The Plague! The Plague! Someone Save Us!

The Comet's Curse by Dom Testa
3Q 3P; Audience: M/J

When the comet Bhaktul flits through Earth's atmosphere, it leaves universally fatal death-dealing particles behind. It won't be long until everyone is dead. Is there any chance that a cure will be found before that happens? Is there any chance the civilization can be saved? With the scientists and doctors dying, it looks unlikely. But Dr. Wallace Zimmer isn't willing to take no for an answer to either question. The virus doesn't affect people until they turn eighteen. If he can put together the right group of kids and get them away from Earth, perhaps they'll be able to find the way to defeat the virus and Earth's civilization. After an intensive search and training period, 251 of Earth's brightest teenagers are sent into space to colonize Eos, a new planet. It will take years for them to arrive and create a new life for themselves. But if they make it, they'll have beaten Bhaktul and Earth will, in some way, have survived.

The crew is carefully chosen for their intelligence, physical fitness, and emotional stability. They are carefully and rigorously trained for the formidable task ahead of them. The Galahad has everything they will need for a long space voyage, including farming facilities, living areas, and game and training rooms to keep them physically fit. And they have Roc, their walking (well, almost), talking, wisecracking supercomputer. Yes, they're young. But they're well prepared, brilliant, and ready for anything. Except, perhaps for the stowaway who is threatening to scuttle their mission before they've had a chance to truly begin it.

Musings:

I wanted to like this book, which is the first in the Galahad series. I was prepared to accept the improbability of a bunch of kids being the saviors of civilization. If it's done well, that premise can be exciting reading. But this is not done particularly well. The characters show some promise, but they are not yet fully developed. The story plays out predictably. The identity of the stowaway is not much of a surprise. But my major issue with the book is the lack of subtlety in the writing. For instance, Testa takes great pains to make sure his readers know that the crew is made up of teens of every ethnicity and culture. Here he introduces Gap, one of the five teens who make up the ship's governing council:

Gap thought of his early childhood in China, raised as an only child by his parents, both of whom were college professors. An early interest in gymnastics was fueled by his training with a former Olympic champion...[Then his parents relocated the family to America] And although his parents were concerned about the abrupt change in his life, Gap immediately accepted the challenge of meeting new people and forming new friendships. It seemed everyone warmed to him as soon as they met him...his school grades reflected his obvious intellect. He kept up his training with gymnastics, keeping an eye on that Olympic future.

Okay, we get it. Gap's Chinese, athletic, very intelligent, and very likeable. All of that could have been shown to us instead of told so bluntly. With Lita, the teen in charge of the infirmary, Testa first goes out of his way to tell us her ethnicity, but then he slips the same information in much more naturally. Which is more effective?

"Lita's black eyes and Latin American skin spoke of her upbringing in Mexico."
or, just a few pages later: "her eyes focused on a glass cube that sat atop a folder. The cube was filled with sand and small pebbles, one of the personal items from her home near the beach in Mexico."

Similarly, Testa works awfully hard to make us find Roc amusing:

I, on the other hand, will continue to be the same sophisticated, charming, and witty intellect that I've always been...I've got reserves of charm that I probably won't begin to tap for years. You're very lucky to know me. Don't you feel lucky?

and

...I obviously talk to the crew, I run the life-support systems on the ship, I answer questions, and I have a lovely singing voice. If you're a girl, and I'm a flesh-and-blood boy, you're all over me... You and I have the same information, so we'll both have to puzzle it out. The only difference is that I'm incredibly smart. Not that you aren't, but when you can recite the table of elements in twenty-six languages, get back to me.

I wish he'd just relax and let his characters be instead of having his author's voice be so intrusive.

I do think this series has the potential to be an intriguing read for younger teens who enjoy science fiction. I'm curious to see what Testa has in mind as the trip goes on and the kids first have to decide if they want to keep the same Council leaders and if not, what the fallout to that decision might be and then (and especially) when they land on Eos and have to create their own civilization. Will they try to maintain what they know from Earth, or will they try to build something completely different? What difficulties will they face? And what will they find in those rooms in the storage areas that are so mysteriously locked for the duration of the voyage? And of course, we already have a budding romance and a brooding leader who may spell trouble. What sort of fireworks will result from all that? Will they be the sort that inspire a satisfied "ahhh!" or the kind that makes one run for cover?

Shall I Stay or Shall I Go?

If I Stay by Gayle Forman
5Q 4P; Audience: J/S

It's no secret that a lot of teens fight with their parents on a regular basis and are waiting impatiently to graduate high school and go to college, preferably someplace away. Mia is not one of those teens. Her family is close. They don't just love each other, they like each other and enjoy spending time together. So when there's a rare snow day in their little part of Oregon, Mia's parents decide it's a perfect day for a family car trip and Mia and her little brother Teddy enthusiastically agree. The snow's not the kind that amounts to anything, so they figure it's perfectly safe. It's not. The four of them are happily talking and listening to music when a four-ton pickup truck going sixty miles per hour plows into them so hard the force of it tears off the doors and pushes the passenger seat clear through the driver's side window.

You don't walk away from an accident like that. Except...Mia does. When the sounds of the crash stop echoing, she can still hear Beethoven's Cello Sonata no. 3 playing. She walks up the embankment and sees the devastation: the crumpled car, the pipe in her father's pocket and his brains scattered on the pavement, her mother's blue lips and red eyes that make her look more like a zombie than someone who was laughing and breathing and living just two minutes ago. But where is Teddy? She frantically searches for a sign of him. There! His hand, sticking out a ditch! But when she gets closer, she realizes the hand sticking out of the ditch isn't Teddy's. It's wearing her bracelet, and the body is wearing her clothing. The body isn't Teddy's. It's hers. No, you don't walk away from an accident like that.

Mia doesn't understand what's going on, why she and her body seem to be two separate things. What she does understand is that her parents are dead and her brother is badly injured. She understands that she can walk, invisible, among her doctors, her friends, and her relatives. She can hear their conversations, but she can't communicate with them. She can only watch them as they sit in the waiting room or by her bedside, grieving and loving. It is a nurse's comment that eventually gives her a clue. If she's "running the show", does that mean that if she lives or dies is up to her? If so, should she stay or should she go? How you make a decision like that?

Musings:
The love in this book is almost palpable. Reading Mia's flashbacks of times spent with her family made me wish I could be a part of their circle. Teddy is adorable, and Mia's parents, both music-loving former hippies, are wise, loving, and totally cool. Two weeks after finishing the book, Mia's father still feels real to me. I melted a little when Mia described his transition from hippie to middle school teacher, and I'm getting a warm feeling from just remembering how he and her mother talked Mia through her first-recital fears. These were good people. Mia's boyfriend Adam is just as likable. He's a rocker and she's a classical cellist. Despite that seemingly wide difference in sensibilities, music both brings and binds them together. The expression "She played me like a cello" has a whole new (and fairly erotic) meaning for me now. Mia is not a romantic. Even as she describes their tender moments and first kisses, she doesn't try to pretend that the relationship didn't have less rosy moments or that she wasn't always secure in it. There's a maturity to their relationship and the way she understands it that resonates.

Music is a constant thread throughout the book. Whether it's rock or classical, music is the common language, and it doesn't matter that they aren't speaking the same dialect. Music is love, and love is music. The book is music is love.

If I Stay is heartbreaking and poignant, life-affirming, and powerful in its simplicity and depth. I can't wait to share it with other readers.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Need by Carrie Jones
3Q 5P; Audience: J/S

Imagine this: There's a small, isolated town in Maine. Boys start disappearing from that town. Not just one boy. A few. No clues are left behind. No signs of struggle, no footprints to track. Maybe just a little gold glitter here and there. No arrests are ever made, but after a few weeks the disappearances stop. But the boys are never seen again. Now picture this: It's about thirty years later. Zara, a South Carolina girl through and through, hates the cold and has no interest in living in a small backwoods town. But her stepfather has recently died, and she is so devastated by his death that her mother is afraid she's going to do something drastic and final. She needs to get her daughter away from the pain of her memories. Where can she send her? She sees no choice but to send Zara to live with her stepgrandmother up in Maine, to the same town where all those boys disappeared so long ago. To a town where boys are disappearing again.

Zara arrives in Maine depressed and angry. She also thinks she might be going a little crazy. She keeps seeing this guy everywhere she goes: in the airport when she left home, in the airport when she got to Maine, on the road on her way to her grandmother's. Who is this guy? What does he want from her?

Zara goes to school depressed, angry, and scared. A kid in a fancy car almost smashes into her in the parking lot. Sparks fly. He's Nick. He's hot. He's bad. Need I say what happens next?

Of course, there's another rival for Zara's affections, as well as new friends. There are also secrets and danger. A lot of both, in fact. Because that mysterious guy Zara keeps seeing? He isn't good news. Pixies tend not to be. Especially pixies who kidnap young boys and have plans for Zara.

Unlike some other heroines of recent supernatural-themed books, Zara is not the type to sit around and be babied. True, she's a pacifist and quite familiar with various phobias, but she's also feisty and angry, and she's not about to be bullied around, whether it's by Nick, Luke, or a pixie. Whatever the pixie king wants, pacifist or not, he's not going to get it without a fight.

Musings, leaning towards a rant:

I was prepared to like Need a lot, based on what I'd heard about it. And I thought I did like it. It was, for the most part, an enjoyable read. But every time I think about it now that I've finished it, I find myself getting more and more frustrated with it, because I think an interesting premise and likable characters were compromised by poor logic and unbelievable character actions.

I'm a librarian. I use the Internet every day to find information. Google is my friend, but it's not a miracle worker. No way do they have enough information to plug into Google and find the answer to who/what is stalking Zara. I know that sounds like a petty complaint, and maybe a lot of people wouldn't even notice, but it took me right out of the book.

I had a hard time believing the sequence of events. Wouldn't you think that when boys started to disappear again, the people who had inside knowledge of what had happened thirty years ago would realize what's probably happening again? Wouldn't you think that the werefolk (highlight to see the missing word) who battled the pixies before would give their kids the training and information they need to battle them again, instead of letting them figure it all out themselves? Isn't that the logical thing? Then why doesn't it happen? This whole aspect of the book (the werefolk ) felt strangely incomplete and underdeveloped.

Last, but hardly least, and trying not to say too much: Zara's mother sending her back to Maine in this situation? Not buying it.

Read this one for the fun of it, but turn down the volume on your inner critical reader first.

Real Girl vs Winter Girl

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
5Q 4P; Audience: (J)/S

Horrifying. Mesmerizing. Shocking. Tragic. Heartrending. Devastating. Exhausting. Unforgettable.

Back when Lia was a real girl, her parents weren't divorced. She had a best friend. She wasn't a fat pig. She wasn't starving herself. She wasn't cutting. She wasn't a wintergirl.

Wintergirl. Dead girl walking. That's what the kids at school call her. Being a wintergirl is just fine with Lia. That way she doesn't need to feel anything. But it doesn't really work that way. Lia feels too much. She just wishes she didn't feel anything. That was easier before Cassie died, before Cassie started haunting her, leaving her scent of cinnamon, cloves, and sugar hanging in the air along with her accusations and her entreaties to join her on the other side.

Lia and Cassie were best friends, right up until they weren't. They played together, got crushes on boys together, hated their parents together, got drunk together. They made a pact together: they would be the skinniest girls in school. ("But I'll be skinnier than you," said Lia.) Cassie binges and purges. Lia starves herself. They'll stay strong together. And then one day, Cassie turns her back on Lia. She won't even speak to her. Which is why, months later, Lia doesn't answer the phone when Cassie calls and calls and calls. (1...2...3...8...10...15...18...22...25...29...30...31...31...32...33. Silence.) Cassie is talking to her now. Now that she's dead, Cassie won't stop speaking to Lia, creeping into her room at night, following her to appointments, haunting her. If Lia stays strong, maybe she can make Cassie go away. Maybe she can make everything go away.

Musings and Quotes:

This was an achingly difficult and utterly engrossing book. While making note of some of the lines I wanted to quote, I also wrote "I feel trapped." There were times I felt I couldn't breathe. I could read only thirty or forty pages at a time before I had to take a break from it. But not everyone will feel that way. I handed the book to my fifteen-year-old niece and she didn't pick her eyes off the pages until she finished it less than four hours later.

The use of strikeouts ("my parents Dr. Marrigan and Professor Overbrook" or (paraphrasing) "I just want sweet, creamy, delicious ice cream slipping down my throat dry toast") to show the difference between what Lia thinks and feels and what she'll allow herself to acknowledge is brilliant.

There's a quotable line on every page (every paragraph). The language is evocative and the imagery is stunning. I know that I'm going to get hundreds of hits on this page, because that's what happens when I quote from Laurie Halse Anderson. Please, do yourself a favor. Read the book. Let yourself be moved by it. Quotes can give you the flavor of a book, but they can't do justice to it.

"Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corner. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. (...body found in a motel room, alone...) Someone just ripped off my eyelids." (p. 4)

"If I weren't so tired, I'd shove trust and issue down the garbage disposal and let it run all day." (p. 6)

"Last week's Thanksgiving was artificially sweetened, enriched with tense preservatives, and wrapped in plastic." (p. 30)

"Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of strange little girls screaming through their fingers...I scroll through our confessions and rants and prayers, desperation eating us one slow bloody bite at a time." (P. 112)

" 'What words are in your head right now, Lia?' Pissed. Pig. Hate...Jail. Coffin. Cut...Hungry. Dead." (pp. 115-116)

"I'm sure she's [Lia's mother] waiting for me in the family room, temperature at fifty-eight degrees, her lecture notes neatly arranged with my faults and mistakes listed in order of priority. She has charts to prove everything I do is wrong, and that my only hope is to allow them to insert her stem cells in my marrow so she can grow a new her dressed in my skin." (p. 148)

"Cassie opens her Pandora's box every night and hitches a ride to my room. She doesn't watch from the shadows anymore. She attacks. Once the sleeping pill straps my arms and legs down to the mattress, she opens my skull and rips out the wiring. She screams holes in my brain and pukes blood down my throat." (p. 183)

Laurie Halse Anderson has done it again. Wintergirls is going to join Speak as one of the classics of YA literature.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Wake by Lisa McMann
4Q 5P; Audience: J/S (gr. 9+)

Even though I love to sleep, I hate to go to sleep. That's only because I'm a real nightowl, though. Fortunately, I don't have Janie's problem. It's not actually the sleeping that's a problem for Janie. It's the dreaming. When she was eight years old, Janie discovered that she could actually enter people's dreams, see what they're seeing and feel what they're feeling. Ever since, she's been afraid to fall asleep, especially if anyone else is sleeping nearby. What if she accidentally falls into someone's dream? She's seen some pretty unnerving things. Mr. Reed at the old age home? His dreams are about war, being shot, and his body parts falling off. Her best friend, Carrie? She dreams about a drowning boy. And in their dreams, all of these people look at Janie and plead, "Help me. Help me, Janie." How? How can she help them? What is she supposed to do in a dream?

None of these dreams compare to the ones she's been having recently. Sometimes there's a middle-aged man and a younger guy, a huge monster-man who has knives for fingers. And he uses those knives on the older man in horrible ways. Sometimes the dream is even worse. Sometimes the monster-man is coming after her.

Janie doesn't know why she has these dreams or what she's supposed to do with them. She just wishes they would stop. She has nobody to talk to about them. Her mother is an alcoholic who rarely has a sober moment, and Carrie's too busy with her boyfriend. She has nobody else. Except, perhaps, for...Caleb Strumheller? Caleb's been trouble and stoned since ninth grade. But there's something different about him this year. He looks more put together. He even talks to people on occasion. And there's the way he looks at her, the way he seems to see right into her. In some weird way, he seems to be involved in her dreams already. Maybe that means something. What would happen if, for a change, she took a cue from the people in her dreams and asked him for help?

Together, Caleb and Janie begin to puzzle out the secret of her dreams. But there are things Caleb isn't telling her, and Janie's nightmares are far from over.

Musings:

I didn't know what to expect from this book. I was a little confused when I first began reading it. It took me a while to get used to the jumps in time and to catch on to what was going on. But once I got into it, I was hooked. It's a compulsively readable book. I'm not going to pretend that I couldn't predict what was going to happen in a few instances. This isn't a goes-where-no-author-has-gone-before book. But it didn't matter. The situation was fascinating enough that I just wanted to keep reading. Janie has complexity and her voice is spot-on, and I found her a totally believable character. I thought the evolution of her relationship with Caleb was handled well. On the other hand, I thought she was a little obtuse on the subject of Caleb's and Carrie's secrets. But perhaps that's because I have a few years on her.

I was surprised when I looked at the front of the book and found excerpts of rave reviews from several review journals. It has 192 customer reviews on BN.com (I've never seen more that a dozen there) and 72 on Amazon. How did I miss this book when it first came out? However it happened, I've already made sure that my patrons and I won't be missing Fade, the sequel. It's already on order. (There will be a third book in 2010.) Bring on the lucid dreaming !

Choose One: Safe vs Real

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
4Q 3P; Audience: J/S; recommended mainly to Gr. 9+

Wow. I started hearing raves about this book months ago from people had received ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies). I told one of my patrons about it and we've both been waiting impatiently for it to finally be published. Now that it's come in, I understand the high praise. It was worth the wait.

Marcelo doesn't operate in the world the way most people do. His condition can't be precisely defined, but he falls somewhere along the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. He has difficulty expressing himself and reacting spontaneously. It's easy for him to get overloaded by visual and aural stimuli, and it's hard for him to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. He is obsessed with music and religion. Marcelo knows exactly how he wants to spend the summer before his senior year: working with the horses at Paterson, his school. It's the perfect job for him. Working with animals is easier than dealing with people, and Paterson is a quiet, safe environment. He'll be interacting with kids like himself and the teachers and staff members who work with them. His needs will be understood and nobody will challenge him. But his father has other plans for him. Arturo has never really accepted Marcelo's diagnosis or believed that Paterson was the best place for him. He thinks it's time for Marcelo take his place in the real world, where he'll be challenged, not coddled the way he is at school, so he's arranged for Marcelo to work in the mail room of his law firm. And he thinks Marcelo should attend the local high school for his senior year instead of returning to Paterson. Marcelo is resistant, but he has to admit that his father has always been fair to him and he thinks he can trust him (if trusting him means believing him). He reluctantly makes a deal with his father: If Marcelo works in the mail room and succeeds in following the rules of the real world for the summer, his father will let Marcelo decide which school to attend in the fall. If he doesn't succeed, Marcelo will attend the local high school.

Marcelo's experiences at the law firm range from comfortable enough to deeply upsetting. Though he knows that his boss, Jasmine, wanted someone else to get his job, she is patient with him. She doesn't overwhelm him with talk and she trusts him to do the job properly once it is explained to him. It surprises him to realize by mid-summer that they've actually become friends. But there are other people who are less willing to accept Marcelo's idiosyncrasies, and they make it difficult for him. And Wendell, the son of the other partner in the law firm, intends to take as much advantage of him as he possibly can. Marcelo's been warned about Wendell, and it's advice worth heeding. Wendell wants something from Marcelo, and he makes it clear that if Marcelo doesn't come through for him, he'll make sure Marcelo comes out on the losing end of his deal with his father.

It's stressful enough for Marcelo to have to deal with the demands, both work-related and interpersonal, of his job. But his stress level gets unbearably high when he comes across information about a major lawsuit the firm is a part of and realizes that the world isn't black and white and neither are people's motives. What should he do with this information, and what will it cost him in the end?

Musings

Many things come into play in this beautifully written book, including friendship, love, trust, sex, good vs evil, and morality. Almost all of it worked for me. Whether it's by having Marcelo explain his own thought processes or in his conversations with his mother and his rabbi counselor/friend, I loved the way Stork illustrated how Marcelo perceives the world and why things that seem unworthy of remark to most of us cause Marcelo to question them. I was rather fascinated by how his mind worked and by what processes he arrived at conclusions. In an odd way, I felt privileged to be given this entry into his world.

I appreciated exploring the dynamics of Marcelo's various relationships. I just this moment realized that the people Marcelo finds easiest to relate to (his mother, his sister, his rabbi counselor, Jasmine) are all women. He's perplexed by his father and frankly frightened and confused by Wendell. Hmmm. I wonder if there's any significance to that.

Without going into specifics, I have some quibbles. I felt there was an inconsistency between what Jasmine says and what she does, mostly in regards to Vermont issues, and some of the scenes in that section of the book felt somewhat out of place with the rest of the book. And despite the growth Marcelo makes over the summer, I still felt that certain things play out too patly in the end, which made me change my initial rating from a 5 to a 4.

I'd recommend this book to high school readers, who will most appreciate Marcelo's struggle with moral dilemmas and following his own dreams vs his father's, and relate to his attempts to understand interpersonal relationships, including sexual ones. It will require a somewhat patient and mature reader who enjoys books that have as much to do with interior events as with outside action.
It is also a book that I would have no hesitation about recommending to adults, whether they self-identify as appreciators of young adult literature or not.

Quote: The world will always poke you in the chest with its finger.

That line really struck me when I read it. I liked the insight it gave into Marcelo and perfectly illustrates that he sees the world as threatening and oppressive. But in the larger context, it's just such vivid, evocative imagery.

There were other things worth quoting, but I had to give the book to my impatient reader before I really had the chance to search through it again for things I didn't write down when I should have!

Citing book titles - an answer

In a very recent post, I asked for a source that indicates how titles should be displayed on the web. I just browsed again and found http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite7.html, which says:

When composing Web documents, avoid underlining. Instead, use italics for titles, for emphasis, and for words, letters, and numbers referred to as such. When you write with programs such as email that don’t allow italics, type an underscore mark _like this_ before and after text you would otherwise italicize or underline.

So, okay, I'm going to run with that. Goodbye, <> and < /u >!

I realize few people really care about this, but it's been bugging me for a long time now. As a librarian, I should have been able to find my answer faster and more easily than I did, and I'm just glad to have it settled. And now I'm finally going to start writing about Marcelo in the real world.