I can’t talk about this without comparing it to Parrotfish, because that was the groundbreaker and is still one of the few YA novels with a transgendered protagonist. The biggest difference between the two is setting, and in this story, setting is everything.

Parrotfish‘s Grady is suburban, with middle-class white parents. J is biracial and lives in Manhattan, with parents who just scrape by financially. In some ways, J’s situation is easier than Grady’s — there’s a clinic and an entire public school for queer kids, and all of it accessible without a car. But the layer of financial woes and cultural pressure on top of J’s gender are so much harder than anything Grady faces.

Parrotfish is a problem novel. It’s a very good one, but there are limitations to that genre. “White and suburban” is the default, and so it’s the blank canvas on which Grady’s gender transition is painted, the star of the show. Whereas I Am J is a novel about a transgendered boy who is also urban, biracial, poor, an artist, a little homophobic, has a best friend who cuts… It’s much more complex (though therefore also for older teens, and less of a good Intro to the Concept of Transgender). Intersectionality fun times!

Another thing I loved about this book is how frank it is that gender dysphoria is hard to understand and takes some explaining, even for the most understanding and supportive loved ones. It’s all very well and good to instruct everyone to be “tolerant” and judge anyone who isn’t, but it isn’t realistic not to acknowledge that it can take awhile to come to that place. There are real issues of “losing a daughter” for the parents to go through here, and Beam does a very good (if painful) job with those.

Also reviewed by: Rebecca Rabinowitz, Wandering Librarians, and The Happy Nappy Bookseller.

I identified with Keri immediately because in the first chapter she explains that she likes to be prepared. She has plans for every possible disaster, keeps emergency supplies in her bedroom, that sort of thing. But of course, she does not have a plan for what to do when her beloved older brother kills himself. Unless it turns out to be murder, as her childhood friend Janna suspects. It turns out that Keri’s brother is part of a pattern of “suicides” that includes Janna’s brother, her friend Sione’s brother, and ten years’ worth of other oldest brothers, all from different parts of New Zealand, who have visited their idyllic resort town for the New Year’s festivities. The three only have a short time until New Year’s comes around again to identify this year’s victim and find the killers.

I loved Healey’s last book, Guardian of the Dead, and I loved this. For many of the same reasons: believable, flawed friendships between fully realized characters; sensitive handling of sex (and the lack thereof); a stunning sense of place. The magic felt a bit less organic here than in Guardian and required more suspension of disbelief for some reason; I kept waiting for a twist, that it wasn’t what the kids thought, but nope — it pretty much was, and was an idea we’ve all seen before, and therefore had something of a “Buffy monster-of-the-week” feel, like with established characters all of this could have happened in 50 minutes on TV.

So while this feels less original than Guardian (with the exception of the New Zealand setting, which is unusual enough to get a bunch of automatic originality points for an American audience), it was no less fun to read. I chewed through it in one day, home sick recovering from BEA. Healey is an outstanding writer with a gift for dialogue, characterization, and foreshadowing. She drops hints along the way that only seem sinister in retrospect, but doesn’t make us wait for the characters to catch up to what we’ve already figured out. And she weaves race, class, and sexuality (and, in this case, temporary disability) into the story in such a way that it feels like she’s creating real people rather than checking character traits off a PC list.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of fear in my own life, and how to avoid sacrificing long-term sanity for short-term peace of mind. I said at the beginning that I identified with Keri’s need to plan for every eventuality. At the end she says, “I still planned for possibilities, but it was easier to recognize the planning as part of the anxiety and not being about real things that might actually happen,” and it was eerily like reading words from my own head.
…

SPOILERS (which might be interesting if you’re not going to read the book, since (surprise!) I go off on a tangent)

One of my favorite things about Healey’s books is how the magic has lasting consequences — good and bad. At the end of Guardian the earthquakes had still happened and people needed to clean up afterwards. And at the end of this, people do start losing their jobs and leaving Summerton. That is the consequence of putting an end to the spell that demanded the boys as sacrifice. (It’s implied that the town is going to be okay anyway, which is maybe a cop-out considering how similar West Coast towns are described as “ghost towns.”) “Dystopia” is the big buzzword right now, but this is a dystopia in the truest sense — it aims for utopia and misses horribly, and we see that from the inside.

It made me think of Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” (If you’ve never read it, the text is behind that link. It’s very short and I think it’s pretty much required modern reading.) To what lengths are we willing to go to keep the places we love safe and prosperous? Is there any amount of sacrifice that’s worth it? We (and here I’m making some assumptions about my readership) are, of course, all citizens of Omelas or Summerton — enjoying our cheap and plentiful fuel and food and material goods at the expense of the impoverished people who create those things for us. There are ways to walk away from Omelas, to go off the grid, but almost no one does it because the pull of the comfort and safety and community is far too strong. (And because — and this is something not allowed for in the parameters of LeGuin’s story — maybe it’s better to stay and try to change things from the inside?)

I think that’s why it took people who had been damaged by the Summerton spell to finally see the rot at the core of the town. The pain of losing their brothers was enough to intrude on the cocoon. Everyone else chose to look away, and the coven members themselves — who, like the people of Omelas (and us), know and are making a fully conscious choice — find ways to justify it.

Also reviewed by: Pink Me, Wandering Librarians, and Bookshop

I can’t believe it took me so long to read this after how much I loved the author’s Dairy Queen trilogy. Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed this too, though it is a quite different book. Ben’s voice couldn’t be more different from DJ’s: where DJ is plainspoken and even sometimes inarticulate, Ben writes like Oscar Wilde. I was reminded of M. T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, written in old-fashioned language with the kind of humor that grows naturally out of such a style. It’s challenging, but entertaining enough that I think a lot of fantasy fans will push through it.

My favorite thing about the book is Ben’s growth as a character. Most of the time, the YA fantasy heroine’s arc is one of discovering self-confidence: the confidence to make her way in the world, to believe in her own competence, etc. This is, of course, a pretty common arc of real-life YAs. And it’s part of Ben’s story, but the other part is that she actually is pretty incompetent at first. She’s likeable enough, and you sympathize with her harsh treatment by the Queen… but you can also see that while the Queen maybe isn’t using the kindest methods, she does legitimately need to whip her stubborn, uneducated heir into shape. Montagne needs a Queen, and like it or not, that’s Ben’s job. Watching Ben realize that and come to take pride in her role was so satisfying. I love a heroine who screws up a lot.

My only serious objection to Princess Ben is from a fat acceptance standpoint. She’s fat, she doesn’t particularly care, she doesn’t lose weight despite the Queen’s best efforts (because dieting doesn’t necessarily work), I’m all set up for a positive fat character without a weight-loss arc… and then she returns from a climactic mid-book adventure having lost weight. Which might not have bothered me — she’s an underfed prisoner, after all — but it coincides, of course, with her maturation into a responsible future Queen. So close, Ms. Murdock, so close.

Overall, slightly offbeat castles-and-magic fantasy for fans of Shannon Hale, the Farsala trilogy, and Flora Segunda.

Also reviewed by: Abby (the) Librarian, Em’s Bookshelf, and Feminist Review.

Wisdom’s Kiss is a companion book, though you don’t really need to have read Princess Ben first. Ben is the grandmother of one of the two main characters: Queen Temperance and her younger sister Wisdom (known as Dizzy, a far more accurate description of her nature). Hoo boy, are there a lot of characters in this book! And they all get voices via letters or memoirs, plus there’s a play and an Encyclopedia of Exposition and probably some other things I’m forgetting. The plot, more or less, is that Dizzy is engaged to marry Roger, Duke of Farina. On their way to the wedding, Dizzy and Ben pick up Trudy, a bar wench who can sense the future. She’s excited to be reunited with her long-lost childhood sweetheart, Tips, who she thinks is a soldier in the capitol. It turns out that Tips has actually joined the circus, and at a performance in Dizzy’s honor, he and Dizzy fall in love at first sight. Dizzy wants out of her engagement, which is of course politically problematic, but even more so when it turns out that her wedding to Roger is all part of Roger’s ambitious mother’s plan to take over Montagne, which threatens Temperance at home.

Whew! You got all that? Yeah, me neither, a lot of the time. I commend the author for her ambition, but there’s kind of too much going on in this book. It would be fun to teach in an English class; you could do exercises on unreliable narrators, exposition, point of view, and on and on. It was a little overwhelming to read, though, and distracted me from actually getting to know any of the characters. Maybe I’m boring, but I found the more straightforward Princess Ben a much more enjoyable read.

Spoiler alert:

Trudy doesn’t end up with Tips, which I liked. That’s believable — they haven’t seen each other in 6 years, and it’s realistic that he’d move on to Dizzy. But it’s so set up that Temperance and Trudy will end up together. Trudy is pulled to Montagne by a sense of unfathomable future joy; when they meet, the narration goes on and on about how important they will become in each other’s lives; there’s even an offhand remark about how Roger’s older brother married a dude, so gay marriage is accepted in this world (though maybe not for queens who need blood heirs?). And again, Murdock gets so close and then pulls back! Trudy, we’re told, eventually marries some random guy; Temperance must marry — she has a son — though we don’t even find out to whom. Cop. Out. In my head, their marriages are shams and they love only each other.

E-galley of Wisdom’s Kiss generously provided via NetGalley.

Also reviewed by: Night Reader and The Novel Gnome.

The writing is lovely, I suppose, but I was disappointed by this book (which everyone else on the internet loves, so my opinion shouldn’t necessarily dissuade you from reading it). None of the characters felt real. The entire time I felt like I was reading through wavy glass or something — the images were beautiful, but kept at a distance, not solid.

In this world homosexuality is unquestioned (at least for women… I don’t remember any gay male couples mentioned) — that felt slightly off given the very traditional medieval fantasy trappings of the rest of the world, but okay. It was nice to read a lesbian YA fantasy in which the relationship gets to proceed like any hetero romance. And it set up a good progression from Sidhean, the otherworldly lover of her childhood who represents escape, to Kaisa, the grounded adult relationship who helps Ash want to live in reality.

But the novel brought up so many other issues that could have been fascinating but were never really explored. The story starts with a conflict between the old ways (“greenwitch” magic) and new science. Ash’s mother believes in the old magic, while her father doesn’t; it’s their major fight, and it’s implied that both died because the town greenwitch wasn’t allowed to care for them her way. The scientific medical establishment has only progressed as far as leeches, so I suppose this isn’t a surprise — but that eliminates any interesting conflict between the two ways of life. We know that fairies exist, so we know that magic works; we know that medical science is dumb because ha ha, leeches. The former is represented by Ash’s beloved mother; the latter by her abusive stepmother. It’s too easy.

And then there are the class issues. The stepmother tells Ash that her father left a lot of debt, and it’s Ash’s responsibility to work it off. She cooks, she cleans, she is her stepsisters’ ladies’ maid. We’re meant to bemoan her fall from the leisure class, but what about servants who’ve been servants all their lives? Ash befriends some of them at another house that her stepfamily visits, and they seem perfectly happy with their circumstances — is it fine just because they have better masters? And the huntress has her own servants, who simply bow in and out and are given no character at all. One of Ash’s trials as a servant is that her time is not her own, to visit Sidhean or Kaisa — what about Kaisa’s servants? Don’t they have lovers they might like to visit, rather than hovering around waiting for their mistress to call them? This is mentioned in passing, but it’s never really dealt with, and it’s something that almost always bugs me in fairy tale retellings. Why should we cheer when a character aspires to have servants but be saddened when she has to be one?

Also reviewed by: The Book Smugglers and Racebending

This was such a “right book at the right time” for me. The idea of chucking it all for a solitary cross-country journey of self-discovery sounds so awesome right now I can’t even tell you. This is the sort of book that inspires a soundtrack — she’s biking, not sitting on a train or bus, but you can picture the “staring out a window listening to folk rock as the corn fields fly by” montage anyway. I have a pretty much endless appetite for that montage, in movie or book form. It’s so romantically appealing to believe that a geographical journey can inspire and mirror an internal journey, that we can return changed to a changed life.

(I said this to Deborah, and she reminded me of the Dar Williams song “Road Buddy”:

I thought we’d find each story like a snake-skin or an arrowhead
But we only stop at fast food places
They hate their jobs; I understand

So okay, not every road trip leads to great discovery; some just lead to French fries and indigestion. Grand romantic gestures are often a disappointment. I think I’ll take my cross-country train trip anyway.)

I actually think this has a lot to do with the appeal of YA for me in general. Every YA novel is in some sense a coming-of-age, and therefore every one is about a reinvention of the self (if not necessarily a drastic one). Adult books often seem to be looking backward at choices made in the past and trying to incorporate those choices into the current self; YA books deal with making those choices and evolving. I suppose at some point I might feel like I’ve accumulated enough of a past that I relate to characters dealing with theirs, but for now I’m still more interested in what happens next and who I am becoming. (Disclaimer: I read comparatively few “literary” adult novels, so I might be way off base here. I want to explore this idea more as part of the endless debate about “how to define a YA novel,” so please share your thoughts!)

Wow, I got off track there, didn’t I? Oops. (Heh… “off track”? Get it? Trains?) At some point I was reviewing a book… A more review-like criticism: I found the timeline really confusing at first, since everything’s told in “Then” and “Now” flashback/flashforward, but it isn’t clear when “Then” and “Now” are.

I also had to suspend disbelief about Cass’s deep hatred of Heather at the beginning. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t sparing a thought for my junior high tormentors by the summer before my senior year. Dude, we all sucked in 8th grade; move on. Eventually we saw enough flashbacks to make it clear that this was a serious pattern of abuse rather than “just” the teasing all middle school geeks go through, which made it a bit more understandable, but still… it felt like too long for the feelings to still be so intense.

Criticisms aside, though, obviously I loved it. It is part of the recent Will Grayson, Will Grayson/My Most Excellent Year/Suite Scarlett genre of Behind the Scenes of the Offbeat Yet Heartwarming Play. But you know, I’m never going to say that we have too many books about smart kids doing what they’re passionate about. We can never have too many kids doing that, so how could we have too many books about it? If you have recommendations in this genre (that I just invented), I’d love to hear them!

Also reviewed by: Bitch Magazine, Abby (the) Librarian, and Dreaming in Books

Alex Sanchez is one of the go-to authors for gay YA, and I’d never read anything by him. This book is fairly workmanlike, but it gave me the warm fuzzies. It’s told in alternating points of view, Xio’s and Frederick’s. I loved that Xio is Mexican (along with everyone Frederick hangs out with in his new California town) and Frederick is Wisconsin white, and you get to see the ways their lives are culturally different, but it’s never a Big Deal. The parents are three-dimensional. There’s a gay kid who gets picked on, so Frederick knows what’s in store if he comes out, and the book doesn’t try to pretend that Frederick will somehow escape that treatment — some kids (and adults) will be jerks, but both Frederick and Iggy still have friends.

This is as much about Xio figuring out who she is — her absent father, her newly-dating mother, her friends, all her dramatic 13-year-old emotions — as it is about Frederick, so I think even kids (like a lot of my girls) who are a little embarrassed about reading A Gay Book will find a lot to enjoy here.

Here’s a column by Sanchez about writing controversial books for teens.

The alternating chapters were so in the style of the two authors that I didn’t even have to check who had written which. Green’s Will is wordy, self-consciously clever, and full of elaborate references to Schroedinger’s cat (and he’s straight). Levithan’s Will is painfully lonely and full of anger — too much anger for me at first, until he started showing his classically Levithan sweet, tender center (and he’s gay).

Both men write witty books about believable, intelligent male characters, and this is no exception. Both also lean towards the optimistic — in the case of Levithan, so optimistic it makes your teeth hurt sometimes — and this is also no exception. His characters like grand gestures, and I’ll admit I’m a sucker for them myself in books. The end of this one made me think of the Buffy episode “The Prom,” in which it is revealed that Buffy’s oblivious classmates have, in fact, noticed how much effort she puts into saving their butts all the time. Dramatic displays of gratitude like that and the end of Will Grayson make me sniffly every time. (…Are Buffy references uselessly passe at this point? No, don’t tell me; I don’t want to know.)

I love how Levithan writes about depression in his Will. He makes it very, very clear that he isn’t just “feeling depressed” — it is who he is, at the core of every day. And yet the book is never bogged down in that; chronic depression like Will’s is an illness, not a mood you can “just get over,” but sometimes, if you work really hard, you can still have some pretty great days.

Much has been written about Tiny Cooper, Green’s Will’s fat best friend. Is Tiny a fat-positive character? He is attractive to an assortment of people, he is successful by all kinds of measures, he’s not a point-of-view character but he is in many ways the soul of the book — and he never loses weight. On the other hand, no character (with the exception of Will’s love interest/Tiny’s friend Jane, for some reason) can see him or think about him without referring to his size, repeatedly. He’ll eat anything you put in front of him, he might break the swing set, etc. It’s tiresome and unnecessary. We get it, guys. So… win some, lose some, I guess, as always.

Also reviewed by: Frenetic Reader, Forever YA, and The Book Smugglers.

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.

Parrotfish opens in the middle of Angela’s transition to Grady: he’s already decided he’s done with being a girl, he’s shared his new name with his family, he’s bought some boy’s clothes, and he’s about to tell his teachers about the pronoun switch.

Of course this doesn’t go smoothly. His mom and sister are wigged out, the principal and several teachers are predictably rigid, his best friend can’t deal with the fact that being friends with the school freak makes her a freak, too.

But what’s cool about this book is how many things do go smoothly. His gym teacher’s reaction is a weary, “Don’t tell me. Good Lord, you’re transgendered, aren’t you?” at which point she gives him her office to change in and goes to bat for him in her gruff way with the rest of the school. He segues into a new group of friends with minimal fuss, including a beautiful girl who might actually like him back. And his dad just says, “Nice name,” and goes back to treating him the same way he always has. There’s no illusion that this is an easy process, but Grady has enough love and support in his life to stay believably strong.

Some characterizations are shallow (Grady’s mom and siblings, the popular girls), but they’re balanced by more entertaining characters (his new friend Sebastian, his Christmas-decoration-obsessed dad), and Grady’s own funny, engaging voice. That’s right, this is a funny book: Grady can be bitter and cynical, but he never wallows. (And nothing’s hilarious like a house all dressed up for Christmas with Victorian picture windows and moth-eaten bears.)

Eventually there will be enough books on this subject that I’ll be able to judge them on their own merits without comparing them to “that one other book about the transgendered kid.” In the meantime, I’ll say that this isn’t a 5-star novel, but it does rise above the generic problem-novel status of Luna. It’s a very good book on the subject of transgendered teens, and that is a thing we need more of.

Also reviewed at: Emily Reads, Bookslut, and A Chair, a Fireplace, & a Tea Cozy.

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This book isn’t so much a story as it is a daydream, a sketched-out version of the country’s trajectory that ends in hope rather than in Fahrenheit 451. I’ll give you the highs and lows of Levithan’s timeline, because it was my li’l optimist / sci-fi nerd heart’s favorite part of the book:

“It all started, I guess, with 9/11, decades before I was born….” Which led to the Reign of Fear. The Debt, Deficit, and Fuel Depression (aka the Greater Depression). The War to End All Wars. And then, as the tide turned, the Prada Riots. The Worldwide Health Care movement. “The rise of the green states. The Jesus Revolution. The All Equal Movement. Stein’s idea of the Great Community. And now the election.”

Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Don’t you want to read a whole huge near-future novel detailing all of these events? I totally do (memo to David Levithan! Or maybe J. Michael Straczynski), but that’s not this book. There’s plenty of relationship negotiation, which Levithan is very good at, but I’ve read plenty of that. (With the caveat that 98% of the time, of course, I’ve read it about straight people. Levithan writes gay relationships without making a big deal about them being Gay! Relationships!, and it’s awesome.) There’s plenty of friendship love; ditto.

So what this book is really about is inspiration. Levithan posted an essay on the fabulous website YA for Obama in which he talks about writing Wide Awake as a response to Bush’s reelection. He says he wrote Stein as an “ideal candidate,” and therefore had to figure out what his ideal was. Turns out his ideal is pretty similar to mine, the sort of person who brings everyone together in a common goal — a Great Community, as it were. The sort of person who says “all Americans” and means all Americans:

The Jesus Freaks and the gay kids. The old soldiers and the students who couldn’t drive yet. Lovers and friends and exes and couples and female fathers. Every skin, every mix, every religion. People from Kansas and people from far beyond Kansas.

Our world now isn’t quite the same as Levithan envisioned 40 or 50 years from now. (Can we get some “rise of the green states” and “Worldwide Health Care movement” up in here?) But I feel like we had a little bit of this today. Obama’s election, for me, was about the very definition of grassroots: ordinary people believing in something, in someone, and overcoming apathy to give that person, that vision, some power.

I’m still sniffly and emotional, so I’ll leave you with the last words of Wide Awake to describe how I felt, sitting in a room with my students, watching Obama take the oath of office:

I was there. Just one young gay Jew in a sea of people. Just one lone voice in an enormous body of sound. Just one unique person at one unique moment, there to witness something monumental.
I was a part of history.
We are all a part of history.

If you read the book too, tell me what you thought! If you didn’t read it, tell me what you think anyway, about where the country’s going and where it should be going! Tell me what you’re going to do to get it there! Today was a good start, but now we’ve got a country to change, and it starts with us — with our voices and our actions.

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