This was super fun! It’s not Great Literature or anything, but I zipped through it in a night and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. There’s a relatable protagonist, her sassy best friend, her loveable dad, and of course her douchebag boyfriend (who did have enough positive qualities that I could see why she’d dated him in the first place, thank goodness) and the sensitive hunk she falls for. Who is quite a catch, I will agree. (Sorry, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t really qualify as a spoiler.)

The core of this book is the girls’ discovery that sex is a dangerous and unfair weapon when used by either gender; men don’t have a corner on manipulation. There’s a somewhat heavy-handed feminist/sex-positive message of “there is no ‘normal’,” as well as an introduction to the concepts of slut-shaming and double standards. I say “heavy-handed,” but I’m always amazed at how uncritically my students think about this stuff. So I actually think this book adds something really important to the conversation, and maybe it needs to be a bit unsubtle (in, again, a light and fun read) to get the point across.

If it wasn’t obvious from the premise, this is definitely an older-YA sort of book. It’s all about the sex, plus it’s not shy with the f-bombs. If you’re going to try to tell me that even my relatively sheltered students are not talking this way and thinking about (and doing, some of them) this stuff as sophomores, juniors, and seniors, you have never met teenagers. This has “Top Banned Books of 2011″ written all over it, but it’s an entirely appropriate YA book. Just maybe not for middle schoolers.

Despite the unbelievable amount of buzz, I couldn’t find other reviews yet. But Phoebe North did an awesome interview with Kody Keplinger. (I’m reading all September ARCs right now, so if I don’t post some of my reviews this blog will be pretty quiet. But I’ll remind you when this comes out, promise!)

Review copy provided by the publisher — and signed by the author! — at BEA.

I can’t talk about this book — nor can I in good conscience review it — without one spoiler: the nature of the crime. The book is told in alternating chapters, Gittel’s childhood voice leading up to the crime and her seventeen-year-old voice reflecting on it. The two voices don’t work back to specifics until the middle of the book, though it’s a safe guess earlier.

SPOILER
Gittel’s best friend Devory is raped by her older brother. The incident Gittel witnesses is part of a repeated pattern of abuse throughout Devory’s childhood. She’s ultimately unable to handle it and hangs herself in Gittel’s bathroom. It’s an incredibly painful sequence to read, obviously, and anyone who might have issues in this department should definitely be warned.

“Eishes Chayil” means “woman of valor,” and is a pseudonym. The author is a Chassidic woman who took a personal risk speaking out about this sort of abuse, though it’s also very clear that she loves her community. It’s so easy, when writing about someone harmed in a very different culture, to lean heavily on the judgment and imply that no one should live that way. Chayil never takes that road. It’s an important book, both for anyone from within an insular community who might get to read it (it’s a first of its kind, I think), and for its description of the Chassidic world to outsiders. The Amish are a much more familiar closed religious society in American popular culture (not that we have many novels written by Amish women, either). I’m Jewish and still knew almost nothing about this version of Judaism. So it’s important, and very well-written, but I wouldn’t call it enjoyable or an easy read.

*Not, oddly, what to eat (aside from the regular kosher laws). I found it completely fascinating that a community so focused on separating its members from the outside world, whose clothing choices and entertainment and everything ignore the modern world as much as possible, thinks nothing of eating Rice Krispie treats.

The characters also mention psychotherapy, which is apparently acceptable — though since the culture is so firmly “ignore it and it will go away,” I’m not sure how the therapist is supposed to help. The cultural lines were the most interesting part of the book for me, for sure.

Also reviewed by: the wonderfully named Velveteen Rabbi, Frenetic Reader, and Helen’s Book Blog. If you’re interested in some Orthodox Jews’ takes on the book, Hashkafah has a forum on the subject.

This is a fairly light story, compared with, say, the similarly premised Children of Men. There’s never any question that the human race will survive, provided we’re a-ok with lots of teenage pregnancies. The world seems to be rolling on much the same as now, in fact — no post-apocalyptic tendencies at all.

When I say “now,” of course, I mean a United States in which the House of Representatives votes to defund Planned Parenthood, one of the most important providers of contraception and STD testing in the country, especially for lower-income women; a Florida court orders a pregnant woman confined to the hospital against her will; a state Senator thinks it’s totally reasonable to compare pregnant women to pregnant cows and the monetary value thereof. Just to name a few recent news items that pissed me off.

So we’ve got some stuff to talk about in this country, in terms of how we treat women and our wombs, “pre-pregnant” or otherwise. Bumped reads light and entertaining, full of zippy slang like Feed, and much like Feed it also asks the tough questions: Why do we have sex? To whom do our bodies belong? How are sex and love and making babies connected, and what is the impact of disconnecting them? How can people of faith interpret sexuality differently? What are our obligations to society vs. our obligations to ourselves? (Unlike Feed it did not make me want to jump off a bridge.)

My only real complaint about this book is the ending, which struck me as so abrupt I thought I’d missed something. It’s clearly heading for a sequel, which I will happily read, but I think this story would have been better told in a longer single volume. Both girls rushed their realizations at the end to give the book some sort of stopping place; it felt off.

Other than that, though, this is sharp, inventive science fiction that will give teenagers and adults a lot to chew on. I want to start a book club at school just so we can read this book.

(Advance copy received from NetGalley, my favorite new toy. Publication date Apr. 26, 2011.)

Also reviewed by: Presenting Lenore, Forever Young Adult, and Beyond Words.

Ingrid and her sprawling extended family get together for every possible occasion, where no matter how old she and her teenage cousins get, they are always stuck at the kid table. Hanging out with each other beats discussing mortgages with their parents, but what will it take for the family to see them as adults?

For a book that’s largely people psychoanalyzing each other and themselves, it was surprisingly engaging — I kept wanting to find odd moments in the day when I could read more. It deals with some Serious Issues (anorexia, alcoholism, coming out), but most of the book is taken up with Ingrid (and to a lesser extent, the cousins we see through her rather distant, calculating gaze) figuring out who she is and what she wants out of life. (…Man, could I sound any vaguer? This is a really hard book to summarize.)

It is very funny, in a dark way, but most of the humor is built up over time as you get to know the characters — my favorite kind of humor, but hard to quote. I think this bit gives you a sense of Ingrid, though:

I looked [the valet] up and down, smiling as if I liked what I saw, even though I saw nothing beyond a nice-enough-looking guy somewhere around my age.
“I’ll be here all night,” he told me.
“You’re a comedian?”
“What?”
“Never mind,” I said. “You shouldn’t be alone on a holiday. Later I’ll bring you out some breasts and legs.”
I’m not sure that one connected either.

And immediately below that is this paragraph, which is pretty representative of the kind of insightful philosophizing Ingrid/Seigel do a lot of:

Whenever there was a holiday involving the preparation of food, all the women crowded in the kitchen, even the ones who had no clue how to warm Pop-Tarts, which made me feel a little crazy. It was like we were participating in a tradition that had never come from us — I mean both the girls and the guys — and it had robbed us of making new ones that had something to do with who we really were.

Sometimes the characters’ behavior is cringeworthily over-the-top. But that flamboyance is a nice counterpoint to Ingrid’s pragmatism, which I quite admired. I liked spending time with a YA female lead who is emphatically not a romantic. I missed her when I closed the book and want to know what she does next with her life, and I can’t think of higher praise for a character.

This is definitely a book for older YAs, trending towards adult. (Of recent books, it reminded me most of Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, though I was never annoyed by Ingrid the way I was by James.) There is sex (or the discussion thereof, anyway), and drinking, but mostly I think it would just bore younger teens who aren’t interested in questions of morality and identity. Adult Themes in the least euphemistic sense.

Full disclosure: the author is a friend of a friend, with whom I went to college. Which makes me doubly pleased to be able to say how much I enjoyed it! It also means I got a peek at a preliminary cover which was deeply wrong for the book, and I’m glad that Melissa Walker of Readergirlz has the whole cover story so you can see it, too.

Also reviewed by: the excellently named Mean Old Library Teacher and The Literary Lollipop.

Finnikin escapes and spends his adolescence traveling with his mentor, doing what they can to alleviate the suffering of the scattered Lumateran refugee camps and find their people a new home. As the book opens, he has been called to a distant monastery to take on a new traveling companion: Evanjalin, a traumatized Lumateran refugee who claims to have seen their kingdom’s lost heir in her prophetic dreams.

I love me some complicated stories (5th season of Lost, what now?), but this is a bit “kitchen sink.” There are too many Important Messages, too many characters with Painful Pasts, and too many Big Reveals. The stuff about the two goddesses and their religious conflict, in particular, seemed tacked-on.

I also have no problem with violence or sex or challenging subjects in YA lit, per se. That sort of book is not for everyone, which is why it’s part of my job to be familiar with what might be difficult about the books in my collection, but they can be powerful for a lot of kids. That said, I do have a problem with gratuity. If it isn’t key to the story or the characters, gloss on over that sex scene or graphic torture. I’m no prude, but despite the themes of growing up and finding oneself, I’d be hard-pressed not to put this in the adult section.

All that aside, I think I would have been more into this when I was younger. I was going to be a martyr to activism; the strong woman tying herself to trees, no doubt about the rightness of her cause. I admired no end characters in books who walk miles with no shoes and torn and bloody feet, as Evanjalin does, sheltered by their single-minded purpose.

Turns out I have no single-minded purpose. Turns out I prefer nesting in a safe city with my friends around me and working at a job that is meaningful but not overly exhausting (er, usually). No one’s going to write any epic biographies about me, and I am a-ok with that. Now that I’m an adult, Evanjalin and Finnikin’s single-mindedness just seems naive. I recognize that they are refugees, that their lives are challenged in ways that mine never has been and hopefully never will be. But I still found it hard to connect with them. I want a spin-off about Lady Abian and her household full of displaced villagers, keeping her community alive with low-key good humor (and randomly having really loud sex with her husband, because for some reason Marchetta felt the need to share these moments with us). She’s much more my speed.

But this seems to be in the Megan Whalen Turner category of “stuff I should love, that everyone else loved, but I couldn’t get into.” So your mileage may definitely vary.

Also reviewed by: Skerricks, Library Lounge Lizard, and Persnickety Snark.

In the end, I had two favorite things about this book, and neither were the story. The first is the epigraph: “Unicorns are in the world again.” — Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn. Knowing that this book is about brutal, dangerous unicorns turns that hopeful line that I know so well into a threat. It’s quite effectively chilling.

The second was how it deals with sex. Unicorns are drawn to virgins, so the “Slayers” have to be abstinent. But what does that mean for modern girls? How creepy is it for the “Watcher” (a young, inexperienced guy himself) to be in charge of safeguarding their virginity?

I am, however, so over “I’m just an ordinary girl with a Great Destiny, but all I want is to live a normal life!” stories. I’m sure Buffy didn’t do it first (though I’m actually having trouble thinking of predecessors), but it did it best. Until you have something new to say on the subject, find a different trope, please.

I also hate aggressively ordinary protagonists. “I like boys and my friends and hot celebrities, and I think my parents are kind of dumb!” It’s blank-slate Bella syndrome, but it’s been around a hell of a lot longer than Twilight; I think every character in 80s realistic fiction was like this. I hate aggressively ordinary people; why would I want to read about them? Astrid grows out of most of this by the end of the book, but she’d annoyed me so much at the beginning that it was tough for her to win me over.

And finally, the conspiracies and grand plotting seemed sloppy. It felt like a first novel, although it wasn’t. In summary: fun book, but didn’t live up to its clever premise.

Also reviewed at: Strange Horizons, Teen Book Review (yikes, the ARC had an atrocious cover!), and Jen Robinson’s Book Page.

Comment here

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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How I Paid for College is one of my top 5 funniest books. (Not sure what the others are, honestly. Gordon Korman’s Son of Interflux and I Want to Go Home! are in there, for sure.) It is my standard Beach Reading Recommendation, and if I haven’t pushed it on you, consider it done. The premise: Edward is simply dying to go to Juilliard, so he and his wacky band of misfit theater buddies contrive to extort the money from his tightfisted dad, who wants Edward to go to business school instead. This involves a blackmail, priest impersonation, and other ludicrously elaborate set-ups. Plus lots of sex. As Edward puts it, “Women are my second-favorite people to have sex with.”

The sequel takes place over a year later, in 1986. Edward has been kicked out for being “too jazz hands for Juilliard.” To avoid telling his dad, he supports himself as a “party motivator,” getting bratty kids to dance at bar mitzvahs and schmoozing with businessmen at corporate events… which is how he gets mixed up with an insider trading scheme. The old cast of How I Paid for College, plus a couple of new friends, concocts yet more madcap schemes to keep Edward out of federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison.

Slightly Spoilery Pondering:

Theater People isn’t quite as hilarious as College, maybe only because I knew what to expect (more or less). But it is more touching. I loved the freewheeling sexuality of College, that the book forced no one to make any pesky definitions. But by the mid-80s, being a gay man in New York isn’t a lighthearted romp. Edward is terrified, so he futilely chases straight dudes and scorns guys who clearly identify as gay.

One of the climaxes (heh) of the book comes (har) when Edward’s gay friend convinces him to relax and enjoy himself: “I’ve got two words for you. Con. Dom.” With his initiation into the gay sex he’d wanted to be having all along, he gains the courage to stop hiding from AIDS and start fighting it. He doesn’t just want to be Edward Zanni, goofball and unwitting white-collar criminal; he wants to own his sexuality and stand for something:

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that if all the world’s a stage, I want to play my part, even if it’s in a shiny shirt and tight pants. Years from now, when someone says to me, ‘What did you do in the fight against AIDS?’ I don’t want to answer, ‘I got a cheap apartment.’”

So in that way, it becomes a pretty great gay coming-of-age novel (without deciding bi people don’t actually exist). And that is a thing the world needs more of.

In every fantasy novel that we could think of in which characters have sex and don’t get KID (as my boyfriend so charmingly puts it), they either a) ignore birth control entirely, or b) have some herb or spell that magically eliminates pregnancy as a possibility. 100% effective, easily obtained, no side effects. Wouldn’t we all love to have birth control like that?

As a plot device, it’s invaluable: you can be responsible by bringing up the issue of pregnancy, and then sweep it off the table easily, leaving the characters to grapple with the more emotionally interesting reasons to have sex or not. But I would love to see a fantasy novel deal with the modern (and age-old) fact that sex isn’t just an emotional risk, it’s also a physical risk.

(The only counter-example I can think of is Pamela Dean’s Tam-Lin. I read it a decade ago and don’t remember the details, but as I recall, Janet’s magical birth control fails (does Thomas make it fail on purpose? I forget). In the end, though, she’s happy about the pregnancy, despite being in college. Correct me if I’m wrong here, people who are more into this book than I am.)

Most fantasy (and historical) novels, of course, eventually get around this by having the heroine decide that she wants kids after all. She meets the right man and decides to slow down from her adventuring days. Alanna does it, Sabriel does it, Catherine-called-Birdy does it. In Sean Stewart’s Nobody’s Son, Gail’s decision to have a child is the happy ending on the very last page (and in that world, there is no magical birth control, so Gail has been denying poor Mark not just sons, but booty). These are all totally reasonable decisions for the characters to make. Often the woman is heir to something and has little choice, so you’re just glad she’s found a way to be happy with her destiny. As a woman who doesn’t want kids and (at almost-30) has yet to change her mind, though, I’m invested in seeing more characters choose to remain childless. Even if that does limit the possibility for multi-generational sequels.

For my first meal at the grown-up table, I picked The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta (author of Election, among other things).

Ruth is a divorced mother of two and teacher of human sexuality at a small-town public school. Despite her own depressing lack of a sex life, her personal credo is that “pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power” — so you can imagine the kind of sex ed she teaches, and have probably already guessed where her career will end up by the last chapter.

Tim is a divorced father of one, a recovering alcoholic and sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n roll-er, and a recently born-again Christian. He’s a member of the Tabernacle, the new fundamentalist church in town, which is shocked — shocked! — by Ruth’s assertion that “some people enjoy oral sex,” and convince the school board to force her to teach a pre-packaged abstinence curriculum.

Tim also happens to coach Ruth’s daughter’s soccer team, and one day he feels moved to lead the team in prayer. Ruth gets predictably pissed…and off the plot goes from there. (Perrotta is good about not portraying the Christians as whackjobs, by the way — though maybe I just think that because I have more stake in Ruth’s portrayal than in the Tabernacle’s. Christians who’ve read it, please weigh in!)

It’s a book about honesty, really — how to figure out who you are and live a life that’s true to both your morality and your identity. Unfortunately, the end didn’t provide satisfying answers to those questions for the main characters. As they made their last choices, were they content with them? Maybe it’s just that I liked the characters so much I wanted more time with them.

The moment that underscored the biggest difference for me between this and YA had nothing to do with any of the sex or parenting or big choices. It was a throwaway line, from a character you only meet once. Ruth is trying to convince a fellow soccer parent, a Muslim, to support her in her official complaint about Tim’s prayer session:

“Do you know what my name is?” he inquired, pulling a paper towel from the dispenser. “My first name?”

“It’s Hussein, isn’t it?”

The doctor smiled sadly. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Ramsey, I think my family and I will sit this one out.”

And that’s the end of the scene. No, “Hey, you know, because of September 11th and all! With the persecution!” The book assumes that we, as reasonably intelligent adults who’ve occasionally read the news in the last seven years, get it. Obviously there are plenty of adult books in which you can’t turn a page without getting bonked with another anvil, and there are plenty of YA books that do expect a lot from their readers. But in general, you can’t expect as much ability to infer from young adults; they just aren’t there yet.* It was cool to read a book that assumed I had a grown-up brain.

* I remember a passage in The Night Journey, by Kathryn Lasky, which I adored as a kid. A Jewish family is escaping early 20th century Russia, and they’ve enlisted the help of a haunted old man whose family was killed in the pogroms. The young protagonist, Rachel, is dying to find out what the old man’s deal is — what, exactly, happened to him to make him so hollow and disturbed? One day she finds him looking at a dead, mangled squirrel family, and he says, “The father fled.” That drove me crazy — wtf, he was that fucked up because he saw some dead squirrels?? It took me years of re-readings to figure out that it was a metaphor, duh.