Review: Love Drugged by James Klise

Found via: I'm Here, I'm Queer, What the Hell do I Read?

The basic premise of this book is fraught with the possibility of going down a baaaaaaaaaaad road. Gay kid starts taking a pill that will make him straight. Not hard to see how this could open up some really bad plot lines, or at least unfortunate implications - and I can't tell you how relieved I am that it does not go in that direction!

Jamie Bates is 15 and if he knows anything about himself it's this: he's gay. But for Jamie, that's just about the worst fate he can imagine - he's sure that he'd be ostracized at school and maybe even kicked out of the house he shares with his parents and his grandparents. So as he enters high school, Jamie figures he needs to play it straight, if you will. He's going to keep a low profile, and just try to fit in. When one of the most beautiful girls in school starts paying attention to him, Jamie figures he might as well go for it - maybe he just needs to meet the right girl, right? And Celia Gamez is pretty much everyone's idea of the right girl - beautiful, funny, smart, and rich since her dad is a big name in the pharmaceutical development industry.

Jamie enjoys spending time with Celia, but isn't feeling much of a spark - until he discovers that her dad is developing pills that will eliminate homosexual desires in men. Desperate for some medical help, but unable to discuss this openly with his girlfriend's dad, Jamie starts stealing pills and taking them on the sly. As his relationship with Celia escalates, the drug starts having worrisome side-effects, and Jamie has to create an ever-more elaborate series of lies to explain his behavior, even as it's becoming obvious that whatever the drug is doing, Jamie isn't acting like the person he wants to be.

Klise is a debut author, but he handles this potentially fragile subject with sensitivity and deftness - explained perhaps in his author's note where he acknowledges that when he was 15 he just might have taken such a pill if it were available to him. I think anyone who has questioned their sexuality will recognize themselves in Jamie - the fear of being discovered by the wrong person, the internalized homophobia, and an overwhelming desire to just feel normal. Klise does an excellent job of bringing Jamie fully to life, flaws and all.

I'd say about 90% of this book is excellent - some of the plausibility is lost in the last chapter as the villain is revealed and the hijinks escalate to Saturday morning cartoon proportions. It's a weak note to leave the story on, but isn't insurmountable.

Love Drugged also presents a bit of a twist on the overworked-oblivious parents routine - instead of being high powered workaholics, his parents are working constantly to try to keep the family's heads above water. They moved in with Jamie's grandparents years ago, promising it as a temporary solution, that has slowly grown more permanent. It's not exactly a nuanced portrayal of how middle class families respond to economic crises, in part because most of the adults are two-dimensional and hardly have any screen time, but I appreciated a multi-generational household being presented as more-or-less normal.

I'm still accepting suggestions on which books I should take on my vacation! Check out yesterday's post and add your vote!

Review: Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

Two weeks ago I reviewed Donnelly's Printz honor winning A Northern Light as the inaugural book in my What I Missed reading challenge. I chose A Northern Light to go first because I knew Donnelly had another book out that was getting rave reviews, and I figured I might as well read the books in publication order. I am happy I didn't delay any further, because wow, was Revolution ever a trip.

Andi is one angry, troubled young woman. After losing her brother, her father took off and her mother is still having difficulties coping. Andi lashes out at anyone who tries to come close to her and refuses to put any effort into her schoolwork, even as the due date for her thesis approaches. The only thing Andi cares about anymore is her music - and sometimes even that isn't enough to keep the demons away.

Incensed by his daughter's near failure in school, Andi's dad insists she spend Christmas break with him in Paris so she can focus on her schoolwork while he works on a centuries-old mystery: identifying the owner of a heart long said to belong to Louis-Charles, the young prince who was imprisoned during the French Revolution. Though Andi's determined to finish her thesis in record time, she's distracted by the discovery of a diary written by Alex, a young woman who served the royal family right at the height of the Revolution. She is drawn to the diary and can't escape until she reads Alex's chilling final entries. That is, until an ill-fated trip into Paris' famed catacombs leads Andi to re-emerge into Paris in 1795, where everyone seems to think that she's Alex. Is it a bad drug trip, or has Andi actually stepped into the past? And if she's really there, can she change the future?

Wow, is Andi ever a painful person to read about. She is just so angry and hurt by her brother's death and her parents' reactions and Donnelly's writing made her ragged emotions just jump off of the page. Just devastating and heartbreaking. Donnelly also does an excellent job of describing Andi's rapidly declining mental state as Andi relies more and more on anti-depressants to keep her world in focus. Operating under the theory that if one is good, more is better, Andi takes an increasing number of pills throughout the novel and it's never quite clear if some things are happening because she is on too many drugs - or not enough.

It took me to get about halfway through the book before I was totally comfortable with using Alex's diary as our viewpoint into the past. Part of me wanted this to be a straight-up historical novel without all of Andi's angst. Or perhaps the story could have alternated chapters so we were fully immersed in Revolutionary-era France. But as Andi herself became more invested in Alex's story, so did I become invested in Andi as a character and the ways her and Alex's stories complemented and contrasted with each other.

Music fans of multiple stripes will have a lot to love in this book. I was never that great at musical theory, so some of the subtleties of Andi's obsession with the composer Mahlerbeau were lost on me, but this is an extremely musical novel filled with descriptions of both classical and ultra-contemporary music. Bigger music fans than me will probably enjoy sifting out all of the various musical references.

As she proved in A Northern Light, Donnelly has a gift for bringing the past to life through her excellent writing. With much of Revolution set in the 21st century, she proves that she's equally gifted with contemporary characters and problems, but by weaving in elements of history she helps illustrate just how timeless many stories are.

Nonfiction Monday Review: Frozen Secrets: Antarctica Revealed by Sally M. Walker

Found via: Bookends

Last Monday, the big talk in New York City was how it was colder in Manhattan than it was in parts of Antarctica. Which probably isn't the fairest comparison considering it's summer in Antarctica right now, but the point was made: it was freaking cold here. As we're in a brief lull between snowstorms, and temperatures are thankfully back into the 30s, I thought it was high time to settle in with Frozen Secrets, Sally M. Walker's in-depth look at the mysterious continent.

Walker methodically walks us through numerous aspects of Antarctic exploration, from the first humans to attempt to cross the continent, back to the dinosaurs that once called it home, and looking ahead to what clues Antarctica can give us about Earth's future.

There's a little bit of something for everyone in here - geology and climatology, paleontology and even robotics. Every couple of pages I was coming across new stunning facts and photographs that I just had to share with my husband - who is going to read the book next and use it as research for the survival-horror role playing game he's setting up for our friends that will now be taking place in an Antarctic research station.

Teen readers I'm sure will feel a connection with the middle school scientists featured in the book - their science teacher goes scuba diving with Antarctic research teams, and gave her students the chance to build a robot that was actually used in an Antarctic dive. How cool is that?!

Walker does an excellent job of explaining complex scientific theories and experiments in plain language for the non-Antarctic-expert. The explanations are accompanied by amazing photographs and excellent charts and drawings when applicable, making everything extremely easy to understand, but not feel condescending.

This is also an absolutely stunning book. I can't find a picture of it online, but the cover image that Amazon has isn't the actual cover - the same picture is used, but the title is moved up above the mountains and is in a blue font, while the subtitle is in roughly the same position but faces from yellow to light blue, like the overall photo does. Visually stunning, and I just love the font as well - it comes back for the chapter headings throughout the book. Almost every page has at least one picture, from portraits of research teams to stunning landscapes to historical photographs of early Antarctic explorers. This is absolutely a must-read for any sort of science geek.


This week's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by The Miss Rumphius Effect. Be sure to stop by and check out the other great nonfiction titles highlighted this week!