Parenthetical.net

Jazz runs a business in Berkeley with Steve, her best friend and longtime pine-object. (They sell personalized postcard photos of local landmarks to ex-hippies, which I think is hilarious.) She’s psyched to spend the summer growing their business and doing some more quality pining over Steve. Until her mom, do-gooder extraordinaire, announces that she has [...]

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I’m madly reading Cybils finalists, which I’m not allowed to review until the winner is announced in February, because our judgely reviews might telegraph the result. So in the meantime… catching up on other reviews!

This collection of short stories is subtitled “Twelve stories of identity,” and by identity we mean queerness. I know [...]

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Another conference speaker with whom I was unfamiliar. She’s also a jazz singer, and gave us a lovely impromptu a capella performance (just reinforcing the sense that I was at a folk festival).
I’ll admit, I found her book tiresome. The prose is lovely, I guess, but it was a Woman’s Sexual Awakening and [...]

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Three three-dimensional best friends, families that genuinely love each other, disability and homosexuality just tossed in like the normal parts of life they are, and it’s even set in Boston! Sold.
The plot is complicated — there’s a deaf kid, a theater production, a wacky road trip to New York (does it count as a [...]

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How did I escape my nerdy fantasy-loving adolescence without ever reading this book? I’m not sure, but I intend to correct the oversight in my Twilight-loving students. Beauty has all the creature-of-the-night broody romance of Edward and Bella, with a little more self-actualization.
You know the story: Beauty’s dad gets lost in the woods [...]

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Sadly, this post isn’t really about the intersection of those things. (Though if you can think of one, I know a few people who’d want to read it!) I’m just smooshing these two links into one post:
Eldritchhobbit at the LJ community YALitLovers has posted a lengthy list of YA dystopias. (I’ve read [...]

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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 [...]

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A train gets stuck in a snowstorm in Gracetown, NC (a literally one-Starbucks town, as we’ll soon see), late on Christmas Eve.* Revolving around this event are three interconnected tales of teen love, angst, and romping in the snow.
I’m not usually a short story fan — by the time I get into [...]

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Boyfriend E, video game fan extraordinaire, caught sight of this lying on my coffee table and cracked up. He played the original game as a kid, of course (if someone wants to fix that Wikipedia page, by the way, it could apparently use some fixing), and expected from the cover that this would be [...]

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I just finished a wonderful book called Graceling, by Kristin Cashore. I’ll wait on the review, because the book doesn’t come out until October, and I don’t want you to forget about it because you can’t read it right now. (I don’t have a lending copy, unfortunately.) But I was talking with [...]

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