Are You Listening, God? It's me, Kiriel.

Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins
5Q 3P J*/S (Technically, VOYA's J is grades 7-9. I think this one will be more popular with high school students.)


Kiriel is a fallen angel who has decided to take a vacation from his job (reflecting regret and guilt). Just as Shaun is about to be hit by a car, Kiriel steps into his body. Shaun's soul leaves, but his body lives on, with Kiriel animating it. Kiriel wants to experience what living is all about, and for those who like this kind of thing, it's quite fascinating to watch him get so caught up in and thrilled by the tiny details of life that we don't even notice (wind on your face, what it feels like to touch and smell even the most mundane things, like a dirty t-shirt). Ultimately, he decides there are three things he wants to accomplish: help Jason, Shaun's younger brother, to find at least a little happiness (Jason is a very angry and unhappy boy); convince at least one human being to stop the kind of behavior that will find him in Hell later as one of Kiriel's charges; and to have sex. How he goes about these things and what he learns about himself is the plot of this deceptively quick read. But it is also takes on what our role is in the world and whether God knows and cares that we exist. Yes, even fallen angels wonder about these things. I guess that gives us something in common.

I said I wasn't going to quote, but I am, briefly, because these few quotes really hit me:

This is one I should be taking to heart right now.

There was a white scar on his forehead that he'd received from falling off a swing when he was a child. I'd never heard him say why he chose to wear his hair on his face, but I wondered if he was trying to hide the scar. I rather liked it. How wonderful, to bear evidence of an event that must have been packed with emotion! How satisfying, to always have a physical token of something you'd experienced.

If you don't like passages like this, this might not be the book for you:

After I finished the shower, I filled the tub and took a bath. I filled it as high as it would go. I liked this water; I liked the feeling of it. It was warm and floaty. I slapped the surface to make little waves that disappeared quickly, and then I slid Shaun's whole body back and forth to make big waves that slopped over the side of the tub. When the water got cold, I filled the tub again, with even hotter water that turned Shaun's skin red. I watched his fingers and toes prune up. I lay back so his ears were under the surface, and I listened to his skin squeak as I rubbed his legs and bottom along the porcelain. Then I knocked on the side of the tub and listened to the echoing clunk. Cool.

It's always good to be reminded that everyone, whether its ourselves or someone else, matters and is somehow connected to someone else. I also like this because of what it means to Kiriel.

I had assumed that a human was bound by its activities and habits, its way of acting and speaking. But now it seemed that there were other threads that wound around someone like Shaun, connecting him to other beings - threads of affection and trust. Shaun was gone, but his place hadn't been quite empty. No matter how I tried to act as he would have, the threads he'd been associated with would always hold his shape. Well. It looked as though I had just learned something.

Even fallen angels have their doubts.

Shaun was lucky. He, at least, would be missed. Shaun Simmons had made a specific mark on the world, simply by being. A discontent rose in me. I thought, This must be Envy. It didn't feel particularly good or particularly bad. The only thing about it that seemed even slightly sinful was the way it clung and gnawed, as if it could easily take on a life of its own. Shaun's pillow cradled my head. I'd stolen a boy's body and the Creator didn't even care! If mankind was of such great import in the overall scheme of things, shouldn't He Himself have shown up to take care of that? But he hadn't. He hadn't even sent anybody. It was as if nobody was running the universe...Maybe the reason that no one cares about my absence, I thought, is that I don't have to be there..."

Passages like the last one make me think this would be a great book discussion group choice. This is a 2008 Printz Honor Book, and I like the choice.

An Abundance of Katherines

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
3.5Q/3P S

Are you a Dumper or a Dumpee? Colin is a Dumpee. He knows this because he's been dumped nineteen times. But this one is the worst. This one hurts more than all the other dumps combined. He didn't love all the other Katherines who dumped him, but he loved this one. He's so depressed that his best friend Hassan decides that the only thing that will help is a road trip to get Colin as far away from Katherine XIX as possible. Colin and Hassan eventually wind up in Shotgun, Tennesee. Enter Lindsey Lee Wells and her mother, Hollis.

Lindsey Lee works at the general store. She's pretty and intelligent, with a sharp wit. If she were only named Katherine (and he wasn't so depressed about being dumped), Colin might be interested. But she's not, and he is, and besides, Lindsey is already dating another guy named Colin. Her mother, Hollis, owns the factory that employs most of the town. She offers the boys a job interviewing the town's inhabitants about the good old days. What the heck. They have nothing better to do, and the road trip thing isn't really working for them. They say yes.

Colin and Hassan figure they aren't exactly small town Tennessee-type people. Colin is former child prodigy, super-intelligent, a lover of anagrams, a whiz at math, and the former boyfriend of nineteen girls named Katherine. And he's getting more and more worried as the months go by that he isn't living up to his early promise. Prodigies are good at something (like math and languages) at a very early age. Geniuses take known information and take it to unexpected and unexplored areas. Einstein was a genius. Colin was just a prodigy, and he can't bear the idea that he's washed up at eighteen. He is obsessed with the idea of making his life matter. Hassan, on the other hand, has blown off college and plans to continue blowing it off. He's a pudgy guy who just wants to let things happen as they happen. He probably has a lot of company in that in Gutshot. But Hassan is also a practicing Muslim (he doesn't smoke, drink, or date - usually) and there aren't a lot of those in Gutshot. He has a feeling he won't be very welcome here. The boys don't know what to expect from Gutshot, other than not much. Instead, of course, they get much more than they bargained for.

What do you do when you're a perpetual Dumpee? You wallow in your pain for a while, you check your cell phone constantly for messages you know aren't going to come, and every once in a while, you give in to the temptation to call your Dumper, even though you know it's a bad idea. And if you're Colin, you also spend hours working out a mathmatical equation, a theorem, that can predict the rise and fall of relationships. Wouldn't everyone want to know before it began how a relationship will unfold? Maybe this is the thing he'll be remembered for. Maybe this is how he will turn out to matter. The trouble is, he just can't get it right. A good theorem has to work every time, but his only works on some of his relationships, and he can't figure out why. It's Lindsey who gives him the keys. In fact, Lindsey is key to a lot that Colin learns over the summer.

I confess that I like the parts of this book more than I like the whole. There are a lot of individual passages and lines that I really like. There's a smart-*ss sense of humor that's fun as well as some very poignant moments and descriptions. I like and can relate to Colin in many ways. Don't most of us want to matter? But the math thing didn't work well for me. It felt forced and a little too cutesy. I also ran hot and cold on the footnotes. Some of them were fun and/or informative, but again, sometimes they seemed unnecessary or a somewhat clunky attempt to add humor. And here's an issue that nagged at me throughout the book. Colin has had nineteen Katherines as girlfriends. Within a week of meeting her, he bonds with Lindsey. This does not strike me as the hallmark of a boy who has a hard time relating to people socially, and it seems highly unlikely of a boy who has only managed to form one other friendship in his life, yet we keep getting told that he's socially incompetent. I know some of his Katherines lasted merely hours or days, and that they were girlfriends in just the very loosest definition of the word, but others lasted months and were real relationships. Is he only socially inept with everyone not named Katherine or Lindsey Lee? One last thing: I think it's a bit of a problem when the sidekick in the book has a stronger, more interesting personality than the protagonist

What did work for me was the friendship between Colin and Hassan and the development of the relationship between Colin and Lindsey. Hassan is a wonderful character, both warm and funny. Their friendship feels absolutely true, especially because Green tosses a few rough moments and home truths into the mix. Green also shows a deft hand with the Colin-Lindsey relationship. True, there's nothing particularly surprising about it. But I enjoyed watching as they learned that neither was quite all they seemed to be, and I enjoyed the banter between them. Best of all were the scenes in the cave.

Is this another Printz book for Green? I don't think so. Is it a Top Ten of 2006 kind of book? I don't think so. Is it a book that everyone will love? Probably not. But the right audience will enjoy this book for its humor as well as for its more thought-provoking moments. It's worth spending some time with Colin and his friends.

Edited on January 31 to say, "Shows what I know." Congratulations to John Green. KoA was named a Printz Award Honor book on January 22, 2007. Still, this decision is on my list of Things That Make You Go "Hmmmmmm."

Lines that caught my attention while reading:

The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much--and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you.

Colin: You can love someone so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.

Colin: Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

Katherine I to Colin: I think maybe you try to be odd on purpose. I think you like that. It makes you you and not someone else.
(This is on page 142, which also has a neat conversation about love and math (and French), which is too long to quote. But I like this quote because I think a lot of us do this at times.)

Colin, after tasting a swig of moonshine: ...Wow. Wow. Man. It's like French-kissing a dragon.

Lindsey: (She's saying that things about her boyfriend, Colin, and Hassan are either true or not true.) But I'm not like that. I'm what I need to be at any moment to stay above the ground but below the radar. The only sentence that begins with "I" that's true of me is I'm full of s*** ." (Green doesn't use asterisks, of course. Sorry. This is a work blog, and I have to observe certain boundaries. This section is too long to quote, but check out pp. 149-151 for the whole thing. I think Lindsey has more company in this than she thinks she has.)