This is one of the first books from Tu Books, the new Lee & Low imprint devoted to YA genre fiction with protagonists of color. I’ve blogged about them quite a bit, and was super excited about Tankborn in particular. It’s not a perfect book, but there was a lot I liked about it. It certainly kept me turning pages, and I’m still thinking about it a couple of weeks after I finished it.

Criticisms first, because that’s how I roll. While of course I understand intellectually that slavery happens and I can see how a group of colonists could theoretically set up that hierarchical society, I never believed the particulars. It felt like a collection of parallels to specific Earth cultures rather than a believable world of its own. (The author mentions her fascination with the Indian caste system; the connections to African-American slavery are also pretty obvious.)

I also didn’t get Kayla as a character, or Mishalla for that matter. A chapter or two at the beginning where we see them as friends, their lives before their Assignments separate them for work, would have added a great deal.

That said, I really wanted to know what was going to happen! I read the last third or so in one go. It was clear that something was off, that there were going to be twists. I guessed some of them, but never too soon, and I was surprised but satisfied by others. There was romance, but it never took too much attention away from the girls’ bravery — their choices were partly based on love, believably for teenage girls, but they never forgot that they had other responsibilities that were more important.

Since the whole point of Tu is to bring more people of color into YA fiction, I feel like I need to address how race is handled in the book. There’s a lot of discussion of color, because the castes are more or less stratified that way. The “high-status trueborns” are described as being a “perfect” brown, with straight dark hair; the implication is a sort of South Asian look, which is emphasized by the South Asian feel of many of their names. Lower status people have either much darker skin or much lighter; it’s emphasized that there’s no way someone with red hair and pale skin (like Mishalla) could be high-status. The girl on the cover, for once, actually seems darker than the description of the character (presumably Kayla). I’m mostly okay with that, given the cover-whitewashing Tu is trying to combat, though I do wish the cover had shown Kayla as the more mixed-race girl it’s implied she is.

So okay, class is still tied to color, just differently than we as Americans are used to. The most interesting thing, though, is how class is handled, particularly the cross-class relationship between Kayla and her high-status employer’s great-grandson. He starts off defending the system that puts him on top, with the expected “but you’re safer and happier this way” arguments, but slowly comes to see the great wrongs being done. What I liked was that Kayla doesn’t immediately accept his guilt. She basically says, “Yeah, that’s very nice, but you’re still comfortable in your nice house and your safe life, and I’m still a slave. I’m not going to congratulate you on your epiphany.” I wished that attitude had lasted longer.

Overall, this is the kind of social commentary science fiction I always want more of. I can see Uglies fans getting into this.

Also reviewed by: Wandering Librarians. Uma Krishnaswami talks about being a “cultural consultant” for Tankborn, and interviews the editor Stacy Whitman.

ARC yoinked by Wandering Librarians’ Arianna for me, by request, at ALA. Thanks!

I loved this book. There’s so much going on — it’s about being thirteen as much as it’s about this particular condition. A strained relationship with her lifelong best friend, her warm and slightly kooky family, the deteriorating health of her beloved cat Mango, the dude she meets on a synesthesia message board… it doesn’t all neatly tie into a couple of themes, but I actually loved that. It felt lifelike. Almost all of the characters (with the unfortunate exception of the best friend) were unique and three-dimensional. And you know I’m a sucker for a strong sense of place: Mia’s rural Illinois town, the rambling house built by her father and grandfather, the fields she loves to run around in.

The process of finding a diagnosis felt a little clunky. Y’all have internet access; use it! But once they got there, I found it fascinating to watch Mia really explore this facet of herself for the first time. She never sees it as a disability. (Which makes this a slightly ironic winner of the Schneider.) In fact, she adores the extra dimension to her perception. She learns online that some synesthetics experience amazing sensations from acupuncture, so she becomes obsessed with going. It’s a drug trip, effectively, only the drug is her own brain, and she basically behaves like an addict for awhile — only thinking about her next hit, distancing herself from her loved ones.

This is not a scientific book about synesthesia. Like many of Wendy Mass’s stories, it’s mostly grounded in reality, but with a bit of the mystical about the edges. It reminded me of Criss Cross in that way. I found it intriguing, a bit heartbreaking (with some truly perfect descriptions of loss), and beautifully written.

Also reviewed by: Things Mean a Lot and Odd Time Signatures

Al Capone, my favorite of the two, takes place on Alcatraz in 1935, when guards’ families lived on the island. (I have a bit of a prison thing — any closed society, really — so I was all over this premise. Also my students have been recommending the book to me for years.) Moose has just moved to the island with his father, mother, and sister Natalie. Natalie has an undiagnosed mental disability (she would probably be diagnosed with fairly low-functioning autism today). Their mother, obsessed with curing her, has sent her to every quack she could find. Now they’ve moved to San Francisco so Natalie can attend a school for special-needs kids.

But she doesn’t get in. So Moose’s mother insists that Moose come straight home from school every day on the ferry and take Natalie around the island with him and the handful of other island kids. Moose is initially grumpy about Natalie cramping his style, but the extra interaction does turn out to help both Natalie and Moose.

I made that description mostly about Natalie, but there’s a lot more going on for Moose: the Warden’s daughter Piper, who’s way too much trouble to be as cute as she is. His new friends at school and their regular baseball games. His relationships with his parents. All are handled with humor and sensitivity, and despite the historical setting the whole thing feels like it could have happened yesterday. This is a book that happens to have an autistic character, not an Austism Problem Novel.

Anything But Typical, on the other hand, is definitely a one-trick pony. Jason, the narrator, is far higher functioning than Natalie — he is “mainstreamed” in school, though he finds a lot of challenges there now that he’s denied his one-on-one assistant. His favorite thing in the world is Storyboard, the forum to which he posts his short stories. He strikes up a correspondence with PhoenixBird, which turns into an online friendship. When Jason’s parents surprise him with a trip to a Storyboard convention, he’s terrified of meeting PhoenixBird — will she still be his friend or even his girlfriend, or will she ditch him once she sees how “weird” he is?

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that she reacts with some distance when they meet — the book would be wildly unrealistic if she didn’t. Jason’s life is pretty tough in some ways. He doesn’t understand what people expect of him or how to give it, but he wants to please them; he wants the kind of relationships “neurotypicals” have. The “uplifting” ending has him proud of his unusual mind, but one definitely gets the sense that he’s going to go through that cycle (as we all do, I guess) many times before adulthood.

This is a solid story that provides a good perspective on autism from the inside (with the caveat, of course, that autism varies widely, so no one should take this as The Way the Autistic Mind Works). My favorite part was reading the descriptions of Jason’s inventive stories, somewhere between magical realism and fable. But overall, it didn’t particularly grab me — there just wasn’t enough depth. (On the other hand, gorgeous cover!)

Al Capone also reviewed by: Of Cabbages and Kings, Searching for a Good Read, and Fyrefly’s Book Blog

Anything But also reviewed by: Auntie Sarah, Abby (the) Librarian, and Ms. Yingling

I adored this book. Piper is a funny, flawed, endearing narrator. No major character is quite what you — or Piper — expect at the beginning; the author doesn’t let us off with easy stereotypes. Money and disability are dealt with honestly, and the casting is smoothly color-blind, so it never feels like an issue (the beautiful popular girl is biracial African-American and white; Piper’s love interest’s last name is Chen). I particularly loved the growing relationship between Piper and her brother Finn, which made me miss my own younger brother. Some of the worshiping of the Seattle music scene (Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix) came off a bit heavy-handed, but then I was exactly the right age to get all sniffly about Kurt and I never did, so maybe the tone will feel just right to grunge fans.

I appreciated how the story handles cochlear implants, a hugely controversial subject within the deaf community. Piper’s parents chose to give her baby sister Grace implants, and at first Piper is furious — because they raided her college fund to do it, but also because she feels her parents are implying that she isn’t good enough. Why wouldn’t they want her sister to be deaf like her? Piper wants a deaf sister to bond with, which is really about Piper, not about what’s best for Grace. By the end she’s come to terms with her parents’ decision, without necessarily changing her mind about implants philosophically. I’m not informed enough to take a stand on this issue myself, but I thought the arc was realistic for the character.

All in all, a delightful book. I miss the characters already. Maybe Piper should, I don’t know, manage a poetry slam venue when she gets to Gallaudet?

Also reviewed by: Library Chicken, Becky’s Book Reviews, Steph Su Reads, and Early Nerd Special

Richard Peck gave the following cover blurb: “high drama about how language unlocks the world.” Which I think covers it nicely. When you think about it, this is an oddly cerebral book for kids (aimed at 10-14, I’d say?) — the central question with which Annie occupies most of her thoughts is, “How can I get Helen to understand the concept of language?” Not generally the stuff of high drama.

And yet it is (and not just because Annie slaps Helen around a whole lot). It’s a fascinating thing to consider, what language is and how it happens, and Miller makes these questions absolutely accessible. I was less drawn in by Annie’s quixotic attempt to make an emotional connection with Helen, but I’m going to chalk that one up to my almost complete lack of a mothering instinct for small children.

Miller also manages to deal pretty smoothly with 19th-century discipline, which can make for awkward 21st-century reading. As I said, Annie gets awfully physical with Helen — not to hurt her, but to get her under some control. I’m not sure how else anyone, even today, would deal with a wild, spoiled 6-year-old who thought nothing of kicking, biting, and breaking people’s teeth, but it’s uncomfortable to read about in this post-spanking era.

More subtly difficult is the way Annie (who was blind herself) thinks about disability:

Turned in profile, her misshapen eye is hidden from my view. I see only half of her face — the pretty half. I fancy it’s also the bright half, the obedient half. Is this the side of Helen that let me touch her moments ago?

Yeesh. Of course, it makes perfect sense that Annie would have seen things that way, as a product of her time. But it’s by no means a prejudice we’re free of in the 21st century, and this is a subtle enough expression (one of many in the book) of the idea of disability as a sort of “devil’s mark” on an otherwise good child that I hope kids don’t just take it in stride.

Also reviewed by: YA or STFU, Jen Robinson’s Book Page, Becky’s Book Reviews, and Eva’s Book Addiction.

I will admit, I only got about halfway through. As much as I love fairy-tale retellings, myths as metaphor, and all that jazz, I found it a slog. (I did get a brief summary of the latter half from my colleague, but this is not a book that lends itself to brief summarizing.) But I wanted to mention a couple of things that bothered me anyway, because I believe they — especially the second — deserve airing, and I haven’t seen them anywhere else:

• You know how almost every Oprah’s Book Club book is a sexual assault narrative in which men are predators and women need to overcome their victimhood? This. Only sometimes the predators are literal bears. Of course this is part of the real world and therefore must be explored in fiction; I just find it wearying when almost every interaction between men and women in a story follows this pattern. (Or maybe that’s not even true of this book, either… maybe it’s just not a story that’s compelling to me for whatever reason. I’m always so conflicted when I don’t like a book everyone else loves.)
• What is with the dwarf issues in fairy-tale retellings? The dwarves in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked and Mirror, Mirror were creepy symbols for… something I never figured out. The dwarf here represents all that is vile, and here is a typical description:
  

  The littlee-man’s face worked with delight and hatred. His head slowly turned, macabre on his hidden neck — perhaps he had no neck, but only the hairs tethering the ball of his head to his doll-body.

  Way to align stature with moral character, there. I need to go read that story from Robin McKinley’s A Knot in the Grain where Rumpelstiltskin is the love interest just to clean out my brain.

Not to mention that it takes a long time for anything much to happen, and all the magic is just about as inexplicable and hard to get a handle on as it is in original fairy tales. It is beautifully written prose, no doubt, but decidedly not to my taste. (And, to go back to my assertion that it’s not a YA novel, I can’t imagine the teenager I could pitch it to. It’s too slow and has no strong character anchors.)

Also reviewed at: Chicklish, Asking the Wrong Questions (which compares this with the second Octavian Nothing in an astonishingly elaborate review), and Playing with Words. I couldn’t find anyone who agrees with me (except my colleagues).

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The plot is complicated — there’s a deaf kid, a theater production, a wacky road trip to New York (does it count as a road trip if it’s on a train?), a baseball memorial at Manzanar — but it basically boils down to a coming-of-age love story. These are a dime a dozen on the YA shelves; it’s the details that make a book stand out (or not). Fortunately there’s nothing generic about My Most Excellent Year. (Did you notice the bit about the baseball memorial?)

My only gripe is that the year — and I say this as a person who loves happy endings — is too excellent. Need tickets to the Red Sox? Good thing you have a bodyguard who knows a guy! The kid you’ve adopted is obsessed with Mary Poppins? Well, of course Julie Andrews is going to decide he’s the cutest thing ever and be his best friend! If you establish a pattern where everything works out for the best every time, the stakes never get high enough to worry about the characters. By the end I was rolling my eyes at each plot twist.

Despite this, I found it warm and fuzzy and entertaining, though I didn’t adore it the way a lot of people seem to.

(Side note: What’s with all the framing devices in YA? Is it really necessary to use the Autobiography Assignment trope? Can’t you just tell a story? I know I’m being too harsh here, but it’s starting to remind me of my students whenever they’re asked to give a speech: “So, I stayed up last night worrying about what I was going to say in this speech. First, I looked up ‘speech’ in the dictionary…”)

Also reviewed at: Valentina’s Room, Kidliterate, and Book Crossing.

I realized that I’m unfamiliar with the work of a number of people speaking at the conference — mostly because they write for younger kids or children’s poetry or something else outside of my wheelhouse — so I’m going to try to rectify that.

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key is the first in a series about Joey, a fourth grader trying to get his ADHD* under control. I’ll be the first to admit that out of the world of problems that my students have, ADHD is not one I get. At a fundamental level, my reaction tends to be, “Oh, just chill out already!” In the same way, some of my colleagues don’t get why my favorite nerdy quiet kids can’t have a non-awkward conversation with their classmates. Teachers are people too, and we gravitate towards different types of kids.

But we still have to teach all of them fairly. And like the best fiction, Joey Pigza put me in Joey’s (tied-together, tossed down the hall, spinning in circles) shoes and helped me get for the first time what it’s like to be the kind of kid who can’t sit still. It was written to be entertaining and maybe comforting for kids, but it ended up being bibliotherapy for this teacher, too.

* Presumably, though the diagnosis is never named.

Also reviewed at: MentalHelp.net, Blogcritics, and HomeschoolBuzz.com

Bobby Phillips, Ordinary Teenage Guy, wakes up one morning to find that he’s invisible. His mom freaks out, his physicist dad is obsessed with figuring out why, but Bobby’s just trying to live his invisible life. One day, while slinking around the library, he bumps into a blind girl named Alicia — who becomes his friend, of course, because she wouldn’t be able to see him whether he was visible or not.

My biggest problem with this book is that we never know Bobby before. He tells us a few things — he doesn’t have any real friends, he plays in a jazz band, he fights with his parents — but I never felt like I had enough of a sense of visible-Bobby to understand or care how he changed after he became invisible. His emotional growth is clearly meant to be a big part of the book, but to get that he’s growing, you have to know where he’s growing from.

Despite jumping into the conflict too quickly, the book starts out too slow. But by the end, the pace picks up — I ended up sitting in a rented kayak, reading the last few chapters instead of paddling. [No, I wasn't kayaking in Boston in January; can you tell I'm playing catch-up? --Ed.] Alicia is a way more interesting character than Bobby, so the book gets entertaining right around when Bobby starts spending a lot of time with her.

As a poster book for YA with disabled characters, it has some issues. I was particularly bugged by how often Bobby emphasizes how pretty Alicia is — the line “It was hard to believe eyes that pretty couldn’t see” was especially eye-roll-inducing. Check it out — sometimes disabled people look like normal hot people!

I haven’t read the sequels yet (there are two), and I probably won’t bother unless someone whose opinion I trust tells me they’re spectacular. Interesting premise, mediocre execution.

Also reviewed at Bookshelves of Doom and Ms. Yingling Reads.

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