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.

Quick hit - Dooley Takes the Fall

Dooley Takes the Fall by Norah McClintock
4Q 3P; Audience: J/S (high school)

I thought I'd already started a blog post about this one, but apparently not. It's the last of the books I read a couple of months ago that I wanted to write about. I've been carrying it around with me for way too long, so this will be a very short post so I can get it out on the shelf where it belongs.

Dooley's had his brushes with the law. In fact, he's on parole and under the very strict guardianship of his uncle, a former cop. But sometimes a guy has to breathe freely for a bit before he submits to going back to life's narrow confines. So when Dooley gets out of work a bit early one night, he takes the opportunity to take the long way home. This isn't in his parole guidelines, so it's definitely not information he'd like to get out. But when he comes foot to face with a dead body, keeping quiet isn't an option. Will the police believe him when he tells them he had nothing to do with the guy's death? That he saw the guy jump (fall?) from the bridge, but that's all he knows? They might believe him, if it weren't for his police record - - and the fact that the kid's backpack and camera are missing, and his family swears he never went anywhere without them. Add to that the fact that, while it's true that Dooley didn't really know the kid, it's also true that they weren't exactly strangers either. When evidence suggests that this was a murder, not a suicide, Dooley is in it up to his eyeballs.

What stood out for me with this book is how real Dooley seemed. He knows he's messed up in the past, and he's trying to get his life back on track, but that doesn't mean he enjoys treading the straight and narrow. He struggles with it and he makes mistakes. Costly ones. It's hard for him to trust his uncle and the other people who say they're on his side, and it's hard for them to trust him, too. That leads to more complications. When Dooley begins to fall for a girl, he's afraid to pursue it, knowing that she'd never fall for a guy with a background like his. When he finds out who she really is, he's more afraid than ever to tell her the whole truth. But again, that turns out to be a big mistake, given that she has ties to the dead boy.

Through it all, Dooley wants to do the right thing and struggles with knowing what that is. He occasionally feels sorry for himself, but he also acknowledges that he's earned some of his problems because his past and present actions. His mistakes and his growth felt real and I got caught up in his story, hoping he'd be smart and trust the right people and fearing he wouldn't. The book moves along at a brisk pace and McClintock keeps the tension building and the twists coming. I thought the denouement was weaker than the rest of the book (a little more forced and somewhat less believeable), but it is still an excellent mystery/suspense novel.

I'm not dead...really, I'm not - take 2

Boy, it's been quiet around here lately! I read a lot of great books in a row over the winter, and then I hit a spate of books that I enjoyed well enough, but didn't really feel compelled to blog about. So I haven't posted anything here in what, almost two months? That's too long. I'll bet all half dozen of my readers have given up on me by now. I hope they'll wander back when their news feed shows signs of life here.

In the meantime, in the past two or three weeks I've read three or four books I really liked, so I'll be posting about Wake by Lisa McMann, Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork, and The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp over the next couple of weeks. (It takes me forever to marshall my thoughts in a semi-coherent manner, so composing a post can take a while.) My thanks to Gail Giles for being such a cheerleader for Tharp's book. It wasn't on my radar before she wrote and blogged about it, and it's a book that should be getting more attention.

On a completely different subject, if anyone can point to style guides that discuss how to cite book titles on the web, I'd appreciate it. I was taught that book titles are always underlined, so that's what I do here. But the underline function isn't an option on the formatting toolbar or in the comments boxes that offer HTML. I don't know if that's because underlining is deprecated on the web or if it's just another example of "we don't really know what the rules of writing proper English are, and frankly we don't care" that seems so prevalent these days. Help?

EXCUSE ME, BUT I'M NOT DEAD. REALLY, I'M NOT.

Newes From the Dead by Mary Hooper

4Q 3P; Audience: J/S

The freaky thing about this book is that it's based on a true story.

Imagine being a servant in 1651. Someone in your class has very little protection. The legal system, such as it is, is not on your side. You also haven't much chance of changing your lot in life. So when the heir to the estate tells you that he loves you and wants to marry you, believing him is tempting, even when your mind knows better. And if you believe, then is it really so bad to give in and give yourself to the man who can give you so much in return?

In the case of Anne Greene, saying yes was a seriously bad decision. She wound up pregnant and discovered far too late that everything she'd been told was a pack of lies. He didn't care for her, and he certainly had no intention of marrying her. She tried to hide the pregnancy, but she couldn't hide the evidence when the baby is stillborn. The circumstances were ripe for a charge of infanticide. What a tidy way for the man's family to get rid of Anne for good. For killing her baby, Anne was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead. And she was hanged. And she was declared dead. Her body was then given to doctors so their students could dissect her body for medical study.

The problem was, she wasn't dead.

The story is told from both Anne's point of view and that of Robert, one of the medical students. Yes, I've told you some of Anne's story already. But I haven't told it all. It was chilling to read her part of the story knowing that the first incision is only moments away. Did they make that first cut? When did the doctors discover that she was alive? What was her reaction when she realized where she was and what was about to happen? What was it like to be one of those medical students at a time when people knew so little about the human body? What went through his mind? And most of all, how did Anne's life change when she literally came back from the dead in a time when superstition and religion held sway and science was in its infancy?

3, 2, 1, and...FREEZE FRAME!

Freeze Frame by Heidi Ayarbe
5Q 4P; Audience: J/S

Kyle and Jason have been through a lot together in their years of being best friends. Lots of crazy escapades, lots of bets, lots of fun. But recently, they haven't been as close, so Kyle's surprised and pleased when Jason agrees to a sleep over. Kyle's sister Melanie isn't as happy about it, and things get a little tense at breakfast the next morning. Kyle and Jace take the wise option and get out of the house before things explode, heading to the shed in the backyard. That's where they find the gun. That's where the gun goes off.

What happened between those two moments...that's what Kyle can't remember. He knows that Jace is dead. He knows that he shot him. But he doesn't know how it happened or why it happened. What he does know is that there's no way he should be walking around free. Why didn't they throw him into prison for the rest of his life? Don't they know he killed a boy?

Kyle is a film fanatic. In his efforts to remember what happened that morning in the shed, he keeps trying to write the scene as his favorite filmmakers would direct it. No matter how he approaches the scene, though, everything ends in the same freeze frame: the moment the gun went off. Not knowing what happened that morning in the shed is tearing him apart. What if it wasn't an accident?

Musings:

I like to read before I go to bed, but I frequently go to bed very late, so I figure I'll read just a chapter before I turn out the light. That's what I intended the other night when I picked up Freeze Frame. It was almost four hours before I finally closed the book and went to bed. There just wasn't a good stopping point or a time when I felt that I could leave Kyle until I got to that last page. I'm not terribly prone to crying when I read, but this book had tears dripping down my face on multiple occasions.

Even given that I'm not much of a movie buff, using movies as shorthand for what Kyle is thinking and how he is thinking was a very effective characterization tool/plot device. I imagine it's even more effective for readers who are very familiar with the directors and movies mentioned throughout.

It's painful to read how much he feels he deserves all the hatred and anger sent his way. So I clung to those moments when Kyle makes contact with someone in a positive way. His friendship with Clock, another school outcast, grows believably and gives both Kyle and the reader some comfort. Kyle's scenes with Chase, Jason's little brother, offer some much-appreciated humor and more than prove that Kyle is not a hard-hearted killer, whatever he fears. And Mr. Cordoba, the school librarian, is flat-out a hero in my book. Jason and Kyle had a theory that "Scarface" is on the run from the Mob, but his actual story (much of it implied rather than stated) is far more compelling than that. I think I'm not alone when I say that I hope that I can give to my teen patrons in need what Mr. Cordoba gives to Kyle.

It's very early in 2009, but this book is already on my favorite books of the year, and I can't wait to recommend it high school readers.

(Post begun on 1/23/09 and posted 2/17 - I'm running very behind!)