about censorship in some way. There's a brief point about a teacher refusing to censor his teaching of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (so long as you're quoting the book he sees no problem with the racial slurs - it's when you call another person that outside of a literary context that it becomes a problem). So the gratuitous and obvious censoring of the jacket copy comes a little bit out of nowhere.

Review: Going Bovine by Libba Bray

Found via: NYC Teen Author Festival
Winner: Printz Award 2010

I got my first glimpse of Going Bovine back during the NYC Teen Author Festival, at the I Have Seen the Future... event. Libba Bray cracked us all up with Cameron and Gonzo's adventures with the Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack 'n' Bowl.

The rest of the book was just about as crazy and ridiculous as that excerpt she read. If nothing else, the book is consistent.

Going Bovine stars Cameron, a 16 year old slacker who wants nothing more than just to get through high school. He really doesn't care about his classes, his job, his family responsibilities, his hobbies...he's just muddling through. Until he gets a devastating diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - aka Mad Cow disease. A punk rock angel named Dulcie appears to Cameron in his hospital room, telling him he must take his roommate, a paranoid dwarf called Gonzo, on an epic quest to save the world from an inter-dimensional rupture, and find a cure for Cameron along the way.

Honestly my first reaction at the end of the book was "What the hell did I just read?!" This book is 99.58% ridiculous, with that last .42% made up of the occasional deep meaningful insight into the meaning of life, the universe and everything. But it's a fun-ridiculous, not a why-did-I-just-read-that, it-served-no-purpose ridiculous. Be open to the ridiculous and the weird, and you'll enjoy Going Bovine.