Fanboy (we never learn his real name) is a fifteen-year-old loner. His only friend is Cal, who shares his love of superhero comics and intellectual conversation, but since Cal’s also an athlete, they move in different social universes. His mother has remarried “the step-fascist” and they’re having a baby, so Fanboy feels like he’s been pushed out of his family. All his dreams are tied to Schemata, the graphic novel he’s writing and drawing. He plans to show his Schemata portfolio to his hero, comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, at an upcoming con — at which point Bendis will immediately faint in awe, call his publisher, and sweep Fanboy away from small-minded South Brook forever.

The thing I loved about this book is the same thing that bugged me about it: its lack of easy solutions to the characters’ problems. On the one hand, Fanboy’s steps toward self-determination are realistically small, yet totally satisfying. On the other hand, there aren’t any explanations — easy or otherwise — for some things that really should have been explained. (His mother’s pathological insistence that he must never invite anyone over, for instance, which I kept expecting to be a big deal because it seemed so unavoidably odd.) A gun is — literally — shown in the first act that never goes off in the third. These strike me as newbie mistakes, so I look forward to reading Lyga’s next book.

Also, notice how I wrote that whole premise without mentioning one of the two title characters? Goth Girl is interesting, to be sure, and such a whackjob that (as my friend Perich wrote about Heath Ledger’s Joker) “you never sit easy when she’s on screen.” But to me (and I suspect this is just me) she felt ancillary to Fanboy’s growing-up process at the center of the story.

I loved all the real-world comics name-dropping — Barry Lyga worked in the industry for years, according to his bio, and he knows his stuff. (If you’re not a comics fan, you might find that a sticking point, the way I always do with the descriptions of games in sports novels.) Everything felt believable (except the parents — why are parents always the hardest part of a YA novel?), even if it didn’t always hang together novelistically.

Ultimately, I think what kept me from falling in love with the book is my lack of misanthropy, or even memory of high school misanthropy. I was a geek in school (oh, who am I kidding with the past tense there?), and there were phases where I had no friends. But the truth is that those phases passed by 5th grade, after which, despite my insecurity about it all, I always, always had someone (usually a bunch of someones) to hang out with. That’s right: I’m a geek poseur.

I kind of hate to say this, because it conflicts so much with my image of my younger self, but the truth is that I find it dreary and incomprehensible to read about kids who are this miserably lonely. It breaks my heart, but I want to roll my eyes at the same time and say, “Get over yourself.” (Which is pretty much what Cal does at the end of the book, so yay for Cal!) I guess I have officially grown up too much to empathize with my inner lonely teenager.

Oh, and confidential to Barry Lyga: Schemata sounds AWESOME. Y is over, Ex Machina is wrapping up, Speed only publishes a new Finder like once every five years, and even the guy at the Picnic yesterday couldn’t come up with anything he thought I’d like that I’m not already reading. Please, please write it! It’ll be like a whole lit-verite viral marketing thing. Love, me

A Grown-Up Table diversion into comics… Y is over. (Well, it’s been over for awhile, but I wait for the trade paperback compilations of the issues, and I just recently picked up the last one.) It’s one of the first series I fell in love with, and the end did not disappoint — I was bawling like a slightly manipulated baby.

The premise: Yorick Brown, twentysomething slacker everyman, and his pet monkey Ampersand are the only survivors of a mysterious plague that instantly wipes out all male mammals on earth. Yorick’s only thought is to find Beth, his girlfriend, who is studying abroad in Australia. But as the last man on earth, he’s too important to be allowed to follow his own agenda. He hooks up with Dr. Alison Mann, a geneticist, and Agent 355 of the mysterious Culper Ring, who is assigned to protect him until Dr. Mann can figure out what allowed him to survive. The trio travel across continents, pursued by (among others) politicians, the armies of several countries, and radical feminists known as Amazons, while the world falls apart and is rebuilt again by women.

Slightly spoilery

By the end, the “scientific” “explanations” get a little hand-wavy, and there is a Joss Whedon Moment (that actually made me shout, “Fuck you, Joss!” before I remembered that he didn’t write it this time). But the characters and their emotions are true, and the brilliant world-building remains solid.

I could say a lot about the gender, race, and sexuality commentary throughout the series (which I think is pretty genius, most of the time), but others already have.* So I’ll just say that I loved it, and I’m so sad it ended, in the same way I was sad when Buffy ended. RIP Y: they saved the world a lot, in spite of themselves.

During the school year, I mostly read for work: how will I know what to give my kids if I don’t tear through as many YA novels as possible? Consequently, I almost never read sequels; I got enough of a taste with the first book, so I feel guilty if I linger. This summer’s reading project is to catch up on the sequels to some books I loved.

TOS is the sequel to Dairy Queen, another book in the “I adored it and so did my kids” category. In DQ, DJ Schwenk is annoyed when well-off Brian Nelson, star quarterback on the rival town’s football team, starts hanging around her family’s struggling dairy farm. His coach decided that spending some time with the Schwenks would give Brian a “work ethic,” but DJ already has plenty of ethic and the work to match. She reluctantly agrees to train Brian, and discovers that she loves football even more than she thought she did. Not only that, she’s a pretty good player… good enough to play for her school’s team.

In DQ, the problems are mostly DJ’s own: she’s overloaded with work, she’s not sure how she feels about Brian, and of course, she’s the only female football player in the state of Wisconsin. Her family’s problems are hinted at, but never fully explored. In TOS, those problems take center stage: DJ’s best friend Amber is tormented at school for dating a woman, DJ’s mom throws her back out and can’t work, and the farm is losing a frightening amount of money. Then there are DJ’s own problems: Brian might be her boyfriend, except that he doesn’t seem to want to be seen with her in public, and she has an accident that forces her to choose between playing football and the possibility of a basketball scholarship.

One of DJ’s defining character traits is her ineloquence. She’s a great athlete, but when she has to talk her way through a difficult situation, she gets stuck. It’s unusual, I think, to find a realistic YA character like this (probably because most authors are eloquent, by definition), but both DQ and TOS manage to be written in DJ’s not-a-strong-student tone without making her seem stupid or weighing the book down. I love this passage, on the subject of Doing Something Stupid (as her mom calls it) with Brian:

I hadn’t really been alone with Brian — not counting the barn, which I don’t because Dad’s there all the time and also the straw is super itchy — since the Mall of America, and while I hadn’t Done Anything Stupid, I wasn’t sure where exactly I stood on the whole subject. I mean, it’s not that I wanted to do anything Really Stupid, but I wouldn’t be so against doing something Kind of Stupid — something A Little Silly, maybe. Not that I had any clear ideas, but I couldn’t help but wonder. So it was awfully hard to work on algebra, and when I took out my A&P book, I looked through the chapter on reproduction, the pages all grimy from kids before me, and that didn’t help much either.

DJ finding her voice and her strength is a theme of this book, even more so than it was in DQ. And she does, in ways that will make you cheer — even if (like me) you wanted the happy ending that wouldn’t actually be best for the character.

(Sidebar about the farm: if you know me, you know that sustainable food is one of my favorite subjects. A book with a small farm struggling to stay afloat in the days of Big Agribusiness? Bring on the Positive Messages! But Murdock doesn’t, exactly. She walks a careful tightrope between ignoring the troubles of small farms entirely, and beating us over the head with Thou Shalt Buy Local. As evangelistic as I am, I have to respect that. This is as much as DJ ever says on the subject, when she’s considering her dad’s ideas about going organic:

On the other hand, what good had not using chemicals done us so far? It’s not like people come by our place because Schwenk milk tastes so great, or that we have any way of even telling them how great it tastes. People I know wouldn’t pay more for that, not one penny, not for just milk. Maybe city folks would… But it still didn’t make sense to me, a bunch of city people who couldn’t identify the front end of a cow paying more for milk that came from sunshine and grass instead of chemicals. That’s not how people think.

Sure, Dad was trying. But it would end up being another one of his harebrained ideas…. And the farm would keep losing money, and eventually he’d have to sell to a developer and give up all his cows and farming ways, which would just about destroy him, and me too, I have to say, and that would be the end of the Schwenks. All because people don’t really care what goes in their mouths as long as it doesn’t come out of their wallets.

By the end of the book, the problem — realistically, and along with most of DJ’s larger problems — goes unsolved.)

Read-alikes: Definitely read DQ first, though in some ways this is an even better book. But my main read-alike recommendation is actually a watch-alike: the TV show Friday Night Lights, whose second season E and I are in the middle of on DVD. It and Murdock’s books made me care (just a tiny bit, mind you) about football, and if that isn’t high praise, I don’t know what is.

During the school year, I mostly read for work: how will I know what to give my kids if I don’t tear through as many YA novels as possible? Consequently, I almost never read sequels; I got enough of a taste with the first book, so I feel guilty if I linger. This summer’s reading project is to catch up on the sequels to some books I loved.

Julie lives a relatively normal middle school life in Northboro, MA (ooh, setting-I-recognize alert!)… except for the tangle of magical vines trapped under her bed. The vines are what’s left of the Wild, the fairy-tale forest that traps everyone it touches inside a story, stripping them of their free will and forcing them to reenact their story over and over. Julie’s parents, Rapunzel and her prince, led the charge to defeat the Wild five hundred years ago. Zel and a host of other fairy tale characters escaped, but the prince was left behind. In Into the Wild, the Wild escapes from under Julie’s bed and takes over Northboro.

At the beginning of Out of the Wild, everything is back to normal: the Wild is safely under Julie’s bed, Zel runs a hair salon, Julie’s “brother” (Puss in) Boots chases the Three Blind Mice… but then the Wild unexpectedly spits out Zel’s prince. The family is thrilled to be reunited, but Prince (as they decide to call him, “like the rock star”) can’t handle the modern world. He doesn’t understand why they have to keep their identities secret, so he immediately charges off to rescue damsels in distress, brandishing his sword and generally impersonating Prince Edward in Enchanted.

Unfortunately, “fairy-tale events” (like, say, rescuing poor still-sleeping Sleeping Beauty) feed the Wild. Someone is setting up Prince to complete as many fairy-tale events as possible, because it turns out that some fairy-tale characters prefer their happily-ever-afters to the modern world with its free will and heartbreak.

I adore Into the Wild. It was an easy sell for my kids, too — I put it on the middle school summer reading list, and I think half the seventh grade will have read it by September. It’s particularly appropriate for a girls’ school because of the clever way it turns the tired damsel-in-distress pattern of fairy tales on its head: Zel and Julie save the world by refusing to be saved by their princes, by refusing to be trapped by their destiny. (Secular humanist hippie stamp of approval!)

Spoilery for ITW and OOTW

Out of the Wild, I’m sorry to say, didn’t have much to add to the themes of its predecessor. It even detracted from Into the Wild’s message that you can’t expect happily ever after: at the end of ITW, Julie foils the Wild by wishing not for a perfect happy ending for her family (which would only have fueled the Wild), but for everything to go back to normal, troubles and all. At the end of OOTW, she transforms the Wild by a different wish — one that creates a fairy-tale utopia for world and Wild alike. Ta-da, you can have perfectly neat little endings if you have a Wishing Well! Duh. So much for tough choices.

Also, Prince never comes off as very bright. He fought the Wild; he knows that fairy-tale events fuel it. So when he sails off chasing his princely destiny with no thought for the consequences, it’s hard not to conclude that he left more than a few brain cells back in the Wild. I never figured out what Zel sees in him.

All that said, I like perfectly happy endings as much as the next person, and OOTW sure has a glorious one! If you enjoyed the formula of ITW and need more of the same, OOTW obliges.

This ARC* randomly found its way into my life, and I picked it from my “haven’t read yet” shelf to take on a recent camping trip to Acadia National Park because it takes place in Maine, and I’m a sucker for reading a book while surrounded by its setting. The plot: Aslaug was raised by her possibly unhinged, ailing mother in an isolated cabin in the Maine woods, with virtually no contact with the outside world. When her mother dies, she goes on a search for her father, and finds her mother’s sister Sara, Sara’s teenage son and daughter, and the Charismatic church Sara founded. The chapters alternate between Aslaug’s life as she spirals into ever-creepier relationships with her aunt and cousins, and transcripts of her trial for their murder.

Apparently I’m the only person in the world who wasn’t so impressed. (Click that link, by the way, if for no other reason than to drool over one of the most gorgeous author sites I’ve ever seen.) I found it to be overly taken with its own intelligence, one of those books that puffs itself up all, “I am so wise, and lyrical, and full of Deep Thoughts! Fall under my spell!” A sample:

I am Aslaug Datter, daughter of Maren. I am a reflection of who Mother was, and who Mother was is a reflection of her life before me. I am closing the circle, bringing the end back to the beginning, back to Sara, the sister of Maren, a person the preacher now must exhume.

The whole book is like that. Only with more obscure information about wild plants. The author clearly did a lot of research about plants, and she wants to make sure you know it.

In a “Dear Reader” at the beginning of the ARC (it may or may not be in the published version), Meldrum wrote:

I remember that part-dream state in which Aslaug…was birthed: a state that seemed a bridge between the natural world and the supernatural, where my rational mind and my unconscious merged…. My hope is that I have somehow captured that in-between space where religion and science meet.

Slightly spoilery

I’m sorry to say that I think she actually got tangled up in the line between the two. The mysteries of the book could have had spiritual explanations, and that would have been cool with me. Instead they had logical, real-world explanations, which would also have been cool with me if she’d left them as such (except that none of them came as a surprise to me in the slightest, even though I felt like they were supposed to be shocking revelations). But to provide obvious logical explanations and yet insist on hanging on to the supernatural atmosphere? That’s just silly. “Ooooh, but she could still be a magical virgin birth!” …No she couldn’t; she just got a DNA test.

Basically, the back cover seduced me with its promise of non-linear chronology, plant lore, and creepy familial mystery (I read way too much V. C. Andrews as a kid, clearly), and then totally failed to deliver anything actually engaging. I skimmed to the end to find out the answers to the mysteries — only to discover that they were exactly what I expected all along. Meh.

*Advance Reader’s Copy

After finding out that John Green might be coming to speak at my school* (eee!), I grabbed his first book, Looking for Alaska. You might recall that I loved the shit out of his second book, An Abundance of Katherines. This is a very different book — weightier; more Dead Poets Society than High Fidelity, which makes it less likely to appear on a list of My Favorite Books because there’s nothing I adore more than an author who can crack me up throughout an entire book while still inspiring Deep Thoughts. But I loved it all the same.

Looking for Alaska starts with two plot elements I find incredibly annoying: 1) hazing, and 2) a mysterious bipolar chick with whom the hapless protagonist is bound to fall in love. 1) No matter how much Separate Peace and Chocolate War I read, I will never understand teenage boys and their need to ritually endanger each other in order to prove how powerful they are. And 2) I think I’m the only person I know who hated The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because shut up already with the glorification of the moody girl who will only make you miserable!

But this book turns both these things around and makes something new and beautiful out of them. 2) is too central to the story for me to say anything without being too spoilery, but as for 1)…

After performing a retaliatory prank on the rich kids (who are known as the Weekday Warriors, because they board but go home to their nearby mansions on weekends):

But even though Kevin had sort of tried to kill me and all, he really didn’t seem worth hating. Hating the cool kids takes an awful lot of energy, and I’d given up on it a long time ago.

By the end of the book, the Warriors aren’t friends, but they aren’t enemies either — just classmates, and not particularly assholic ones at that. Because all the inter-clique drama just isn’t worth it anymore. Don’t you wish you’d figured that out in high school?

* The high school part, not the middle school part. This is very much a high school book, with adult crossover potential; I’d say 15+. It’s a shame, in a way, that the book has so much Adult Content, because it’s also very spiritual and even religious. The publisher has an interview with Green that gets at some of the religious questions in the book, in which Green declares that he considered becoming a minister, and that he is “not embarrassed by [his] faith.” If it weren’t for all the swearing and the blow job, this might get a stamp of approval from the “Think of the children!” crowd. Instead it just gets called “porn”, which is too bad because there are so few good, thoughtful YA books by and about people considering their faith.

During the school year, I mostly read for work: how will I know what to give my kids if I don’t tear through as many YA novels as possible? Consequently, I almost never read sequels; I got enough of a taste with the first book, so I feel guilty if I linger. This summer’s reading project is to catch up on the sequels to some books I loved.

People of Sparks is the sequel to City of Ember. The entire population of dying Ember (…yeah) follows Lina and Doon aboveground for their first taste of fresh air, sky, and a world not run by ancient machines they don’t understand. Since they’re totally useless in this world, it’s fortunate for them that they find the town of Sparks.

…But it’s not so fortunate for Sparks. They want to do the right thing, but adding the Emberites will double their population. Hundreds of years after the mysterious Disaster (insert your favorite apocalypse here), most surviving towns are barely eking out a living; Sparks is more prosperous than most, rocking the gardens and livestock, but they’re afraid the Emberites will eat them back to starvation.

City of Ember is a good book, your standard two-kids-save-their-community adventure story. But People of Sparks steps out of the generic shadows into the limelight. You might even say it shines! (Ok, I’ll stop with the puns now.) It sets up a genuinely challenging conflict: the people of Ember can’t survive without seriously straining Sparks’ resources, but the people of Sparks can’t kick the Emberites out without losing their morality.

Lina and Doon save the day, of course, but the rest of the characters aren’t sheep the way they were in City of Ember. They want to do the right thing, but they don’t want it to be too hard: they’re human. Even the true villain is understandable (though he’s the weakest link in the book). The book has a clear message — tit for tat starts wars — but I didn’t feel bludgeoned (for a young YA novel, anyway).

The solution is a bit too simple, but honestly, the conflict is so realistically insurmountable that DuPrau almost wrote herself into a corner. It’s not the sort of book in which characters are going to murder each other in a bloody food war, so I can’t complain about the happy ending. I read the whole thing in a day, and it gets the secular humanist hippie stamp of approval! Skip over City of Ember and head straight for this one.

The new Double Love reads like a time-traveled transliteration of the original novel: the girls ride around in a Jeep Wrangler rather than the red Fiat convertible they drove in 1983; Elizabeth has a blog on the school website rather than a column in the newspaper; Jessica’s secret bad-boy date takes her to an illicit drag race rather than to a seedy bar; and the characters have expanded their vocabulary to include the intransitive vulgarity “that sucks” and the ubiquitous “whatever.”

I have this image of a committee of 80s dudes with big ’staches and chicks with even bigger shoulder pads going through the originals all, “Ok, we need to get one of those ‘blog’ things in here.” “Yes, and I’m told ‘texting’ is very popular!”

Amy ultimately concludes — and I think she’s right — that “Sweet Valley High… may be too naively optimistic for its contemporary audience.” Besides, it probably doesn’t name-drop expensive shoe brands nearly often enough.

During the school year, I mostly read for work: how will I know what to give my kids if I don’t tear through as many YA novels as possible? Consequently, I almost never read sequels; I got enough of a taste with the first book, so I feel guilty if I linger. This summer’s reading project is to catch up on the sequels to some books I loved.

Full disclosure: in elementary school, my best friend and I desperately wanted to be detectives. We read the entire Trixie Belden series repeatedly, and played Trixie and Honey with our Barbies. We had maps of each other’s houses and yards, with all the best spying spots marked. We even scoured the obituaries looking for anything that seemed related to her neighbor’s plot to smuggle TVs (…don’t ask).

So holy crap, did I love the first Kiki Strike book (Inside the Shadow City, as reviewed on the excellent Bookshelves of Doom)! I book-talked it non-stop to my middle schoolers before our Book Fair. All I had to do was read the back copy out loud, and they were hooked — we sold out within two periods and had to order stacks of extra copies. “Five delinquent Girl Scouts, a million hungry rats, one secret city beneath Manhattan, and a butt-kicking girl superspy… welcome to the world of Kiki Strike.” How can you not want to read that immediately? (The fact that their teacher said “butt-kicking” in class had nothing to do with it, I’m sure.)

The Empress’s Tomb is only slightly less awesome. The plot was a little more scattered, the resolution of the mysteries a little less tight, and the Harry Potter-esque “all my friends have deserted me” middle of the book was too drawn-out.

But seriously, “only slightly less awesome” than Inside the Shadow City is still more awesome than most things you’ve read this year. I am totally addicted, and if you were the sort of kid who had dossiers on your classmates and spied on your little brother (…you know, hypothetically), you will be, too.

Read-alikes: I never was a fan of Nancy Drew; Trixie Belden was way more badass. (Why yes, there is Trixie Belden fanfic, why do you ask?) Her forty-some books were published between 1948 and 1986. For more recent spunky girl ass-kicking, you absolutely must read Bloody Jack by L. A. Meyer. It’s Alanna on the 19th century open seas — what’s not to love?

Marcus and his too-smart-for-their-own-good punk friends are in the wrong place at a very wrong time — the destruction of the San Francisco Bay Bridge by terrorists. They get picked up by Homeland Security, taken to a secret detention facility, and abused. This experience focuses Marcus’s teen rebellion and, upon his release, he resolves to use his 133t haxx0r skillz to bring down the authoritarian new world order.

Yup, I read it, finally. (Props to Alison again for hooking me up with my galley fix.) Because I’m a contrary pain in the ass, I wanted to dislike it just because of how many times I’d been told I should loooooove it. But the truth is that I couldn’t put it down. If you are the sort of person who burned with a fire to Change the World in high school, or if you have an “If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention” bumper sticker, or if you just love intense political thrillers, you will probably love this book, too.

Doctorow does a spectacular job of imbuing the book with the creeping sense of dread that the loss of our civil rights should elicit. It’s the whole boiling-a-frog thing: the point of this book is to remind us that the temperature is being raised, and we should jump out. At the same time, it’s a damn good growing-up story populated with 3-dimension friends, parents, and new girlfriend.

This is a hacker-y, techie story, and I’d also like to hand out an extra-credit gold star for making the technology both intelligible, and a logical outgrowth of the story. (*cough*writers of TV science fiction*cough*)

It’s not perfect, for sure. While most of the good guys are real people rather than ACLU pamphlets, there aren’t any three-dimensional characters on the other side. An interviewer for The Onion AV Club asked Doctorow about this, and he said, “The other side of the equation is people who are desperately scared. I don’t mean the authoritarians who are taking advantage, but the people of good will, whom I respect, are people who are terrified.” So having Evil Villainous Authoritarians was intentional, I guess, but I still prefer my villains shaded in grey.

Slightly spoilery commentary

An even bigger issue for me was that Marcus makes some (realistically; he’s only 17, after all) bad decisions, but they aren’t coded as bad enough in the book. When your argument is based on “But I’m not a terrorist,” it helps if you don’t, you know… act like a terrorist. The Flash Mob-esque stunt at the end of the book was especially stupid, dangerous, and damn close to inciting to riot, and I didn’t feel like Marcus did enough thinking later about what was wrong with that choice.

Read-alikes: Crusader by Edward Bloor, for another teenager making tough choices to change her world; An Abundance of Katherines by John Green and Seek by Paul Fleischman, for more smart young men with smart girlfriends figuring out how to be adults; Double Helix by Nancy Werlin for both.