Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

Naomi isn’t like other high school students. The fact is that Naomi doesn’t remember anything about the last four years of her life. After a fall in which she hit her head, she is now back in school trying to deal with amnesia. As she gets accustomed to being back at school and hanging out with friends she mostly doesn’t remember, she wonders if she likes the person she seems to have been before the fall. Is the same person or is she now someone completely different?

Naomi gets reacquainted with the appropriately named Ace, her boyfriend and her high school’s star tennis player, and discovers that she was also on the tennis team. She also gets to meet Will, the school’s yearbook editor, again for the first time. Will is very committed to the yearbook and is baffled by Naomi’s newfound lack of interest in it. She discovers that she once worked side by side with Will on the yearbook and that he referred to her as “Chief” during those days.

Gabrielle Zevin has written a number of excellent books for adults and teens. In addition to Birthright, her dystopian series, Zevin also penned the teen novel Elsewhere and last year’s brilliant The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. While Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac isn’t quite as good as the latter two I mentioned, it's still a thought provoking and highly entertaining read.

John

Teeth by Hannah Moskowitz

Rudy and his family live on a remote, sparsely populated island so that his younger brother Dylan, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, can eat a rare fish called the Enki. The Enki are said to have magical powers, particularly in terms of improving one’s health. Rudy and his family are not the only people who have come to the island for this reason. Many other severely ill people have come with the hope of becoming better from the fish’s restorative powers.

An island inhabited mostly by old, sick people is not exactly what Rudy was hoping for in his teenage years, but he knows that the fish are important for his brother’s health. Rudy eventually meets a girl his age named Diana who spends most of her time sitting inside and reading. Rudy finds her odd as most everything she knows seems to come from reading and not from interacting with people. Even odder is Teeth who is a merman, or fishboy as Rudy likes to call him. Rudy ends up forming a sort of friendship with this half fish/half boy and even spends some time hanging out in the ocean with the creature. Yes, this is not one of those books where I spent my time thinking “I’ve read something like this dozens of times before.” I also wondered if some of the strange things in Teeth were even real.

Rudy’s conflicted loyalties between his family, Diana, and Teeth turn the book into not just a quirky read but a book with substance. Teeth also brings up some good points about the needs of people versus their impact on the environment. If the originality in Teeth is any indication, Hannah Moskowitz is an author to keep an eye on.

John 

Recovery Road by Blake Nelson

Before she arrived at the Spring Meadows rehab center Madeline’s high school classmates referred to her as “Mad Dog” Maddie. She not only had a severe drinking problem but she became angry and violent when she drank. Now she is trying to straighten herself out. Spring Meadows is not glamorous and is hard for Maddie, whose family is well off, to adjust to. Things get better when she meets Stewart on her halfway house’s weekly movie night. He’s slightly older and from another halfway house just down the road. She immediately has a crush on him. Things start to get serious between them once they are out of rehab.

Maddie returns to high school and hides out in the library during lunch. She’s afraid of associating with her old, hard partying friends. At the library she meets Martin, a socially awkward, honors student and develops a friendship with him after a somewhat rocky beginning. She also starts hanging out with Trish, a train wreck of a girl from her halfway house. Since they’ve both been to rehabe, Maddie finds that she can relate better to Trish than to most of the people at her high school.

Maddie’s encounters with some of her fellow recovering substance abusers are gut-wrenching. I wanted her to make sensible decisions and not get pulled back into the life of an addict. Even though I rooted for her to stay on the straight and narrow, Recovery Road made it easy to see why sobriety is not as simple as deciding to say no. Particularly challenging for Maddie is making a completely new set of friends late in high school and trying to cope with being very lonely. Blake Nelson’s Recovery Road neither glamorizes nor goes into some kind of fear-seeking hysteria regarding substance abuse. Despite how realistic the book is, or perhaps because of it, Recovery Road still manages not to be boring at all.

John

Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling by Lucy Frank

Chess would like to think of herself as a normal girl, but lately her body is not behaving in a normal manner. She’s been ill frequently but doesn’t know why and her undiagnosed condition even caused her to have a humiliating incident with a guy she has a crush on. It turns out that she has Crohn’s disease. She ends up in the hospital depressed and trying to come to terms with the diagnosis. One of her roommates, Shannon, has been in and out of the hospital with Crohn’s for a number of years. To put it mildly, Shannon is sassy with the doctors and nurses. She also isn’t one to throw a pity party for herself. Much of the book centers on Shannon and Chess trying to learn to deal with each other and Crohn’s disease.

Written in an unusual manner, Lucy Frank’s Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling takes an honest and realistic look at the subject of young people suffering from a chronic illness. Plenty of books have focused on terminally ill adolescents. (The Fault in Our Stars and Jenny Downham’s Before I Die come to mind.) It’s good to see an author exploring chronic illness as so many young people suffer from these health problems.

John

The Prince of Venice Beach by Blake Nelson

I first encountered the work of Blake Nelson through the movie adaptation of his novel Paranoid Park. The movie was a fairly forgettable indie film, so I was not inspired to pick up Paranoid Park or another one of Nelson’s novels until a few weeks ago. Judging by the quality of The Prince of Venice Beach, Nelson’s most recent novel, my reluctance to read him was a mistake.

The Prince of Venice Beach is narrated by Cali, a homeless kid originally from Nebraska who sleeps in a tree house in the back yard of a home owned by a kind older hippy woman--when he’s not hanging out on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Cali is also good at finding people and is hired by a private detective to locate a homeless man named Mugs and later on Reese, a young girl who recently ran away from her rich father. Cali sees private investigation as a potential career and starts planning a missing persons business with Ailis, a quirky girl who seems to have a thing for him.

While Cali’s career as a private detective, or at least as an assistant to detectives, gets off to a successful start both in terms of finding people and getting paid more money than he knows what to do with, Cali’s principles soon get in the way. Cali quickly realizes that people sometimes have reasons why they don’t want to be found, and he has his reasons for living off the grid too. With one case in particular he hears very different stories from the person he’s looking for and the person who is paying him to do the looking. The Prince of Venice Beach is not a novel just about homeless kids or detective work. It puts these two elements together, along with strong character development, for a book that you will not want to run away from. 

John

Winger by Andrew Smith

Ryan Dean West is in over his head. He is a fourteen year old junior at Pine Mountain, a boarding school for wealthy kids, and he feels like a little kid even with his friends. Worse, he has a huge crush on his friend Annie and she seems to only think of him as cute and as a friend. Worse yet, his roommate in the dormitory is Chas Becker, a not-too-bright and very scary member of the rugby team. Despite his small size compared to those juniors who are actually old enough to be juniors, Ryan Dean is also a member of the rugby team because of his speed.

Between rugby, tensions with Annie, and another girl at Pine Mountain who develops a thing for Ryan Dean, it would seem like Andrew Smith’s Winger would be action packed. Instead, the book is more of a character study driven by the strong voice Smith gives Ryan Dean. He is a flawed but likeable character who encompasses the sometimes impulsive, sometimes passive and always turbulent years of adolescence.

John

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt

Things are not going well for fourteen-year-old Doug Swieteck and his family in Gary D. Schmidt’s novel Okay for Now. Doug and his parents have to move to a rundown house in upstate Marysville, New York, where his father has found a new job. Doug’s older brother Chris is a budding juvenile delinquent under suspicion of committing several robberies in town, and Doug’s oldest brother Lucas is in Vietnam. On top of all of this, Doug has a very big obstacle to overcome when it comes to his school work.

On the brighter side, Doug is a gifted artist who receives lessons on drawing birds from John James Audubon's Birds of America from a kindly librarian, and he quickly develops a crush on Lil Spicer, whose father owns the local deli and hires Doug to make Saturday deliveries. There is a lot going on in Okay for Now and Schmidt does a convincing job writing Doug’s narration of these events. Ultimately, too many events in the book come off as implausible. These include Lil being cast in a Broadway play even though she has no acting experience, and Doug’s dad doing something unimaginably cruel to him. Even worse, the implausibility often shifts between slapstick comedy and gritty realism. This could be a good book, but there is just too much crammed in.

John

Everybody Sees the Ants by A.S. King

Lucky Linderman isn’t all that lucky. He has been harassed for years by school bully Nader. His parents aren’t getting along due to his dad being more interested in running a restaurant than spending time with Lucky and his mother. Lucky is even in trouble at school for a homework assignment. For a freshman social studies survey assignment Lucky asked his classmates “If you were going to commit suicide, what method would you choose?” The survey landed Lucky in counseling sessions.

The follow-up to her Printz Honor Book, Please Ignore Vera Dietz, A.S. King’s Everybody Sees the Ants has a lot going on in its 280 pages. Fairly early on in the book, Lucky’s mom becomes so frustrated with his dad that she decides to take Lucky along on a visit to his Aunt Jodi and Uncle Dave in Arizona. Throughout the book Lucky has vivid dreams of trying to rescue his grandfather, a Viet Nam POW who was never found, from a prison camp in Laos. On her death bed, his Granny Janice told him, “You have to find him and bring him back.” He also sees, or perhaps has hallucinations of, magical ants that serve as a sort of Greek chorus on his triumphs and failures over the course of the book. At times Everybody Sees the Ants feels like several books scrambled together, but almost everything works. The once exception is the ants. The fantastic element of ants holding up signs to cheer Lucky on or telling him that his Aunt Jodi is crazy seems out of place. It also makes Lucky seem a little crazy at times. This was particularly problematic when Lucky encounters Ginny, a rebellious model a few years older than him, during his stay in Arizona. He first sees her sneaking around like a ninja, and her eccentric behavior and seemingly random interest in Lucky made me wonder if he wasn’t imagining her along with the ants.

While I wish King would have exterminated the ants, Everybody See the Ants is still a very strong book. (And King would have also had to come up with a new title.) It tackles problems such as the difficulty people have living in the present, the challenges involved in staying true to oneself, and the way some families’ priorities are skewed. A.S. King shows again that she is one of the best young adult authors to emerge in the last few years.

John

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Eleanor and Park first meet up on the school bus. Eleanor is the awkward new girl everyone on the bus has decided they are going to be mean to. Park likes to sit by himself and get lost in the music he listens to on his Walkman, but he feels sorry for Eleanor and lets her sit down by him. Soon Park notices that Eleanor is reading the comic books he brings on the bus. Soon after that he starts lending her comic books and soon after that they become friends.

Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park is a nice change from the gazillion dystopia novels that have shown up in the young adult section the last number of years. I’ve enjoyed several of the dystopia series, but it’s nice to read something not set in the future. In the case of Eleanor & Park it seems to be set in the past, perhaps the late eighties or early nineties.

The book alternates between Eleanor’s point of view and Park’s points of view. I was thoroughly charmed by the first two-thirds of Eleanor & Park, but the book’s last one-hundred or so pages seemed to drag. I think a lot of this had to do with Park’s character development. Apparently he is some combination of saint and superhero. I guess this is possible, there are certainly amazing people in the world, but reading about someone who seems to have no doubts about the relationship he is in does not make for compelling reading. It was almost as if some of the later Park sections of the book were being written by Eleanor. The book’s last third also suffers because not a whole lot happens. It’s nice that Rowell gives the sense that the reader is hanging out with the main characters but hanging out can get kind of boring. Despite these complaints, Eleanor & Park is definitely worth reading. Rowell has a fresh voice and a great knack for coming up with quirky yet believable characters. I could see Eleanor & Park becoming a young adult classic on par with The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

John

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow is set in the near future in England where those caught illegally downloading movies can face punishments such as losing their internet service or time in jail. Trent, the book’s main character, is one of those caught illegally downloading. He loses internet access for himself and his family. This has disastrous results for his sister, who has trouble doing her school work without the internet, and Trent’s sickly mother, who has difficulties setting up doctor’s appointments without being able to go online.

Disgraced and feeling guilty, Trent leaves his family for London and falls in with a group of squatters, freegans, and general non-conformists. He learns ways to resume downloading films without getting caught, but Trent, who starts going by the nickname Cecil B. Devil, never downloads films in order to sell them. Trent makes no money off his films, which consist of clips from other films he cuts together. His films are funny and sometimes poignant. Soon, Trent and his London friends find themselves fighting to change Britain’s laws on downloading.

Pirate Cinema has slow pacing compared to Little Brother, one of Docotorow’s earlier YA novels. Too much time is spent on all the wild characters Trent runs into in London as well as on details about the technology they are using. But if you’re patient, Pirate Cinema is worth sticking with. It is also a somewhat frightening novel in that some of the laws the characters fight in the book have already been proposed or implemented.

John

The File on Angelyn Stark by Catherine Atkins

Catherine Atkins young adult novel The File on Angelyn Stark shows the perseverance of its title character even as the adults around her, and sometimes her own judgment, fail her. Angelyn thinks of herself and her friends Jacey and Charity as the tough girls at her high school. At the beginning of the book the three run into Jeni, who at first appears to be meek but turns out not to be afraid of their bullying. Jeni, even though she’s new at school, knows a few things about Angelyn’s past that Angelyn would like to keep in the past.

Since The File on Angelyn Stark is not heavy on plot, I won’t give any more of it away. The book’s strength is its character development. The characters are not clearly good or bad, and many of them you’ll find yourself alternately loving or hating or some combination of the two. There are few clear villains in The File on Angelyn Stark and this is a good thing.

My one complaint about Atkins’ novel is that at times it reads too much like a play. Many pages are almost all dialogue with only occasional quick descriptions of the characters’ actions and surroundings. Events seem to move along at such a breakneck pace that I found myself getting lost at several points. At the same time, Atkins can’t be accused of getting bogged down in extensive descriptions of people and places.

John

Godless by Pete Hautman

If you are going to read one book this year about teens worshipping a water tower, then I suggest you read Pete Hautman’s novel Godless. This unique book follows Jason Bock. He is not particularly happy about having to attend a church group called Teen Power Outreach.  At one meeting he announces that he’s a member of the Church of the Ten-Legged One, mostly to mess with Just Al, the group’s leader. What starts off as a joke about worshipping the local water tower soon gains a following, including Jason’s obsessive friend Shin, a girl named Magda who Jason has a crush on, and Henry Stagg, the town’s leading juvenile delinquent.

Keeping the events contained within the characters’ town rather than having them explode into a nationwide sensation helps the book’s believability. In addition, Godless is the rare book that explores heavy subject matter without ever feeling heavy. In an entertaining and often humorous way, Hautman explores how people come to have or not have faith and how one’s faith can change over time. Highly recommended.

John

Winter Town by Stephen Emond

Stephen Emond’s novel Winter Town explores what it’s like when someone you think you know everything about becomes a mystery to you. Evan and Lucy have been friends since childhood. Since moving to Georgia after her parent’s divorce, Lucy has continued to visit every winter to see her dad and hang out with Evan. He looks forward to these visits but during one of them the usually upbeat Lucy shows up with a goth look and a dark and aloof personality. Evan figures that something must have happened to Lucy in the preceding year but can’t get her to tell him what.

Emond does a stellar job developing Lucy and Evan as well Winter Town’s many supporting characters. Evan starts to question his goal-oriented life and Lucy eventually opens up about what she has been through in the past year. The book also includes drawings by the author including excerpts from "Aelysthia," a comic Evan and Lucy work on in the book. 

John

Waiting by Carol Lynch Williams

London, the narrator of Carol Lynch Williams’ novel in verse Waiting, lives in Florida with her parents and with the memory of her late brother Zach hanging over her family. Her mother has not spoken to her since Zach’s death. Her father seems warm by comparison, but it is obvious Zach’s death has also deeply affected him. London has a strained relationship with Taylor, her former boyfriend who was also a friend of Zach’s and soon starts to develop feelings for Jesse, the new guy at school. In her grief-stricken state, London rarely makes good choices when it comes to Taylor and Jesse.

 London’s parents are former missionaries and she and Zach became best friends as their family traveled from country to country together. Zach’s death strains the religious beliefs of all three surviving family members. London constantly questions her faith. Her mom has quit going to church altogether while her dad continues to work for the church and hold on to his belief that Zach’s death was all part of God’s plan.

Williams is very slow to reveal how Zach died and this helps build tension in the novel. It also makes Waiting a novel about how people deal with the death of a loved one instead of a novel about why someone died. Waiting is an honest and moving look at a difficult subject.

John

Because It Is My Blood by Gabrielle Zevin

Because It Is My Blood is the second novel in Gabrielle Zevin’s futuristic Birthright series following All These Things I’ve Done. Zevin continues the story of Anya Balanchine, who is a part of the Balanchine crime family. The Balanchines have made their money selling their own brand of chocolate, which is illegal in the late twenty-first century America Zevin sets the book in. Along with the crime family drama, Anya’s relationship with on again, off again boyfriend Win— whose father is running for district attorney—continues and leads to many complications for her. Among these are Win’s father getting her sent back to a juvenile detention center on trumped up charges in order to help his campaign. Her brief imprisonment leads her to break out, with quite a lot of assistance, and end up on a cacao farm in Mexico.

Because It Is My Blood was not quite as strong as the first book in the series, mainly because the plot meanders somewhat when Anya is hiding in Mexico. However, the ending was very strong and Zevin has set up what should be an exciting final book in the series.

John

All These Things I’ve Done by Gabrielle Zevin

Gabrielle Zevin’s All These Things I’ve Done combines a mob family drama with the type of dystopian world readers of The Hunger Games and Matched will be familiar with. Set in 2083, the book takes place in New York City where things have taken such a sad turn that most of the Statue of Liberty has been sold off for scrap metal. Water is rationed, paper is scarce and chocolate and caffeine are illegal. Anya Balanchine, the book’s narrator, comes from the Balanchine crime family, which has made much of its fortune illegally selling chocolate. Both her parents are dead, her mother from a bullet intended for her father and her father from the bullet of an assassin who has never been caught. Anya lives with her grandmother, her younger sister Natty, and her intellectually disabled brother Leo. Due to her grandmother’s poor health and her brother’s condition, she ends up being the de facto head of the family even though Leo is older.

At the beginning of the book, Anya breaks up with her manipulative boyfriend Gable and soon becomes friends with Win, a new kid at school and the son of the assistant district attorney. She soon starts to think about Win as more than a friend. Everything goes off track for Anya when the police accuse her of intentionally giving Gable poisoned chocolate, and she ends up at a juvenile detention facility called Liberty.

There is a lot going on in this book and things move along at a nice pace. The combination of organized crime and science fiction is original, though I wondered how likely it was that chocolate would really be so coveted in a world running out of resources such as water. I was also a little annoyed by how great Win seems to be. It’s obvious that he is the good guy in the book, but it seems like he could at least have a few faults. Despite these problems, the good parts of All These Things I’ve Done far outweigh the bad. This is the first book in a trilogy and I look forward to reading Because It Is My Blood, the second book in the series.

John 

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

I was a little reluctant to read this book because it sounded like a disease-of-the-week movie with a J.D. Salinger type of character thrown in to give the book a twist. I was pleasantly surprised and ended up thoroughly enjoying The Fault In Our Stars. While at its most basic level the book is what I described, it never presents stereotypical characters or trite solutions to their problems.

Hazel Grace, the novel’s narrator, is a sixteen year old cancer patient. She meets Augustus Waters, a handsome boy about her age who was once a star basketball player before losing his leg to cancer. He comes off initially as something of a James Dean, tortured rebel type, but Green quickly develops him into a believable and unique character. One of my favorite touches is how Augustus puts cigarettes into his mouth but never lights them. Hazel is horrified when she first sees him put one in his mouth, but he tells her that “It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.” Augustus and Hazel’s relationship becomes deeper when Augustus reads Hazel’s favorite book, An Imperial Affliction. This is apparently the most important novel ever written, at least for the two of them, and their obsession with its cryptic ending and the whereabouts of Peter Van Houten, the book’s reclusive author, set in motion much of The Fault In Our Stars’ plot.

While I enjoyed two other John Green novels, Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, The Fault In Our Stars is by far the best of the three. It maintains the unique and quirky characters from the other two novels while also being a rare case of an author taking on more significant subject matter without becoming heavy handed. I can’t recommend this book enough.

John

Matched by Ally Condie

Cassia, the main character in Ally Condie’s novel Matched, completely trusts the autocratic society she lives in. Everything in her world is planned out for her. Her society will choose her future husband, the job she will have for the rest of her life, and like her fellow citizens she will even know the day of her death because people in this world die on their eightieth birthdays. Even music and literature are controlled by the government. The Society has preserved exactly one-hundred poems, one-hundred songs, one-hundred of any art form they deem worthy for their citizens. Works not making the lists are destroyed.

Cassia’s trust in the society waivers on the day she finds out her match, which is the person she will spend the rest of her life with. She feels lucky to be matched with Xander, a boy from her neighborhood she has known for years. But another match is also briefly show to her, that of Ky. Ky is also someone she knows although he is considered an aberration and is the adopted son of a couple living in her neighborhood. His past is a mystery to her and so is the possibility that she might have a choice in her life. People are not supposed to be matched with more than one person.

This apparent mistake causes Cassia to start questioning the happy and perfect world the government has designed for her, and she starts to see her entire society unravel in small but significant ways. Tension builds throughout the book and while I was disappointed that it ended on a cliffhanger—it’s book one of a trilogy—I’m definitely anxious to find out what happens in Crossed, the second book of the series.

John