ADV = adventure and exploration
ALEX = Alex Award winner
GF = general fiction
GN = graphic novel
HIST = history
HOR = horror
HUM = humor
LOI = literature of inclusion
M/S = mystery/suspense
ROM = romance
SPEC = speculative fiction
THE ALIENIST
Carr, Caleb. Random House, 1994. ISBN: 0679417796. HIST, M/S
The year is 1896, and the mutilated body of a murdered adolescent male prostitute has been discovered on the Williamsburg Bridge over New York’s East River. In an unorthodox move, the newly appointed police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (yes, the future president) asks two nonpolice personnel—John Schuyler Moore, a New York Times reporter, and Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, an alienist (as psychologists were then called)—to investigate. Their methods are equally unorthodox. Discovering that the murderer is a homicidal maniac who has perpetrated similar crimes, the two “detectives” use the details of these to develop a psychological profile that, they hope, will lead them to the killer. This intellectual approach and careful attention by the author to period details will remind some readers of the Sherlock Holmes adventures—in spirit if not in execution.
This novel has been enormously popular with YAs, as has its sequel: The Angel of Darkness resembles the first novel but boasts more real historical figures. A woman, an alleged serial killer, is defended at her trial by no less than attorney Clarence Darrow. Fans of E. L. Doctorow (think Ragtime) will enjoy both of these unusual novels.
ALL SOULS
Schutt, Christine. Harcourt, 2008. ISBN: 9780151014491. GF
Astra Dell, the “star” of her senior class at the exclusive Siddons School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is ill with a mysterious ailment that might well prove fatal. The novel that grows up around her focuses on the impact her illness has on various classmates, teachers, and parents. An English teacher at a private school in New York, Schutt brings a rare understanding of that milieu to this excellent novel along with the psychological insights that enrich her characters. The author’s novel Florida was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2004, and her literary skills are once again in evidence in All Souls, including her narrative strategy, which is to tell her story from multiple points of view in impressionistic snippets of story that are notable for their brevity (some are no longer than a paragraph). The cumulative power of the story is, however, significantly larger than the sum of its parts. Readers who have enjoyed this novel may wish to have a look at Paul Murray’s somewhat similar take on prep school life Skippy Dies.
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES / THE CROSSING / CITIES OF THE PLAIN
McCarthy, Cormac. Knopf, 1992. ISBN: 0394574745 / Knopf, 1994. ISBN: 0394574753 / Knopf, 1998. ISBN: 0679423907. HIST
It’s nearly impossible to summarize the three volumes that comprise McCarthy’s Border Trilogy series—at least in a brief space. McCarthy is one of America’s greatest novelists, as he has proven in such masterpieces as Blood Meridian and The Road. And some of his work requires considerable literary sophistication of its readers. These three linked novels are more accessible, however, and since they feature teenage protagonists, they are of intrinsic interest to YAs. Volume 1, All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award, is set in the immediate post–World War II years in West Texas. It’s the coming-of-age story of 16-year-old rancher John Grady Cole, who, losing his prospective inheritance, sets off to Mexico to find a new life and, perhaps, a new fortune. Volume 2, The Crossing, is set a decade earlier and tells the story of another 16-year-old, Billy Parham, who is growing up on a ranch in southern New Mexico. Like John, he too will head to Mexico with uneven results. Volume 3, Cities of the Plain, is set in the early 1950s and brings John and Billy together, working as ranch hands on the same spread. There is a melancholy air to this novel, which acknowledges the impending death of a Western way of life. Like the first two it will take its protagonists back to Mexico, this time to rescue a young Mexican prostitute from her vicious pimp. There are tragic elements to this great American trilogy and certain aspects are inarguably depressing, but the experience of reading such beautifully written work redeems the novels from that and further establishes McCarthy’s place at the very top tier of great American writers. That All the Pretty Horses was made into a movie starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz will doubtless expand the audience for the first volume of this trilogy.
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY
Chabon, Michael. Random House, 2000. ISBN: 0679450041. GF, SPEC, HIST
Amazing, indeed—amazing enough to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction! Chabon, the author of such celebrated works of fiction as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, has outdone himself in this epic fictional treatment of the early days of comic book publishing in America, beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the early 1950s. Chabon brings an exuberance to this work that is infectious and tinges it with elements of magical realism. Following an ingenious escape from Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia, Joe Kavalier travels circuitously to Brooklyn, there to join his young cousin Sammy Clay. Together the two young men then create a masked comic book superhero called the Escapist. The name reflects not only the Escapist’s mission—to help people everywhere escape oppression—but also Joe’s own exodus from Europe, his background in magic, and his penchant for wandering. Chabon did prodigious research to bring to life the mechanics, the business, and the politics of early comic book publishing that will fascinate not only fanboys but also the general reader. In the process he became so fascinated himself with the subject that, in the wake of the novel, he created a comic book series of his own titled Michael Chabon Presents the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. Published by Dark Horse Comics, the series received the prestigious Eisner Award for best comics anthology of 2004. Truly amazing!
ANTHILL
Wilson, Edward O. Norton, 2010. ISBN: 9780393071191. GF
Wilson, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on ants and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for his nonfiction, has here written his first novel, and the result is remarkable. It begins with the story of a boy named Raphael (Raff) Semmes Cody, who falls between two worlds—his mother’s one of wealth and privilege and his father’s of working-class redneck life. The boy finds refuge in exploring the world of the Nokobee Swampland in Florida’s panhandle, where he meets a Florida State professor named Fred Norville, who helps shape Raff’s education, which culminates in a law degree from Harvard. Returning to his home state of Alabama, Raff launches an effort to save the endangered Nokobee wilderness. Oddly/interestingly/fascinatingly enough, Wilson has included a seventy-page section in the middle of the novel devoted to the life and death of an ant colony; the conceit being that this is Raff’s dissertation, though many readers will suspect it is Wilson’s excuse for focusing attention on his own scientific specialty (his book Ants was one of his Pulitzer Prize winners). Whatever the reason, it is a fascinating diversion and could be published as a stand-alone monograph. The novel’s surprise ending is sure to engender much passionate discussion. Readers who enjoy this novel might want to have a look at some of the mysteries of Carl Hiaasen, who focuses most of them on the continuing war between those who wish to exploit Florida’s unspoiled areas and those who wish to preserve them.
AS SIMPLE AS SNOW
Galloway, Gregory. Putnam, 2005. ISBN: 0399152318. M/S, ALEX
Snow is simple? Sure it is: about as simple as this tantalizingly complex mystery. Here’s the premise: an average high school boy—the narrator—falls in love with Anna, a mysterious goth girl whose hobby is writing obituaries of everyone in their small town. Yes, the people aren’t dead yet but, as the girl observes, “it’s only a matter of time.” The first to die, however, is Anna herself. Or does she die? Certainly she vanishes, leaving behind only a dress next to a hole in the river ice. Refusing to believe she’s dead, however, the narrator determines to find her and soon finds himself up to his eyebrows in a jumble of the kinds of codes, ciphers, mysteries, and ghost stories that spooky Anna loved. Evocative of Rod Serling’s classic Twilight Zone television series, Galloway’s first novel will intrigue some and frustrate others; but with its head-scratching forebodings and foreshadowings, its complexities and conundrums, it’s bound to remain in the memory of everyone who reads it.
ATONEMENT
McEwan, Ian. Doubleday/Talese, 2002. ISBN: 0385503954. HIST
Like Cormac McCarthy, the British writer Ian McEwan generally takes no prisoners, demanding his readers invest serious attention to the material at hand. In this case it’s the character-driven story, opening in 1935 on a British country estate, of two young people. Cecilia is the daughter of an upper-class British family, while Robbie is the son of the family’s cleaning lady. When Cecilia’s younger sister, Briony, a would-be writer, happens to witness an ambiguous encounter between Cecilia and Robbie, her imagination runs wild, and she misrepresents the encounter with near disastrous results. The novel then follows its characters through World War II and beyond as the now young adult Briony struggles to make atonement to Cecilia and Robbie for her actions. Atonement was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category. It was also made into a movie.
BATWOMAN: ELEGY
Rucka, Greg. Illustrated by J. H. Williams III. DC Comics, 2010. ISBN: 9781401226923. GN, LOI, M/S
As is often the case with graphic novels, the contents of this trade paperback were originally published as individual stories in Detective Comics. Batwoman is gay—a departure from many graphic novel interpretations. The volume gives readers some of her backstory, including her discharge from the military because of her sexual identity. It then flashes forward to the present, wherein Batwoman encounters the dubious Alice, who evokes Alice in Wonderland and, indeed, speaks only in quotations from Lewis Carroll. It makes for an attractively dark and compelling story, but critics are unanimous in suggesting that Williams’s stunning art nouveau illustrations are equally important to the success of this volume, and they will get no argument from this quarter. This title was selected for ALA’s Rainbow Project bibliography, an annual list of the best youth books with GLBTQ content.
THE BIG BOOK OF ADVENTURE STORIES
Penzler, Otto, ed. Vintage, 2011. ISBN: 9780307474506. ADV
A big book of adventure stories that range from Tarzan of the Apes to Hopalong Cassidy and from island paradise settings to deadly deserts. Armchair adventurers will be entranced. What more is there to say?
BLACK HOLE
Burns, Charles. Pantheon, 2005. ISBN: 037542380X. GN, HOR
Widely regarded as a modern masterpiece, Burns’s deeply disturbing story is the surrealistic account of a sexually transmitted disease called “the bug.” It manifests itself as bizarre mutations that disfigure the affected teens, who live in camps in the woods away from society. Burns humanizes his scenario—set in Seattle in the 1970s—by focusing on two teens, Keith and Chris (the latter is a girl) who contract the disease. Both suffer from ghastly nightmares that Burns renders in detail in his vividly realized black-and-white illustrations. He also beautifully captures teen angst and anomie in a near existential setting. Call it atmospheric, call it creepy, Black Hole is unforgettable and a book that many teens who read it will regard as a quintessential coming-of-age experience.
BLACK SWAN GREEN
Mitchell, David. Random House, 2006. ISBN: 1400063795. GF, HIST, ALEX
When celebrated English author Mitchell was a boy, he suffered from a stammer, an affliction that plagues his protagonist, 13-year-old Jason, in this largely autobiographical novel. Set in the village of Black Swan Green, the novel recounts the boy’s desperate attempts to fit in with the other boys and—touchingly—his equally desperate attempts to avoid having to say words that trigger his stammer. Set in 1982, this vaguely episodic novel—each of its thirteen chapters can be viewed as a stand-alone story—features such subjects as the disintegrating nature of his parents’ marriage; Jason and his friends’ reaction to Britain’s invasion of the Falklands and the death of a local soldier; and the community’s dealings with Gypsies (which will recall Jeanine Cummins’s The Outside Boy). One of the most memorable and funniest of these episodes is the story of Jason’s encounter with the local Bohemian Mme. Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, who knows Jason’s most closely guarded secret: he is a poet who is being published pseudonymously in a local paper! Jason’s innocence makes him an especially appealing character in what promises to become a classic coming-of-age novel. Those who are intrigued by Jason’s stammer might want to view the motion picture The King’s Speech, about King George VI’s similar, lifelong problem. British actor Colin Firth won an Academy Award for his portrayal of the king.
BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY
Fielding, Helen. Viking, 1998. ISBN: 0670880728. ROM, HUM
If Helen of Troy’s was the face that launched a thousand ships, British author Helen Fielding’s first novel was the book that launched a new subgenre—chick lit—and a thousand (or more) imitations. It’s hard to specify the precise reasons for the novel’s resonance (critic Daphne Merkin called it “a cultural artifact that is recognizably larger than itself”), but it surely has something to do with the book’s robust humor, with Bridget Jones herself—one of whose goals is to reduce the circumference of each thigh by 1.5 inches—and with the book’s form, a journal of a year in the life, including a daily record of calories consumed, cigarettes smoked, lottery tickets bought, alcohol units imbibed, and other seemingly unbreakable bad habits. Readers who are—like Bridget—attempting to lose a number of dubious habits themselves might gain a little perspective from our heroine’s many failures: she loses seventy pounds but gains seventy four, indulges in an unwise relationship with her boss, deals with her mother’s disappearance with a Portuguese gigolo, and more—much more. Though Bridget is 30-something, teenage readers who cut their teeth on Louise Rennison’s teenage Georgia Nicholson will be highly amused by Bridget’s peccadilloes and cheered by her unfailing good humor. Look for the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO
Díaz, Junot. Riverhead, 2007. ISBN: 1594489580. GF, LOI
The Dominican American author follows up his acclaimed short story collection Drown (1996) with this ambitious novel that achieved the double distinction of winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Michiko Kakutani, chief book critic for the New York Times, called it “funny, street smart, and keenly observed.” It is all these and more—an often exuberant and sometimes horrifying story of the Dominican diaspora from the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo. Díaz’s chief character is the eponymous Oscar, a 307-pound science fiction geek and second-generation immigrant who lives with his family in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar may claim center stage, but every member of his family steals the spotlight in individual ways. Perhaps because of the richness of its characterization, this beautifully written novel manages—without being in any way tendentious—to show the sad story of the Dominican Republic through the fate of a single family. Without missing a beat, it also takes the reader back in time to the family’s homeland. Deeply felt, funny, and poignant, it is an altogether remarkable and unforgettable novel. For another view of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, see Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies.
THE CANTERBURY TALES
Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Peter Ackroyd. Viking, 2009. ISBN: 9780670021222. HIST
The prolific British author retells the classic Chaucer tales for contemporary readers. This would be a ridiculously overambitious project for most authors, but Ackroyd brings it off with polish and aplomb—not only modernizing the English in terms of spelling and meaning, but also translating Chaucer’s verse into prose that is nevertheless poetic instead of prosaic. It helps, of course, that Ackroyd is a biographer of Chaucer and has previously based a novel, The Clerkenwell Tales, on Chaucer’s immortal saga. It’s an altogether lovely tribute to the father of English literature.
Cisneros, Sandra. Knopf, 2002. ISBN: 0679435549. GF, LOI
Best known for her poetry (Loose Woman), her short fiction (Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories), and her novel The House on Mango Street, Chicana author Cisneros has written an ambitious work of extended fiction (464 pages) that recounts the compelling story of the Reyeses, a multigenerational family that has immigrated from Mexico to Chicago, where the father becomes a furniture upholsterer. This is an affectionate and often funny story of a family caught between two worlds, a family that travels in a caravan of cars each summer to Mexico City to visit the Awful Grandmother and the Little Grandfather. Initially the story is told by the youngest child and only daughter, Lala, and focuses on her childhood and adolescence. The novel soon becomes the story of her ancestors as well, especially the Awful Grandmother, whose acerbic and intrusive comments pepper the narrative. Loosely based on her own childhood, Cisneros’s story shines with love of family and fascination with its history. YA readers—and their teachers—who are interested in exploring the work of other successful writers of short fiction who have then produced blockbuster novels night want to have a look at Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools and Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles.
CITRUS COUNTY
Brandon, John. McSweeny’s Rectangulars, 2011. ISBN: 9781934781531. GF
Citrus County, Florida, lies a couple hours north of St. Petersburg “on what people called the Nature Coast,” author Brandon tells us, explaining:
“There was nature because there were no beaches and no amusement parks and no hotels and no money. There were rednecks and manatees and sinkholes. There were insects, not gentle crickets but creatures with stingers and pincers and scorn in their hearts.”
Yes, readers, this is the landscape of Southern gothic fiction, and Citrus County is a downright dandy example of this darkly fascinating genre. Not surprisingly, a dark miasma of foreboding hangs over the novel like a shroud over a corpse. The major event of the story is the kidnapping of Shelby’s little sister, Kaley. Shelby is the new girl in school; she is quickly and ineluctably drawn to Toby, the resident bad boy who—parentless—lives with his sociopathic uncle. Aside from their tentative interest in each other, the two teens have in common Mr. Hibma, their 29-year-old geography teacher who dreams of murdering Mrs. Conner, the 50-something “grammar Nazi” English teacher. All righty, then. This is an offbeat and original coming-of-age novel that invites readers to consider whether the events of our lives are momentous or meaningless, whether our endings are really beginnings, and what’s the best way to think about the things we’ve done. Readers who enjoy this will surely want to discover the fiction of the late Flannery O’Connor, the queen of Southern gothic. Her work is available in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, part of the Library of America series.
THE CLIENT
Grisham, John. Doubleday, 1993. ISBN: 038542471X. M/S
Former attorney Grisham’s legal thrillers are almost as popular with YAs as Stephen King’s stories of horror and their unnerving intersection with reality. There is no “almost” about The Client, however. It is clearly one of Grisham’s best—and most teen-friendly. When 11-year-old Mark inadvertently witnesses the suicide of a mob-defending attorney, he learns a closely guarded secret about a murdered senator that will put him squarely—and dangerously—between an ambitious, unscrupulous attorney and a mob boss named Barry the Blade. Mark becomes the client of the title when—for a dollar—he retains the legal services of a tyro lawyer named Reggie Love, a divorced, 50ish woman who has been a lawyer for only four years but becomes fiercely protective of—though often impatient with—her new client, who is precocious beyond his years. Though never a darling of the critics, Grisham—as always—shows himself such a master of setting (thanks to his own career as an attorney) and nail-biting suspense that the turning pages become a blur. This was made into a successful 1994 movie starring Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones.
COFFEE WILL MAKE YOU BLACK
Sinclair, April. Hyperion, 1994. ISBN: 1562827960. GF, LOI
Here is another novel that has become a staple for young adult readers making the transition to adult fiction. Set in Chicago in the late 1960s, Sinclair’s novel follows the coming-of-age of Jean Stevenson, who is 11 at the book’s outset and 15 at its conclusion. While Jean (“Stevie”) is experiencing ritual rite of passage experiences—first kiss, first period, and the like—black culture and civil rights are also coming of age, and the story nicely strikes parallels between the societal and the personal (Stevie discovers the work and larger-than-life persons of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, for example). As racial stereotypes are revealed and rejected, Stevie learns to be proud of her identity and that, in the parlance of the times, “Black is beautiful.”
A COMPLICATED KINDNESS
Toews, Miriam. Counterpoint, 2004. ISBN: 1582433216. GF
This superb novel tells the coming-of-age story of Nomi Nickel, who lives in a Mennonite community on the plains of Manitoba. Being a Mennonite, she wryly observes, is to live in “the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.” It’s not easy for adults, either. In fact, half of Nomi’s family—“the better-looking half,” she notes of her absent mother and older sister—have fled life in the repressive community, which shuns modern ways. Nomi’s mother had little choice, since she had been excommunicated by her own brother, the local minister, whom Nomi acidly calls “the mouth of darkness.” Nomi herself has pot-fueled dreams of escaping the community and moving to New York to become a groupie for Lou Reed (!), but she cannot bring herself to desert her gentle, befuddled father, who is busy selling off all their furniture. Author Toews grew up in a similar community and writes with authority not only of daily life there but also of the large questions that such circumstances invite about the conflict between freedom and religious oppression.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
Haddon, Mark. Doubleday, 2003. ISBN: 0385509456. GF, LOI, ALEX
Here is another modern classic that—along with Life of Pi—helped usher in the modern adult crossover novel. First published in England, this is the story of a teenage boy who discovers that his neighbor’s dog has been killed by being run though with a pitchfork; he decides he will solve this case as he imagines his hero, Sherlock Holmes, might have done. The boy, 15-year-old Christopher, tells the reader his story in his own first-person voice, which is extraordinary, since Christopher is autistic and author Haddon’s imagining of his deadpan tone is a tour de force of narrative choice. Christopher, who lives with his single-parent father, may be a mathematical genius, but he is totally ignorant of social cues and other people’s emotions. This leads to some extremely funny scenes as the boy overreacts to a policeman’s queries and then attempts to interview neighbors himself in search of clues. As the reader will come to understand, there is a larger mystery here than the simple case of a murdered dog. Though Christopher is, at first, completely ignorant of it, his investigation will have the secondary effect of solving this larger puzzle. There has been considerable discussion in this country about whether this book should have been published as a YA title. In England it was published in simultaneous YA and adult editions, which would have been the perfect procedure here. Unfortunately, for economic reasons such simultaneous publication is regarded as impossible in this country. While this issue remains unresolved, one thing at least is certain: the appeal of this enchanting book is universal.
DIAMOND DOGS
Watt, Alan. Little, Brown, 2000. ISBN: 0316925810. GF, ALEX
Seventeen-year-old Neil Garvin’s single-parent father is sheriff of their small community near Las Vegas. The father’s deep-rooted anger and his alcohol abuse have taken a toll on Neil, who is the star quarterback on his high school football team and also a relentless bully. Having drunk too much at a party where he abused two freshmen, he drives home with his lights out and accidentally hits one of the young men, killing him. Not knowing what to do, he puts the body in the trunk of the car and drives home. In the morning he discovers, to his horror, that the body is gone. Yes, his father has found the corpse, and yes, he covers up for his son until the FBI gets involved and things become increasingly complicated. Watt does a fine job of limning difficult father-son relationship issues in his first novel, which was selected as an Alex Award winner. And if you’re wondering, the Diamond of the title refers to pop singer Neil Diamond, the father’s favorite performer.
DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE
Packer, Z. Z. Riverhead, 2003. ISBN: 1573222348. GF, LOI, ALEX
Packer’s marvelous debut collection of eight stories features largely—but not exclusively—African American protagonists living in Baltimore and Washington, DC, though one especially memorable story is set in Japan. Seven of the eight protagonists are young women who are confronting—or being confronted by—imposing coming-of-age moments: running away to find one’s absent mother, prostituting oneself for food, and encountering racial prejudice. Perhaps the best story in the book deals with that last topic; it’s the story of a black Brownie troop who conspire to take revenge on a white troop, one of whose members has used the “n” word—until they confront and actually begin to know the white girls, discovering some surprising truths in the process. This is another Alex Award winner and one that was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Packer is winner of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award.
THE EIGHT
Neville, Katherine. Ballantine, 1988. ISBN: 9780345351371. SPEC
Here is another of the currently fashionable puzzle-mysteries (see As Simple as Snow and The Rule of Four). This one involves the Montaigne Service, a mystical chess set that once belonged to the Emperor Charlemagne and that contains a code which—when deciphered—gives its player great powers. The chess pieces, accordingly, were dispersed during the French Revolution. Now—well, in 1972—an accountant and computer expert named Catherine Velis finds herself tasked with recovering the pieces. Needless to say, she’s not the only one hot on the trail. Of course, deciphering the code plays a major role in the story that ensues. If readers are wondering, Neville’s novel predates The Da Vinci Code and may indeed have inspired its theme.
Twenty years after the publication of The Eight, a sequel, The Fire, appeared. It involves Catherine’s daughter, Alexandra, who is searching for her vanished mother. Of course, the chess pieces that drove the plot of The Eight appear again. This time a parallel story, set in 1822, involves another young woman whose quest involves Lord Byron. How romantic can you get?
ELECTION
Perrotta, Tom. Putnam, 1998. ISBN: 0399143661. GF, HUM
Set in suburban New Jersey in 1992, this darkly humorous story of a high school election was made into a—you guessed it—popular movie starring Matthew Broderick and the incomparable Reese Witherspoon. Here’s the story: ambitious high school student Tracy Flick will do anything to be elected president of Winwood High; her chances are diminished, however, when a popular, sweet-spirited jock, Paul Warren, is persuaded to run by Mr. McAllister (Mr. M.), the election faculty adviser who will do anything—well, almost—to forestall Tracy’s election. This does not set well with Paul’s younger sister, who is in love with Paul’s girlfriend, and she (the sister) decides to run. Things deteriorate rapidly for poor Mr. M., whose marriage is also in deep trouble. Opportunities to satirize high school life abound and are enhanced by the use of multiple first-person voices. Perrotta is also the author of Joe College, which is set in 1980 at Yale University, where outsider Danny, a junior, has to cope with various crises including wealthy students, spring break, a group of extortionists, and, oh, yes, the pregnancy of his girlfriend …
ELLEN FOSTER
Gibbons, Kaye. Algonquin, 1987. ISBN: 0912697520. GF
An oldie but goodie, this first novel has been a perennial favorite with YAs since its first publication a quarter-century ago. And it’s small wonder, since the story is filled with teen-friendly elements, including a spunky heroine who tells her story in her own memorable first-person voice (“When I was little, I would think of ways to kill my daddy”) and an involving plot that invites the reader’s empathy, particularly when Ellen recalls her terrible childhood with an alcoholic, abusive father (her much loved mother died young) and with relatives who weren’t much better. Gibbons is a Southern writer, of course, and telling stories is as easy for her (and her narrator) as normal conversation is for Yankees. Contrary to many stories about kids from unfortunate home situations, it’s not until Ellen is placed in a foster home that her life actually improves. Readers who have become emotionally engaged with her will celebrate and pass the book on to a friend. For the record, the book has been a hit not only with readers but with critics as well, receiving universal praise and winning the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
ELMER
Alanguilan, Gerry. SLG, 2010. ISBN: 9781593622046. GN, SPEC
Fable and satire meet somewhere in the middle in this offbeat story of sentient chickens that have, for too long, been victimized and exploited by humankind. Part of the story centers on the fowls’ determined and sometimes violent struggle for racial equality, but part also examines the domestic life of Jake, whose father, the eponymous Elmer, is dying. This event reunites the family, bringing the son home along with his siblings, a newly engaged sister and a gay movie star brother. Going home again vividly recalls for Jake his difficult childhood and, when he discovers his father’s diary after Elmer’s death, introduces him to that of his dad as well. The story’s beautifully evoked setting is the author/artist’s native Philippines, a fact that ensures the landscape will be more than a simple backdrop; it is instead a significant contribution to the tale’s ethos.
EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Mariner Books, 2005. ISBN: 9780618329700. GF
In the wake of the death of Oskar’s father in the 9/11 tragedy, the 9-year-old boy discovers a mysterious key belonging to him that is labeled only “black.” This sets the determined youngster on a quest throughout New York to find the owner of the key. That this means interviewing every single person with the surname Black doesn’t daunt him a bit! Foer’s second novel is a brilliant tour de force of imagination that comes in a beautifully designed package—a book that’s illustrated with photographs, employs a variety of different typefaces, and ends with a fourteen-page flip book. All of this adds to the attractively offbeat originality that is a hallmark of this novel and is sure to delight young adult readers. A subplot involving Oskar’s grandfather, who survived the World War II firebombing of Dresden, Germany, may send readers on a search of their own: to find and read Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Breakfast of Champions, which also features the bombing that, in some ways, prefigures 9/11. (Oh, yes: the character of Oskar is inspired by the protagonist of Gunter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, but the reader doesn’t necessarily need to know that.) More recently Foer has written Eating Animals, a nonfiction book dealing with his ambivalent feelings about meat.
THE FLOWERS
Gilb, Dagoberto. Grove, 2008. ISBN: 9780802118592. GF, LOI
This often funny slice-of-life novel tells the story of a 15-year-old Chicano named Sonny Bravo. When his mother marries a bigoted Okie named Cloyd, the family moves into the Flowers (Los Flores), an apartment building that Cloyd owns. Sonny’s not unwelcome assignment to perform various menial chores around the building gives him an opportunity to get out of the apartment as well as to meet and interact with various tenants, including Mr. Pinkston, an albino African American, and with other teens like Cindy, a married dropout, and Nica, whose duty to take care of her brother keeps her confined to her own apartment all day. Meanwhile the world outside erupts into the violence of a race riot that viscerally reminds the reader that Sonny lives in a world defined by prejudice and hatreds. Despite its often engaging immediacy, the real draw of this novel is Sonny’s first-person voice with its mixture of Spanish and English, its run-on sentences, and its street slang, a combination of elements that makes for hectic but rhythmic music that sticks in the memory.
Gilb is not only a novelist but also a short story writer whose collection The Magic of Blood won a PEN/Hemingway Award and an essayist whose Gritos was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
GETTING IN
Boylan, James Finney. Warner, 1998. ISBN: 9780446674171. GF, HUM, ALEX
Getting into the (prestigious) college of your choice has become something of a nightmare these days, what with the stiff competition and the perceived need to assemble a résumé that would rival that of the president of a Fortune 500 corporation. Boylan, however, deftly demonstrates that there is also a humorous side to this process as he puts four high school seniors and three adults into a Winnebago and sends them on a tour of New England campuses—including Colby where he (i.e., the author) teaches and thus brings an insider’s knowledge to the admissions chase. As one might expect, Boylan has lots of fun with interviews and suchlike while also demonstrating that his four teens will not only learn about colleges on their tour of academia but also about themselves. You’ll find Boylan’s surprising memoir She’s Not There in the nonfiction section. Don’t miss it.
GIL’S ALL FRIGHT DINER
Martinez, A. Lee. Tor, 2005. ISBN: 0765311437. HOR, ALEX
Rejoice, horror fans. Here’s a novel that features not only a vampire but also a werewolf, both of whom are on the trail of a pack of pesky zombies! It doesn’t get any better than this. Earl (the vampire) and his bud Duke (the werewolf) set this whole thing into action when they stop, one evening, at Gil’s All Night Diner for a bite to eat (not Gil, presumably!). Hardly have they sat down when zombies show up, and the two manage to fight off this onslaught of the undead. Loretta, the proprietor, is good and tired of zombies storming her place and hires Earl and Duke to handle—as it were—pest control. What a teen named Tammy has to do with all this is for me to know and you to find out.
THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON
King, Stephen. Scribner, 1999. ISBN: 0684867621. SPEC, HOR
King, as mentioned more than once in this book, is arguably the most popular of all the adult authors whose work appeals to teens—quintessentially so. And of all of King’s many novels, this one is arguably the most popular with teens (well, a case could probably be made for Carrie, as well). Here’s the story: the girl in question is 9-year-old Trisha, who one day wanders away from her family while they’re hiking the Appalachian Trail (see Bill Bryson for his own nonfiction take on the AT experience). Realizing she is lost, Trisha finds comfort and a connection to civilization by listening on her Walkman to a broadcast of a Boston Red Sox–New York Yankees game in which her favorite Sox player, relief pitcher Tom Gordon, strikes out the eternal rival Yankees. Thereafter Trisha imagines Tom is with her, a comforting presence that keeps her alive as the days pass. But wait! What is that … something that is secretly following her through the swamp and woods? Welcome, reader, to the world of Stephen King, who, in the book’s first sentence, has reminded us, “The world has teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.” Ouch!
GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
Chevalier, Tracy. Dutton, 1999. ISBN: 052594527X. HIST, ALEX
Who posed for the Dutch artist Vermeer’s celebrated portrait Girl with a Pearl Earring? In her enormously popular novel of the same title, Chevalier suggests it was a 16-year-old servant in the artist’s seventeenth-century household. The author names her Griet and imaginatively creates a coming-of-age story for her while also offering an intriguing look at the artist’s household. The book has been widely (and justifiably) praised for its splendid evocation of daily life in seventeenth-century Holland. A perennially popular crossover novel, it was chosen as a 2000 Alex Award winner.
A second Chevalier novel that will interest YAs is The Lady and the Unicorn, which offers a highly romantic look at the making of a set of medieval tapestries known as The Lady and the Unicorn sequence. Again, the details of the setting are beautifully realized, and the carefully detailed creation of the tapestries is fascinating stuff. Another winner for Chevalier.
THE GOD OF ANIMALS
Kyle, Aryn. Scribner, 2007. ISBN: 1416533249. GF, ALEX
Life is no picnic for 12-year-old Alice. Her mother has been virtually bedridden with depression since the girl’s birth; a classmate has just drowned; and her older sister has run off to marry a rodeo cowboy, leaving Alice as her father’s principal helper just as the family’s horse ranch is struggling to survive both declining business and the hottest summer to hit Desert Valley, Colorado, in fifteen years. Obviously bad things do happen to good people, and Alice and her family certainly seem to be harvesting a bumper crop of badness over the course of this accomplished first novel. Accordingly, readers in search of rainbows and unicorns are advised to steer clear of this work of dark realism. However, those who enjoy character driven fiction, beautifully realized western settings, and the world of horses will find much to appreciate here.
THE HEADMASTER RITUAL
Antrim, Taylor. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. ISBN: 9780618756827. GF
The prep school—whether British or American—has always provided a setting ready-made for satire and awkward coming-of-age experiences. The academy this time—the tony Britton School—is an American one and the coming-of-ager is poor James, whose father is the ferociously left-wing headmaster Edward Wolfe, who is much given to wearing Mao jackets and (figuratively) pledging allegiance to Communist North Korea. Into this uneasy mix comes a young history teacher Dyer Martin, whose life will become bound up with James’s when Wolfe instructs him to set up a model United Nations. Things are not as they seem to be (are they ever?), and Dyer soon finds himself in a fix, while James finds himself the object of some nasty hazing. Journalist Antrim attended Andover, to which the Britton School bears more than a passing resemblance, and there is no question that the author knows his territory and uses it to good comedic effect.
Though much more serious, another excellent prep school novel profiled in this book is Tobias Wolff’s Old School.
HIGH FIDELITY
Hornby, Nick. Riverhead, 1995. ISBN: 1573220167. GF, HUM
Though many teens will be more familiar with the 2000 film version of this title starring John Cusack, Jack Black, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, British journalist Hornby’s first novel is not to be missed. The story of a 30-something vintage record store owner named Rob, the novel charts the course of his life following his abandonment by his live-in girlfriend, Laura. For diversion he tries to rearrange his huge record collection and compile top five lists of everything under the sun (top five episodes of Cheers, top five best songs to play at a funeral, top five most memorable split-ups, etc.) with the help of his two store clerks, who provide comic relief. Just when Rob thinks he has his new life under control, he sees Laura again …
A best seller in England, where it was first published, the novel travels well to this country, where it succeeds in presenting an offbeat but universally entertaining love story from the point of view of a man. Equally diverting is the clever and often satirical look at the lives and opinions of musical snobs. Booklist called this “an amazingly accomplished first novel.” Hornby’s first novel for teen readers, Slam, about a 15-year-old skateboarder who also has girlfriend troubles, is another delightful (okay, amazingly accomplished) read.
THE HISTORIAN
Kostova, Elizabeth. Little, Brown, 2005. ISBN: 0316011770. SPEC
The discovery by a motherless 16-year-old girl of a strange medieval book and a packet of letters in her scholar father’s library is the catalyst for an epic quest in search of the true history of Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, better known to history as … Drakulya! The subsequent quest will take the previously sheltered girl not only into the history of the legend but also into the history of her own family and that of her historian father’s mentor, Bartholomew Rossi. What will she learn—and will it confirm or disprove the validity of Dracula’s own assertion, “History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so”? It reportedly took Kostova ten years to write The Historian; considering its great length (656 pages), non–vampire fans may claim it’ll take that long to read it! Nevertheless, surely its popularity is further illustrated by the fact that it was, in its time, the only first novel to have debuted on the New York Times best-seller list at number one, going on to sell more than 1.5 million copies. Kostova’s second novel, The Swan Thieves, published in 2010, tells the romantic story of a deeply troubled painter and a mystery surrounding a French Impressionist artist.
HOW ALL THIS STARTED
Fromm, Pete. Picador, 2000. ISBN: 0312209339. GF
In his well-received first novel Fromm, a prolific short story writer (more than a hundred published), tells how—well—all this started; that is, how 15-year-old Austin and his 20-year-old college dropout sister Abilene (yes, they’re named for the cities in which they were conceived) have wound up with their parents in a small Texas town in the middle of nowhere (that actually means the West Texas desert). Austin is a promising pitcher, and his sometimes manic sister—a fine pitcher herself—has decided that she will make him a great one; to that end she devotes her considerable energy to training him. Austin is absolutely devoted to his sister, and it accordingly takes him quite a while to recognize that her whiplash mood swings are signs of a bipolar disorder, one that ultimately cannot go untreated. What this will mean to their close and loving relationship and to Austin’s hopes for a baseball career provides the conflict that drives the plot of this extremely fine, character-driven novel, a natural read for baseball fans.
HUGE
Fuerst, James W. Crown, 2009. ISBN: 9780307452498. HUM, M/S
Eugene “Huge” Smalls, a 12-year-old with anger management issues, is the protagonist of this engagingly offbeat first novel. Anything but huge, he’s frustratingly tiny for his age but nevertheless large in his ambitions. For when an act of vandalism shatters the peace at his beloved grandmother’s retirement home, Huge decides to find the perp. Though set in New Jersey in the 1980s, the novel recalls an earlier period when hard-boiled detectives like Philip Marlowe and the Continental Op roamed mean streets on both coasts in search of bad guys. Though Huge dotes on such hard-boiled private dicks from the ’30s he is—let’s face it—not in their league, and as a result all sorts of hilarious misadventures, misapprehensions, and mishaps occur. As much coming-of-age story as mystery, the novel offers in the person of Huge a hero who commands a large place in the reader’s affection and imagination. Though an academic, author Fuerst, who holds a PhD from Harvard and an MFA from The New School, writes accessible and thoroughly delightful fiction. Please, sir, may we have more?
I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER
Doyle, Larry. HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN: 0061236179. GF, HUM
Nerdy high school senior Denis Coverman interrupts his valedictory address at commencement to blurt out his true feelings: “Beth Cooper,” he declares, “I love you.” Now, Beth, the object of Denis’s unrequited passion, is the school’s hot-hot-hot chief cheerleader who is—by high school reckoning—light years out of Denis’s league. But to his amazement she doesn’t have a fainting spell at Denis’s news and even shows up at his graduation party. Wow! Unfortunately her army boyfriend Kevin, home on leave, doesn’t share her tender feelings and is, in fact, enraged by Denis’s declaration, coming after him like an angry freight train. The kinds of complications that ensue are suggested by the fact that Doyle has written for the TV shows Beavis and Butthead and The Simpsons. Not only does this inspire outrageous incidents, it also lends the book a swift-paced cinematic quality that is sure to delight YAs. Doyle’s second novel, Go Mutants, is a witty takeoff on teen horror movies that will interest YAs who enjoy I Love You, Beth Cooper.
IMANI ALL MINE
Porter, Connie. Houghton Mifflin, 1999. ISBN: 0395838088. GF, LOI
Porter’s protagonist is a 15-year-old African American girl named Tasha, an honors student, a rape victim, and the single mother of a daughter she has named Imani, which means “faith.” The name could well symbolize Tasha’s faith in her ability to raise her daughter very much on her own. Set in the inner city of Buffalo, New York, this powerful novel is told in Tasha’s voice, which is rich in street dialect and adds significantly to the reader’s understanding of her character and motivations. The neighborhood in which she raises her infant daughter is rife with drugs and gang violence, and it is the latter that will lead to a heartbreaking tragedy that will test Tasha’s faith. Porter, who is the author of the Addy titles in the American Girl series, has obviously written an entirely different work of fiction here, one that establishes her credentials as an abundantly talented writer of visceral, powerfully immediate, realistic fiction.
IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES
Alvarez, Julia. Algonquin Books, 1994. ISBN: 1565120388. HIST, LOI
The “butterflies” of the title are the three beautiful Mirabal sisters, Minerva, Patria, and María Teresa, well known for their opposition to the Dominican Republic dictator General Rafael Trujillo. Set in 1960 during the last days of Trujillo’s reign, the novel—a fictionalized account of real history—begins with the assassination of the three sisters and proceeds to tell the stories of their lives retrospectively in their own voices. A fourth voice, that of the one surviving sister, Dedé, adds a contemporary account. Vivid and visceral, the voices create a compelling picture of life under a dictatorship and the revolutionary struggle for freedom. For their part in this struggle the sisters have become national heroes in the Dominican Republic, the term butterflies being a translation of their underground code name, Las Mariposas.
Alvarez, who has become a well-known author of young adult fiction, says in her story, “A novel is not, after all, a historical document but a way to travel through the human heart.” If it is, In the Time of the Butterflies provides a moving and memorable journey.
INDECISION
Kunkel, Benjamin. Random House, 2005. ISBN: 1400063450. GF, HUM
Literary critic Kunkel’s first novel introduces readers both to his 28-year-old protagonist Dwight Wilmerding and also to the (fictional) illness that plagues him: abulia, the chronic postcollegiate inability to make up one’s mind. Some readers may think this is not an illness but simply a condition of being a Gen Xer; but that aside, Kunkel’s conceit is that it is indeed an illness, and one that may finally be curable, thanks to the marvels of modern medicine. In fact, Dwight works for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, so he is no stranger to this idea. When his med student roommate suggests he sign up for a trial of a new drug called Abulinix, Dwight is quick to comply. Unfortunately, he is then—as one reviewer waggishly put it—“pfired from Pfizer.” But, oh, well, it’s as good a reason as any to head off to Quito, Ecuador, to look up a beautiful former classmate named Natasha. There are some very funny scenes in Kunkel’s novel and some well-handled meditations on post-9/11 New York, but perhaps Kunkel’s main purpose is to inspire his readers to consider indecision in the context of free will and of even freer use of pharmaceuticals.
INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH
Urrea, Luis Alberto. Little, Brown, 2008. ISBN: 9780316025270. HUM, LOI
Art imitates life—well, almost—in this sweet-spirited, good-natured story of a Mexican village, Tres Camarones, that has lost almost all of its men to El Norte. In their absence a motley band of gangsters threatens to take over. Feisty 19-year-old Nayeli—who divides her time between working as a waitress in the local café, La Mano Caída, and serving as the campaign manager for her Aunt Irma, a champion bowler, who is running for mayor—is determined to see that doesn’t happen. Seeing a screening of The Magnificent Seven at the local movie theater (this is where the “art” comes in), Nayeli decides to head north in search of her own magnificent seven who could return with her to Tres Camarones and take care of the incipient bandido problem. And if she happens to find her father, whose last known whereabouts were Kankakee, Illinois, that would be all right, too. So off she goes along with her two best friends, Yolo and Vampi. Tacho, the gay owner of the café, decides to go too. How they manage to get across the Mexican/U.S. border and what happens to them on the other side makes for a delightful and diverting picaresque novel by a popular Latino author who is the winner of both an American Book Award and a Christopher Award.
JAMRACH’S MENAGERIE
Birch, Carol. Doubleday, 2011. ISBN: 9780385534406. HIST, ADV
“I was born twice,” protagonist Jaffy tells us, “first in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames and then again eight years later … when the tiger took me in his mouth.” It’s this second “birth” that will change the life of the nineteenth-century London street urchin, for the tiger is the property of Mr. Jamrach, an importer of exotic animals, who is so relieved by Jaffy’s escape from the animal’s jaws that he gives the boy a job. Seven years later he gives Jaffy and his now best friend Tim another assignment: to sail to the South Seas and capture a legendary dragon to sell to an eccentric collector. Adventure quickly turns to misadventure as their ship encounters a horrendous storm, and the book then becomes an almost unbearably suspenseful story of survival. Though Jamrach was a real historical personage who sold animals to P. T. Barnum and the shipwreck is loosely based on the wreck of the whaling ship Essex, Birch makes the story uniquely her own, inventing her unforgettable characters and giving the telling of the tale to Jaffy, who has a marvelous narrative voice. This is absolutely top-notch historical fiction that can be read for pleasure and also used in the classroom. For those who prefer their history as nonfiction, a widely praised account of the Essex is Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.
JIM THE BOY
Earley, Tony. Little, Brown, 2000. ISBN: 0316199648. HIST
Set in the small town of Aliceville, North Carolina, in 1932, this gentle, genial novel traces the year that the boy Jim turns 10. Though his father died a week before he was born and his mother—still grieving—has never remarried, Jim finds male role models in his three bachelor uncles. Together the uncles—Zeno, Coran, and Al—manage the family’s rural businesses and farms while at the same time providing love, support, and guidance to Jim during his coming-of-age year. Told in the form of interrelated stories that smoothly cohere, the book is a beautifully written salute to the past while at the same time a celebration of the universal experience of being young. This charming novel, with its multigenerational appeal, will remind some readers of Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury’s similarly wonderful episodic novel of growing up in small-town America. A professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Earley was named one of the twenty best young American fiction writers of 1996 by Granta magazine. In 2008 he wrote a sequel of sorts to Jim the Boy. Titled The Blue Star, it is set on the eve of World War II and tells the evocative story of how Jim—now a high school senior—falls in love for the first time.
Coupland, Douglas. Bloomsbury, 2007. ISBN: 9781596911055. HUM
Coupland’s novel Generation X helped define a whole generation of Americans; in this novel he continues his cutting-edge ways, examining the lives of a group of geeks working together on development in a Vancouver video game corporation. Our hero, Ethan Jarlewski (the surname of everyone he works with begins with J), lives a surreal life at work and at home, where his mother is a marijuana farmer, his father a would-be actor, and his brother—well, he has stashed twenty illegal Chinese immigrants in Ethan’s apartment. And, oh yes, in a nicely metafictional twist, Coupland himself is a character in this extravaganza. In other words, don’t expect a smooth narrative ride from Coupland’s latest satirical laugh-fest; just fasten your seatbelt and enjoy the bumpy ride.
THE KITCHEN GOD’S WIFE
Tan, Amy. Putnam, 1991. ISBN: 0399135782. GF, LOI
Tan’s celebrated first novel, The Joy Luck Club, was published in 1989, missing the chronological parameters of this book by a single year. Happily, Tan’s equally successful second novel made the cut. Like the first, it is a penetrating look at the relationship of mother and daughter. The story is largely that of the mother, Winnie, who tells her adult, American-born daughter, Pearl, the whole story of her youth in China in the 1940s, her abandonment by her own mother, the difficulties of her arranged marriage, the horrors of World War II and the Japanese invasion, and more. How Winnie survived all of this is, it becomes clear, due to the support and love of her female friends. The revelations create a new bond between Winnie and Pearl that is deeply satisfying to both them and to the reader.
THE KITE RUNNER
Hosseini, Khaled. Riverhead, 2003. ISBN: 1573222453. GF, LOI, ALEX
As the U.S. war in Afghanistan enters its second decade, this novel set there in the 1970s remains timely and apposite. It is the story of the unlikely friendship of two motherless boys: Amir, the son of a wealthy merchant, and Hassan, the son of one of the family’s servants. The relationship, though close, is uneven for reasons other than class and caste. Hassan worships Amir, but the wealthy, insecure boy is jealous of his father’s obvious affection for the servant boy. When Amir discovers Hassan being raped by a gang of neighborhood boys, he refuses to intervene and, overcome by guilt, then conspires to have Hassan and his father expelled from the household. Out of sight, out of mind? Not exactly. When the Soviets subsequently invade, Amir and his father escape to America. Years later, the now-adult Amir is given a chance to redeem himself, though it means returning to Afghanistan, now under Taliban control. An Afghani American doctor living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hosseini demonstrates in his debut novel a true gift for characterization, a love for his native country, and a deep appreciation of its culture and politics.
In his subsequent novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, the author views thirty years of Afghanistan’s recent history through the eyes of two women: Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a maid, while Laila is the daughter of liberal, educated parents. Unlike Amir and Hassan in The Kite Runner, who are peers, Mariam and Laila are separated by a generation, Mariam being the older. As events develop, Mariam and Laila assume a mother-daughter relationship that becomes especially important when the Russians are expelled and the ascendant Taliban takes over, imposing a regime of violence and repression. Much darker than The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns is not without its tragic elements; but, as before, Hosseini’s intimate knowledge of Afghanistan and its people make for a compelling and rewarding reading experience.
LAMB
Moore, Christopher. Morrow, 2002. ISBN: 0380978407. SPEC, HUM
Jesus didn’t really have a best friend named Biff—but what, author Moore wonders, if he did, and what if Biff were to be brought back to life to recount Jesus’s first thirty years of life? The result is often irreverent (no surprise there) but just as often humorous and intriguing. A central part of the story is Biff’s account of the trip the two young men take to India in search of the three wise men who brought gifts to the infant Joshua, as Jesus is called here. The two also hope to find wisdom about Joshua’s identity and his destiny. There are abundant opportunities here for satire—all of which Biff takes—but the story assumes a more serious tone when the two return home and Moore deals with the traditional story of Jesus’s work and death. Clearly not for every reader and sure to offend many, the novel has nevertheless been a great favorite of teens who enjoy its irreverence and occasional laugh-out-loud lines. To his credit, Moore also does an excellent job of recreating his historic milieu.
A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Gaines, Ernest J. Knopf, 1993. ISBN: 0679414770. HIST, LOI
Gaines’s novel is another classic example of an adult novel for YAs. Set in small-town Louisiana in 1948, a time when racial discrimination is still a rampant way of life, a young black man named Jefferson is wrongfully accused of complicity in the murder of a white man. Despite the injustice of the charge, it’s nevertheless inevitable—because of the nature of the crime—that he will be executed. His white defense attorney regards him as little more than an animal, and it’s clear that Jefferson himself feels no sense of self-worth. However, his godmother, Miss Emma, is determined that he will die with dignity and persuades Grant Wiggins, the teacher at the local black school, to counsel her godson. But who needs the counseling more? Grant himself has grown up on the local plantation and accordingly struggles with his own self-image. However, as he and Jefferson work together, both gradually come to value their individuality and experience new feelings of dignity. There’s no traditional happy ending to this moving novel but one that celebrates the dignity and worth of each individual. In certain details of plot and theme, Gaines’s novel may remind contemporary YA readers of Walter Dean Myers’s Printz Award–winning YA novel Monster. Gaines is also the author of another modern classic of African American literature, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
LIFE OF PI
Martel, Yann. Harcourt, 2001. ISBN: 0151008116. SPEC
Along with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Martel’s novel was one of the first to usher in the modern trend in crossover novels—that is, books published as either adult or young adult titles that appeal to both generations of readers. Just as it has multiple readerships, so it has multiple layers of meaning. But it is the confoundingly original premise that will hook readers and not let their attention go until the final page. Here’s the story: when the ship carrying Pi Patel from India to Canada sinks, the teenage boy finds himself stranded in a lifeboat with a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker! How the two survive for 227 lost-at-sea days makes for page-turning suspense and laugh-out-loud humor. It also makes for an increasingly serious philosophical novel that explores—though never oppressively so—questions about the nature of humankind and of God. And since there are no definitive answers to those questions, so there is no definitive conclusion to Canadian writer Martel’s mind-teasing fiction. In a novel about belief, it’s altogether appropriate to wonder if one can believe that Pi is a reliable narrator. Did things happen as he states them? Or did his ordeal at sea somehow scramble his wits and lead to a delusional mindset? Readers are invited to make up their own minds, a fact that will frustrate some but will delight others. Regardless, Martel’s masterful storytelling abilities will surely stick in all their memories.
THE LITTLE FRIEND
Tartt, Donna. Knopf, 2001. ISBN: 0679439382. M/S
The New York Times Book Review noted this “might be described as a young-adult novel for adults,” a description that was meant as a compliment, since, the staid Times added, “it can carry us back to the breathless state of adolescent literary discovery.” What readers will discover here—breathless or not—is a very long (six-hundred-plus pages) and complex literary mystery. Set in small-town Mississippi in the 1970s, this is the story of how 12-year-old Harriet Dufresnes sets about solving the murder—nine years previously—of her then 9-year-old brother, Robin. Her snap decision is that the murderer was a local good-for-nothing redneck named Danny Ratliff (the name is probably a reference to a William Faulkner character named V. K. Ratliff). Now all she has to do is prove it, aided only by Hely, an adoring (boy) friend. The book is filled with eccentric characters, including Harriet’s four maiden aunts, who fill her in on her family’s sometimes checkered past. The atmosphere is pure Southern gothic, which evokes not only the spirit of William Faulkner but also of Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee. Higher praise cannot be offered! Readers of this will also want to check out Tartt’s acclaimed first novel, The Secret History, also featuring a cast of eccentrics and a murder but set at a small liberal arts college in Vermont. That story is as cerebral as its setting.
Hernandez, Jaime. Fantagraphics, 2004. ISBN: 156097611X. GN, LOI
With his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Hernandez created the longstanding comics series Love and Rockets, but these stories—collected from that source—are completely his own and represent a significant contribution to twentieth-century graphic art. Maggie is a young Mexican American woman living in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Attracted to the emerging punk scene, she meets Hopey, a rabid punkette, and the two become friends. These stories chart that friendship while also offering an in-depth look at Chicana working-class life and culture. Hernandez pulls no punches in the unsparing realism he brings to the stories, including the sexual lives of the two young women. Additionally, these stories are extraordinary exercises in visual narrative art that are further enhanced by the richness of their characterizations.
THE LOVELY BONES
Sebold, Alice. Little, Brown, 2002. ISBN: 0316666343. SPEC
Really, what is left to say about this book that hasn’t already been said? A huge best seller that was made into a movie, it has excited widespread discussion—and a host of imitators—because of its unusual premise: its protagonist, 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who tells the story in her own first-person voice, is dead, murdered on her way home from school. The story she tells from her new home in heaven is essentially one of how her survivors deal with her death and how their lives are changed. There are moments of heartbreak, of course, but also of triumph. In her Booklist review, Kristine Huntley wrote that Sebold “brings the novel to a conclusion that is unfalteringly magnificent.”
THE MAGICIANS
Grossman, Lev. Viking, 2009. ISBN: 9780670020553. SPEC, ALEX
Grossman’s novel of dark magic will remind many readers of Hogwarts, but with alcohol and sex. High school senior Quentin, who has always been fascinated by a series of children’s fantasies about a magical land called Fillory, finds himself improbably enrolled at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy in upstate New York. Alas, learning magic is no guarantee of happiness, and following graduation, Quentin finds himself leading an aimless, purposeless life until (wait for it) he discovers that Fillory is a real place! But, once again, the reality is different—and far more dangerous—than the fantasy. A sequel has now been published: The Magician King. In this one Quentin goes on a quest to find seven gold keys and gets more than he bargained for. In the meantime readers learn the back story of Queen Julia, the “witch queen.”
Grossman is not only an accomplished fantasist but also the book critic for Time magazine. Readers who enjoy The Magicians may want to ferret out his first novel, Codex, a bibliothriller involving an ancient codex and a modern online computer game that may be more than it first appears to be.
MARY REILLY
Martin, Valerie. Doubleday, 1990. ISBN: 0385249683. HOR, HIST
Martin’s imaginative retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is presented from the perspective and told in the vernacular voice of Jekyll’s maidservant, Mary Reilly. The result is not only suspenseful and true to its original source, but also richly atmospheric as Martin recreates a Victorian London that rivals the Sherlock Holmes stories in its verisimilitude. Readers who enjoy Mary Reilly will want to look at the similar recasting Jekyll, Alias Hyde by Donald Thomas. In a nice twist, Thomas is also the author of a number of Sherlock Holmes pastiches.
THE MEANING OF CONSUELO
Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003. ISBN: 0374205094. HIST, LOI
Set in 1950s Puerto Rico, Cofer’s novel is the story of the eponymous Consuelo, an intelligent, bookish girl who is charged with caring for her sister Mili (short for milagros, or miracle), who is emotionally troubled and may be headed for full-scale psychosis. Meanwhile Puerto Rican life and culture are changing, a process reflected in Consuelo’s home life, which is dominated by her parents’ incessant quarreling over her father’s fascination with all things American and her mother’s equal commitment to traditional Puerto Rican life and culture. Lost somewhere in the middle is Consuelo, whose struggle to discover her own identity reflects the larger struggle of her homeland.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. ISBN: 9780618646531. GF, LOI
The titular new Miss India is teenager Anjali Bose, who flees her village and an arranged marriage. On the advice of her American expat teacher she heads for the city of Bangalore, the center of India’s burgeoning cyberculture. There she hopes to find a job working as a service agent at a call center (any American who has ever made a phone call for technical support or billing questions or even dinner reservations will be familiar with the sound of an Indian voice answering the phone). Angie’s evolution from naive small-town girl to urban wannabe sophisticate mirrors the transformation of India itself. And as the Indian subcontinent becomes a major world power, a host of writers like Mukherjee are giving faces to young Indians whose lives are becoming ever more Americanized. This is not only an excellent novel but an important book for all young people who are interested in our rapidly changing world.
MISTER PIP
Jones, Lloyd. Dial, 2007. ISBN: 9780385341066. GF, LOI, ALEX
To a remote island off the coast of New Guinea comes an eccentric Englishman who assumes the de facto role of teacher to twenty young people there. His text for teaching is Dickens’s Great Expectations, and so connected is he in his students’ minds to the work that he soon becomes known as Mr. Pip. The island is hardly a paradise, alas, and several different kinds of conflict soon emerge. One involves the mother of the teacher’s star pupil, 13-year-old Matilda, for the parent fears the teacher will destroy the local culture through his stories of life in England and is determined to do something about it. A much more serious conflict, however, derives from a local war that is raging and that will bring violence to the village, which provides the story’s setting. The parallels between narrator Matilda’s coming-of-age and the Dickens novel are nicely and unobtrusively handled. As a result, it is altogether a splendid novel that has in the few short years since its publication become a great favorite of YA readers. Author Jones knows his territory very well, having been born in New Zealand, where he continues to live with his wife. This is his eighth novel.
Watson, Larry. Milkweed Editions, 1993. ISBN: 0915943131. HIST
Narrator David Hayden recalls the terrible summer of 1948 when he was 12 and his family was ripped apart. How so? It begins when his father, the local sheriff, has no choice but to arrest his older brother, a war hero and the town doctor, for committing serial rapes of Sioux Indian women in his care. This truth is revealed when the Haydens’ housekeeper adamantly refuses to see Dr. Hayden when she falls grievously ill. When she subsequently dies, David gives evidence that implicates his uncle. To spare his brother the embarrassment of being publicly jailed, David’s father then locks Dr. Hayden in the family’s basement, where he subsequently commits suicide. Clearly there are tragic overtones to this beautifully written coming-of-age novel, but its power makes it unforgettable, and its exquisite treatment of its setting—the landscape of Mercer County, Montana—is a tour de force, as is its demonstration of the inescapable link between character and context.
MORE LIKE NOT RUNNING AWAY
Shepherd, Paul. Sarabande Books, 2006. ISBN: 1932511288. GF
Twelve-year-old Levi adores his carpenter father even though the man, restless and angry, moves his family constantly, almost as if he were running away. Levi’s circumstances routinely change accordingly; what remains always the same are the voices he hears and has heard his whole life. Sometimes they sound like God, and sometimes they sound so much like his father that it’s hard to distinguish between the two. But as his father’s behavior becomes more erratic and possibly dangerous, it’s the redemption of silence that Levi seeks. This powerful father and son story, Shepherd’s first novel, won the 2004 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Larry Woiwode, who in his introduction calls More Like Not Running Away “haunting” and praises its “surefooted forward momentum.” Also praiseworthy is the spot-on first-person voice that Shepherd has given Levi, his narrator. “The air tasted green like after rain,” the boy tells us. “A voice, soft and canyon deep, vibrated in the bones of my head.” And it is Levi’s voice, soft and deep, quiet but reverberant, that will remain with the reader long after the other voices have faded.
Prose, Francine. HarperCollins, 2011. ISBN: 9780061713767. GF, LOI
Prose is not only a critic (see her entry in the nonfiction section) but also a fine novelist. Here is the proof of it in her latest work of fiction, the story of Lula, a 26-year-old emigrant from Albania, who is working as a nanny in New Jersey. Amusingly enough, her charge is a bored teenager, Zeke, who is old enough to be in college (his single-parent father doesn’t want him home alone)! The book’s conceit is that this is Lula’s diary, an account she has been encouraged to write by her immigration lawyer, Don. The diary is often wildly funny in its perceptions of her new homeland, but things become really interesting when three Albanian criminals show up on the doorstep with an unusual request. In addition to its page-turning story, Prose’s latest also offers an intimate portrait of some of the universal experiences of recent immigrants to the United States.
Older YAs may also like Prose’s Blue Angel. It tells the often funny, occasionally fraught story of a university creative writing teacher into whose class comes a funky but desirable young student named Angela Argo—and before you can say “sexual harassment,” the teacher, Ted Swenson, finds himself in potentially serious trouble. Clearly inspired by the Marlene Dietrich/Josef von Sternberg movie of the same title, this happy combination will invite some creative writing exercises of its own …
NEVER LET ME GO
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Knopf, 2005. ISBN: 1400043395. SPEC, ALEX
When two of her childhood best friends and classmates reenter her life, 31-year-old Kathy recalls for the reader their often halcyon student years together at the exclusive, secluded—and mysterious—Hailsham School. While encouraged to develop their own intellectual and artistic abilities and interests, the students there are constantly reminded that they are “special,” and so they are—but it will take the reader some time to realize why: they’re clones being raised for the harvesting of their body parts. This is to be done according to a carefully controlled schedule, including a term as a “carer” like Kathy before they begin their cycle of organ donations. Ishiguro offers his readers an accessible but never simplistic story that involves wide-ranging questions about the meaning of being human and the ethicality of compromising and disturbing that essential meaning. The critics have been unanimous in calling Never Let Me Go Ishiguro’s finest novel since his Booker Prize–winning The Remains of the Day. Readers interested in another fine novel about human cloning might want to have a look at The Bradbury Report by Steven Polansky.
NINETEEN MINUTES
Picoult, Jodi. Atria, 2007. ISBN: 9780743496728. GF, ALEX
Picoult is among the most popular authors of adult books for YAs in part, perhaps, because her issue-driven novels reflect the real-life experiences of today’s teens. In her fourteenth novel, for example, she tells the urgently important and deeply felt story of teen violence in a small New Hampshire town. With echoes of Columbine, the story tells how Peter Houghton, an abused and bullied 17-year-old, brings a gun to high school and opens fire, killing nine of his classmates and a teacher in nineteen minutes. How could this happen? What part did the community play and what guilt must it—and Peter’s clueless parents—bear? These questions are dealt with in the searing account of the trial that follows and that also tells the story of the relationship between the presiding judge, Alex Cormier, and her daughter Josie, whose boyfriend has been one of the chief bullies. As noted above, Picoult specializes in writing fiction based on ripped-from-the-headlines incidents, and she has written here a combination thriller and work of social comment, a type of novel that the late Robert Cormier wrote so effectively. Could the judge’s name be a tribute to him?
My Sister’s Keeper is another Picoult novel featuring a court case. This one is the story of 13-year-old Anna Fitzgerald who sues her parents—for the rights to her own body. She has been asked to donate a kidney to her older sister, who suffers from leukemia. Anna loves her sister and has already donated bone marrow and blood, but this time she doesn’t want to do the procedure. Will it tear her family apart? Readers will be anxious to find out.
OLD SCHOOL
Wolff, Tobias. Knopf, 2003. ISBN: 0375401466. GF
Author of the classic coming-of-age memoir This Boy’s Life and a host of short stories, Wolff has now written his first novel. Set in 1960 at an elite New England prep school, this is the story of an unnamed narrator/protagonist, a scholarship student and outsider who longs to become a writer. When it is announced that Ernest Hemingway, no less, will visit the campus and will meet with the winner of a writing competition, the narrator is determined to win—so determined that he “borrows” an idea and reveals a family secret, with devastating consequences. Wolff, who teaches at Stanford University, has a great deal of interest to say about writing, while imagined visits to the school by both an aged Robert Frost and a fire-breathing Ayn Rand offer wonderful opportunities for satire. Readers of this novel may wish to also read Taylor Antrim’s The Headmaster Ritual. More important, they won’t want to miss Wolff’s compelling memoir This Boy’s Life.
THE OUTSIDE BOY
Cummins, Jeanine. New American Library, 2010. ISBN: 9780451229489. GF, LOI
When 12-year-old Christy’s beloved Grandda dies, not only does a human being pass on, but so perhaps may a whole way of life. For Christy is an Irish Traveler, a Pavee, and though the world no longer calls him and his family Gypsies, their way of life remains largely unchanged as they travel in caravans from town to town with no fixed place to call home. But it’s 1959 and times are changing, and with the death of their paterfamilias and the emergence of long-held secrets, Christy’s family may have to change with them. Cummins is clearly sympathetic to the often vilified Pavee but is nevertheless quite candid in her depiction of their occasional petty thefts and tradition of mooching. The Outside Boy is a marvel of Irish storytelling further enhanced by the wonderfully vernacular first-person narrative voice Cummins has created for young Christy. His poignant but often funny story of his larger-than-life family is enriched by its implicit expression of the book’s theme: the quest for a place to belong and for people with whom to share it.
OVER AND UNDER
Tucker, Todd. St. Martin’s, 2008. ISBN: 9780312379902. HIST, ALEX
Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are best friends. No, not the former presidents. This Jefferson and Jackson are surnamed Kruer and Gray, respectively, and they are 14-year-old best friends living in a small town in southern Indiana. It’s the summer of 1979, and the boys’ friendship is about to be tested. The catalyst for this is a strike at the Borden Casket Company, where their fathers work: Tom’s is labor and Andy’s is management—and therein lies the rub. In the meantime Tom’s cousin gets involved in some dangerous business, and it appears that Andy’s mom and the handsome local sheriff have a—well, call it dubious secret. There is enough drama, in short, to keep the pages turning while an air of sweet but never stifling nostalgia hangs over the entire work. Tom and Andy are feisty and funny and, as I said in my starred Booklist review, “as likable as Labrador retriever pups.”
THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE
Bender, Aimee. Doubleday, 2010. ISBN: 9780385501125. GF, SPEC, ALEX
On her ninth birthday Rose Edelstein discovers she has a strange gift—the ability to taste other people’s emotions in the food they prepare. As she grows up, she learns that what began as a gift may be turning into a curse, one that has been shared by other members of her family. How we cope with emotions plays a large thematic role in this small but deeply felt novel that focuses not only on Rose but also on her relatives. Bender’s previous novel, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, has been described as surrealistic, but this one is rooted in a more accessible magical realism. In fact, the novel was selected as a 2011 Alex Award winner—one of the top ten adult novels of the year for young adults.
THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER
Chbosky, Stephen. MTV/Pocket Books, 1999. ISBN: 0671027344. GF, LOI
Set in 1991, this epistolary novel is told in the form of letters, from 15-year-old high school freshman Charlie to an anonymous recipient the boy has heard is a nice person. Many readers may feel the letters are addressed to them as Charlie writes about his personal disaffection and the problems he has experienced since a friend of his committed suicide in middle school. Charlie is helped by an understanding English teacher, but his real healing begins when he meets stepsiblings Samantha and Patrick, who are seniors. Together they take the boy under their wing and give him the understanding, affection, and support he urgently needs. Charlie returns a measure of this support when he learns that Patrick is gay. Though he is straight himself, he says to Patrick, who is suffering from the abrupt ending of a relationship, “You know, Patrick? If I were gay, I’d want to date you.” The novel helped launch the MTV imprint of adult crossover books. In the years since, the book has become something of a modern cult classic and has seldom been out of the news, since it remains a fixture of ALA’s list of most often challenged books. It is not possible to convey the extraordinary quality of innocence that this book emanates along with a tone that perfectly captures Charlie’s mood as he grows from hurt to healing. The only way to do justice to this marvelous book is to read it.
PIGEON ENGLISH
Kelman, Stephen. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. ISBN: 9780547500607. GF, LOI
Set in contemporary London, this is the haunting story of an immigrant family from Ghana that is told through the eyes of 11-year-old Harrison. Surrounded by pimps, prostitutes, poverty, drug abuse, and gang warfare, the family’s life is a daily struggle. But nothing can dampen Harrison’s cheerful attitude toward life—not even the murder of a neighborhood boy who has been kind to him. True, death is always present in life; however, Harrison doesn’t see this as an opportunity to philosophize but, rather, to turn detective, hoping—with the help of his friend Dean—to solve the case and collect the reward he imagines will be forthcoming. Of course, 11-year-olds don’t always fully understand what they see around them, and Harrison and Dean may encounter more than they have bargained for. This first novel reflects the author’s own early life growing up in the projects. As a result, the setting of his novel and the intimate details of daily life there are strengths of this book, but so is the wonderful first-person vernacular he has created for Harrison. The “pigeon English” of the title, it is this voice that rescues the book from any hint of didacticism and humanizes the universal immigrant experience.
THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH / WORLD WITHOUT END
Follett, Ken. Macmillan, 1989. ISBN: 0333519833 / Dutton, 2007. ISBN: 9780525950073. HIST
The kind of book for which the word epic was coined, this two-volume historical blockbuster (nearly two thousand pages long!) is a departure for Follett, a popular writer of suspense fiction, but is nevertheless among his most popular work, and with good reason. The first volume tells the compelling story of the building of a twelfth-century cathedral. The action plays out over a four-decade period during which the cathedral nearly becomes a character in itself, enhanced and enriched by the lives and fortunes of the three men—and three women—who are inextricably connected with it. Thanks to its rich characterizations, its beautifully realized medieval setting, and its grandly sweeping plot, the novel is a compellingly readable epic, as is its sequel, World without End, which is set in the same town but two centuries later and features descendants of the characters from Pillars. Like the first volume, this is a marvel of verisimilitude that takes the reader into a chronologically remote period and brings it to richly realized life. This one, too, has compelling characters (four main ones in this case) and a riveting, page-turning plot enriched by an intriguing mystery. Historical fiction is said to be a hard sell to teens but this one will sell itself. Readers who might want to know more about cathedrals and their construction won’t want to miss David Macaulay’s first book, Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction. Even better, they should seek out a copy of Macaulay’s later title, Building the Book Cathedral. As the title suggests, this volume contains not only the original contents but Macaulay’s fascinating, richly illustrated examination of the process that went into the book’s creation and execution. As for those who want another novel about the building of a cathedral, one can’t go wrong with Nobel Laureate William Golding’s The Spire.
PLAINSONG
Haruf, Kent. Knopf, 1999. ISBN: 0375406182. GF, ALEX
Though Haruf’s third novel has been compared to the work of both William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, it is not set in the South but instead on the high Colorado plains east of Denver, in the small town of Holt. There the story follows the interconnected lives of eight characters. Among the principals is a high school teacher named Tom Guthrie, who is attempting to raise his two young sons, Ike, 10, and Bobby, 9, as a single parent. Meanwhile another teacher, Maggie Jones, has arranged for pregnant teen Victoria Roubideaux—abandoned by her family—to become a boarder with the two elderly McPheron brothers, who may remind some readers of those Norwegian bachelor farmers that Garrison Keillor is always talking about. Certainly the McPherons are a study in social distance, comfortable only with each other and after many years of this, not much for conversation, either. Their interactions with Maggie are at first funny but gradually become touching without being in any way sentimental. As the characters tell their stories in alternating chapters, the novel becomes a celebration of nontraditional families and also boasts a beautifully realized setting that is a kind of love letter to small town and farm life. Altogether, Plainsong is the kind of flawless novel that every writer wishes he or she had written, and it inarguably will find its way near the top of any list of the best adult books for YA readers. It’s a modern classic.
Five years after the publication of Plainsong, Haruf published a sequel, Eventide. This novel finds Victoria and her baby, Katie, leaving their home with the McPheron brothers so Victoria can attend college. Haruf introduces a handful of new characters who continue the story with the same kind of humanity that underscored his first novel. As this second novel seamlessly evolves, the reader will come to realize that what links it to the first—and that what makes both so wonderfully memorable is their rare quality of goodness. Though Eventide can be read as a stand-alone novel, readers will find the experience much richer if they have first read Plainsong.
THE POE SHADOW
Pearl, Matthew. Random House, 2006. ISBN: 1400061032. M/S, HIST
Here is something different, a combination literary/historical/mystery novel involving the eternally popular Edgar Allan Poe—though he wasn’t quite so popular in his own day, Pearl claims. This is important, for when Poe dies under mysterious circumstances, his great fan Quentin Hobson Clark, a wealthy young lawyer, is outraged by the callous disregard of the press. Vowing to solve the mystery of Poe’s death and restore his reputation, Clark travels to France to enlist the aid of the Frenchman he believes to be the real-life model of Poe’s fictitious detective C. Auguste Dupin (who appeared in the Poe short story “The PurLOIned Letter,” widely considered to be the first American mystery). Things become complicated when a second claimant to the mantle of inspiration appears and is fit to be tied that Clark has chosen the other. He follows the two to America, where things turn deadly and the plot thickens like my mother’s gravy. It’s all great fun for both Poe and mystery fans.
Pearl is also the author of a second mystery of this sort, The Dante Club. Following two murders of particularly gruesome sorts—the first involves maggots, the second premature burial—a clutch of literary celebrities who are members of the Dante Club (which actually existed in nineteenth-century Boston, the setting for this novel) resolve to solve the mysteries of the deaths, which they recognize as being inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Booklist hailed this one as “a unique and utterly absorbing tale.” Fans of Pearl’s mysteries may want to have a look at Caleb Carr’s work, too.
THE POISONWOOD BIBLE
Kingsolver, Barbara. HarperFlamingo, 1998. ISBN: 0060995386. HIST, LOI
To the Belgian Congo in 1959 come Baptist missionary/evangelist Nathan Price, his wife, and their four daughters. Though the stiff-necked Price clearly regards himself as a patriarchal character, this is less his story than that of his wife and daughters, all of whom take turns narrating. The eldest daughter, solipsistic Rachel, is 16; the youngest, Ruth May, is 5, while twins Leah and Adah fall in between. Kingsolver does a marvelous job of creating individual voices for each of the daughters and for the mother, Orleanna, as well. And a good thing, too, for the story they have to tell approaches the epic, spread over three decades and contemplating the extraordinary—and often tragic—events that visited the transformation of the Congo into Zaire. The author also does rough justice to Price’s naive but often dictatorial attempts to impose Christianity on native culture and beliefs, an attempt that ironically mirrors the political turmoil of the time. Readers who are familiar with Kingsolver’s earlier work, which is typically set in the American Southwest, may be surprised by this unusual setting, but the author herself lived for a time in the Congo when she was a child and her parents worked there in public health service. Her memories of that experience have clearly served her well in the creation of this extraordinarily ambitious—and successful—work.
PREP
Sittenfeld, Curtis. Random House, 2005. ISBN: 1400062314. ROM
Here is an early example of another type of crossover novel: one that, though published as adult, could well have been published for young adults. In the years since, this has become an increasingly common phenomenon. In fact, I have been reviewing this type of book for Booklist since this title was published. As I explain in my introduction, it is typically publishers’ sales and marketing departments (working sometimes in concert with the Barnes & Noble retail chain) that make the decision as to whether a title will be published as adult or YA. Frankly, there is a good deal more money to be made from publishing as adult (with the rare exception of the Harry Potter or Twilight books). As for this title, it’s a fairly traditional school story set in an exclusive prep school on the East Coast. The protagonist, 17-year-old Lee, is a scholarship student from South Bend, Indiana. Not surprisingly she feels like an outsider—until, that is, the handsomest boy in the school appears in her bedroom one night! Passions are spent, mistakes are made, and Lee is left older but wiser. The novel is smoothly written, and Lee, though tiresomely introspective, is an otherwise interesting character—interesting enough that this title became a huge best seller. Go figure.
PRIDE OF BAGHDAD
Vaughan, Brian K. Art by Niko Henrichon. Vertigo, 2006. ISBN: 1401203140. GN, GF
This compelling graphic novel is based on a real incident that took place in 2003 during the Iraq War, when the Baghdad Zoo was bomb damaged and a pride of lions (two females, a male, and a cub) escaped their confines. Told from the lions’ perspective—they communicate with one another as in a talking animal story—the city they see is a bleak commentary on the senseless violence of the war as are their encounters with other animals. The mixed and dangerous blessing of the lions’ sudden freedom is also clearly intended as a commentary on the war and its impact on the Iraqi people (the lions are killed by U.S. troops). A memorable and haunting story that also demonstrates how Henrichon’s beautiful art complements and expands the author’s text.
PROJECT X
Shepard, Jim. Knopf, 2004. ISBN: 140004071X. GF, ALEX
In the wake of the Columbine shootings, Shepard writes of two disaffected middle-school students, Edwin and Flake, eighth-graders who have been the object of relentless bullying. Edwin (“I’m the kid you think about when you want to make yourself feel better”) is the narrator, writing in a flat, affectless voice that nevertheless becomes increasingly vivid as it describes the boys’ growing rage and desire for revenge, which result in their planning what they call Project X. Perhaps predictable but also powerful, their attempts to put their plan into action will end badly, if not tragically. Project X belongs in every collection of books about teen violence and bullying. Shepard, the author of six novels and four short story collections, teaches creative writing at Williams College.
PYGMY
Palahniuk, Chuck. Doubleday, 2009. ISBN: 9780385526340. GF, HUM
Palahniuk has had a cult following since his first novel Fight Club (made into a film starring Brad Pitt). In this, uh, unusual novel—his tenth—he shows why. Meet 13-year-old Pygmy, a foreign exchange student-cum-terrorist come to America along with a clutch of other kids to implement “Operation Havoc.” The story is told in a series of dispatches from Pygmy written in his bizarre form of English that is sometimes hilarious, sometimes incomprehensible; for example,
Begins here second account of operative me, agent number 67, on arrival retail product distribution facility of city ??. Outlet number ??. Date ??. For official record, during American winter youth attend compulsive levels of teaching; during summer, American youth must attend shopping mall.
The point of all this is social satire that—like Pygmy’s tenuous grasp of English—is sometimes funny, sometimes spot-on, sometimes stinging, and sometimes baffling. This is definitely not for every reader, but fans will adore it, especially the fact that it’ll give a lot of adult authority figures apoplexy!
Fight Club, the author’s first novel and a model of nihilism, established his reputation as a take-no-prisoners champion of disaffected Gen X youth. Thanks to the success of the movie, the novel’s conceit is familiar to many readers. They will know that Tyler Durden is the founder of the Fight Club in which young men gather to beat the daylights out of each other, since nobody much cares if they live or die. As this becomes a national movement, disaffection and alienation approach anarchy, which is Durden’s goal. Much darker than Pygmy, Fight Club’s satire is delivered with a bludgeon instead of a wink and a nod. Still, many consider this a brilliant work. YAs and the adults in their lives will make their own judgments.
THE RADLEYS
Haig, Matt. Free Press, 2011. ISBN: 9781439194010. HOR, ALEX
“Why are the Radleys so weird?” the popular girl at school sneers. Hmmm … could it be because they’re … vampires? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, they are. But here’s the rub: the two Radley kids—teenagers Rowan and slightly younger sister Clara—don’t know it! Thinking it for the best, their abstaining parents—Peter, a doctor, and Helen, an artist—have kept the truth from the children as they, themselves, have refused to indulge their own bloodlust. Not an ideal situation but—though uncomfortable—an honorable one, until the night when Clara, on her way home from a party, is assaulted by a rugby-playing bully from school. When he attempts to rape her, she scratches his face, tastes a drop of his blood, discovers her inner vampire, and tears his throat out. Ooops. In a panic Clara’s father calls his older brother, Will—a still-practicing vampire—for help. And the darkly Byronic, deeply charismatic, utterly dissolute Will answers the call. Too bad for the Radleys, for that’s when things become a bloody mess; but good for the reader, since that’s when the plot kicks into overdrive as complication piles upon complication, keeping one hooked until the very end of this thoroughly compelling, beautifully conceived and executed novel of horror and suspense.
Haig is also the author of a wonderful novel called The Dead Fathers Club. When its protagonist, 11-year-old Philip, sees the ghost of his newly dead father, the paternal shade asks the boy to murder his murderer: his own brother. Poor Philip. To kill or not to kill? Yes, the story is cleverly based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the author hasn’t missed a beat in crafting his own version. In the process he has created a wonderful first-person voice for the indecisive Philip. It all makes for great reading fun!
READY PLAYER ONE
Cline, Ernest. Crown, 2011. ISBN: 9780307887436. SPEC, HUM
Welcome to the year 2044, a grandly dystopian future where kids like Wade live a largely virtual existence thanks to global warming. Wade lives in a kind of ghetto area called the Stacks, for the stacks of trailers piled everywhere. No wonder he spends most of his time tied into OASIS, “a globally networked virtual reality” that offers players an opportunity to escape the quotidian awfulness of life. Things get complicated when Wade inadvertently happens on a cleverly concealed clue that might be his ticket to wealth and power. But there’s no privacy in an online world, and soon Wade and a clutch of his gamer friends find themselves running for their lives from others who want the clue. This is a first novel for Cline, a screenwriter whose 2009 film Fanboys has become something of a cult classic. Its obsession with the Star Wars films recalls the numerous (significant) pop culture references in Ready Player One.
RED MARS / GREEN MARS / BLUE MARS
Robinson, Kim Stanley. Bantam/Spectra, 1993. ISBN: 0553092049 / Bantam/Spectra, 1994. ISBN: 0553096400 / Bantam/Spectra, 1996. ISBN: 0553101447. SPEC, ALEX
The red planet gets a full-dress treatment in this ambitious trilogy by a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Beginning in 2026, the trilogy charts the course of the human colonization of Mars, the shaping of the its ecology and its ultimate terraforming. The social, political, and ecological issues that crop up are not dissimilar to those being discussed, debated, and sometimes derided today as they regard global warming and its ramifications. Red Mars tells the story of the establishment of the first settlement on Mars, while Green Mars explores the first efforts at terraforming. As the title of the third volume suggests, oceans have now been established. Regard this 1,700-page trilogy as the equivalent of a multivolume world (i.e., Mars) history and you have some idea of its ambition and scope. Happily it is vastly more readable than a textbook. Indeed, many regard it as the premier work of science fiction of the 1990s. Robinson’s Antarctica, a stand-alone novel, is often compared with the trilogy because its setting, Antarctica, approximates the inhospitable environment of Mars. This novel, however, is as much mystery as science fiction, since it involves the exploitation of the natural resources of Antarctica by multinational corporations and the attempts by “ecoteurs” (think saboteurs) to stave this off. Who are the ecoteurs, and will they succeed? Read this brilliantly relevant novel to find out.
THE REHEARSAL
Catton, Eleanor. Little, Brown, 2010. ISBN: 9780316074339. GF
This unconventional novel is the story of two neighboring schools: one a private school for girls, the second a school for drama students. The alleged sexual abuse of one of the girls by her adult male music coach provides a focus for the action while also becoming the invasive—and callous—inspiration for a play that the drama students then contrive as the core of their traditional year-end performance. The play rehearsals and the rehearsals of a group of girls for a saxophone recital give the novel its title and provide an opportunity for the author to link performance and real life as the students are also “rehearsing” for their adult lives. The stories of the girls are linked by their teacher, a strong-willed woman who will evoke memories of Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie as she revels in stage-managing her students’ lives. As the lines between performance and real life begin to blur, The Rehearsal becomes an increasingly challenging novel; contributing to this is the fact that many of the scenes are presented nonchronologically and as if they were scenes in a play, not in a novel. A bit of a tour de force, this first novel was written as the New Zealand author’s creative writing master’s thesis and was subsequently shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Despite—or because of—its complexities, the novel would provide an excellent text for high school drama classes.
RESERVATION BLUES
Alexie, Sherman. Atlantic Monthly, 1995. ISBN: 0871135949. GF, LOI
Here is the celebrated Native American author’s first novel, an exuberant story about a magic guitar, the devil, and blues music. A stranger, fleeing from the devil—whom he calls “the Gentleman”—arrives one day on the Spokane Indian Reservation, desperate to lose the enchanted guitar the devil, er, Gentleman has given him in exchange for his soul. Young Thomas-Builds-the-Fire gladly—but perhaps unwisely—accepts the instrument, and in short order has formed his own R&B band, along with his friends Victor and Junior. Calling themselves Coyote Springs, the three begin playing in local venues and soon begin touring. The promise of success attracts some wonderfully named groupies—two white girls who are called (à la the Archie comics) Betty and Veronica—and two Native Americans named Chess and Checkers Warm Water. Success is famously problematic, but in this case it’s exacerbated by a lingering question: will too much of it attract the Gentleman’s attention to them? Alexie brings his wonderfully humorous attitude to material that—though sometimes fantastic—nevertheless paints a realistic and insightful picture of contemporary Native life. His first book for YAs, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is also not to be missed.
THE RULE OF FOUR
Caldwell, Ian, and Dustin Thomason. Dial, 2004. ISBN: 0385337116. M/S
Set at Princeton University, this intellectual mystery puts Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code in the shade with its cleverly conceived plot and its fine writing. Tom and Paul are trying to finish their graduate research on a celebrated but baffling Renaissance manuscript called “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” They appear to have hit a dead end until a mysterious diary appears and a fellow researcher is murdered! Let the thrills begin as our students rush through a tangle of puzzles, codes, ciphers, and more in an urgent attempt to resolve the manuscript’s mysteries before they, too, might become the victims of the murderer. The authors, both Ivy League graduates, certainly know their setting, the social lives and the mindsets of students there. They also know their history and have based their cunning puzzle mystery on an authentic manuscript that is said to contain coded clues to a buried Roman treasure. Quick! Where’s my shovel?
RULE OF THE BONE
Banks, Russell. HarperCollins, 1995. ISBN: 0060172754. GF
Fourteen-year-old Chappie, a self-described mall rat, lives with his mother and abusive stepfather in upstate New York, where he slips into a disaffected life of drugs and petty theft. Finding himself in trouble with the law, he decides to reinvent himself, getting a crossed bones tattoo on his arm and renaming himself Bone. Perhaps inevitably he then leaves home and takes to the road, living a life of squalor with dopers and a gang of biker thieves. Along the way he rescues a little girl named Rose from a pedophile and then meets a Rastafarian named I-Man, who will lead him on an odyssey of self-discovery that will take him all the way to Jamaica. This is an astonishing novel by one of America’s most important writers. Banks has not only demonstrated a great social consciousness in this unforgettable novel but has created an absolutely marvelous character in Chappie/Bone, giving him a pitch-perfect voice with which to tell his story. Published in 1995, this is one of the first contemporary adult crossover novels and remains one of the finest, the kind of book—like The Catcher in the Rye—that speaks to and for an entire generation.
SAG HARBOR
Whitehead, Colson. Doubleday, 2009. ISBN: 9780385527651. GF, LOI
Set in 1985, author Whitehead’s autobiographical novel tells the coming-of-age story of 15-year-old Benji Cooper and his younger brother, Reggie, well-to-do sons of a doctor and a lawyer. Benji (who now prefers to be called Ben) is one of the few black students at his exclusive prep school in New York, where he has the reputation of being a bit of a nerd (who reads Fangoria magazine). But the summer months are different. This is when the boys come, every year, to a black enclave in Sag Harbor, “the definition of paradox, black boys with beach houses.” Episodic in form, the novel’s eight chapters focus, with wit and warmth, on classic adolescent situations from a job scooping ice cream to dreams of dating, from BB guns to beer to nude beaches and, above all else, trying to fit in. This endearing exercise in nostalgia may remind some readers of Ray Bradbury’s classic coming-of-age story Dandelion Wine.
SAMMY AND JULIANA IN HOLLYWOOD
Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. Cinco Puntos, 2004. ISBN: 0938317814. GF, LOI
No, not Hollywood, California, but instead the Hollywood barrio of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Set in the late 1960s, this episodic story recounts the coming-of-age of young Sammy Santos, whose life seems defined by loss, most poignantly that of his mother and of his first love, Juliana. Death is not the only agent of loss, however; sometimes it’s society, as is the case with a friend who is drafted for military service in Vietnam and two gay friends of Sammy’s who leave the small-town prejudice and homophobia of the barrio for a new life elsewhere. Meanwhile the hard-working Sammy continues to dream of college. An avid reader, he is known at school as “the Librarian” (not a bad thing to be called!). Sáenz, a former priest who now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Texas–El Paso, has a large heart and shows extraordinary empathy for his characters. Many observers regard this book as having been published for teens, as it was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize as a teen book. However, since Cinco Puntos has no YA imprint, I think it’s fair to include it here.
THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES
Kidd, Sue Monk. Viking, 2002. ISBN: 0670894605. HIST, LOI
Kidd’s story of life in South Carolina in 1964 has become a mini-classic of adult fiction for young adults. Following the accidental death of her mother, Lily Owens—now 14—has been raised by her family’s strong-minded African American housekeeper, Rosaleen. Fleeing from their rural home in Sylvan following a violent racial incident that left Rosaleen injured, the two find themselves in the small town of Tiburon, where they meet three beekeeping African American sisters: August, June, and May Boatwright. The three provide refuge and new lives for Lily and Rosaleen. Lily learns about beekeeping, honey, and the Black Madonna venerated by the Boatwrights. In the process she finds her first real home and discovers secrets about her late mother and her connection to Tiburon. Beautifully and evocatively written, The Secret Life of Bees is a paean to the powers of sisterhood, truth, and love.
SHADES OF GREY: THE ROAD TO HIGH SAFFRON
Fforde, Jasper. Viking, 2009. ISBN: 9780670019632. SPEC, HUM
That darned future! Something’s always going wrong there. This time it’s a mysterious something called, er, “Something Happened,” and it’s left the world at the mercy of a Colortocracy. Come again? Well, it simply means the world—and one’s place in it—are dictated by the color individuals see. Thus, those who see only grey are virtual outcasts. Eddie Russett, our hero in this first volume of a promised series, can see red, which means he’s fairly well placed and will move even further up the ladder when he marries Constance Oxblood. But then he falls in love with a young woman who is, wouldn’t you just know it, a grey. And then things get really interesting with the advent of carnivorous trees, an UnLibrary, terrible secrets, and more. So much more that one quickly sees why Fforde has been called both a modern Kafka and also a modern C. S. Lewis (some combination, no?).
Fforde made his debut with another triumph of imagination titled The Eyre Affair, starring a character named Thursday Next who lives in an alternative England where she works in the Literary Detective Division of the Special Operations Network. Time travel features in this one, along with pet dodos and the kidnapping of characters escaped from famous novels—novels such as … Jane Eyre. Clearly it’s easier to read Fforde’s brilliantly imagined novels than it is to describe them, so get busy reading!
SKIPPY DIES
Murray, Paul. Faber and Faber, 2010. ISBN: 9780865479432. GF
No spoiler here. The titular character, Skippy, a 14-year-old student at Seabrook College, a historic Catholic boy’s school in Dublin, is, indeed, a goner by page 5 of the prologue. His last words are “Tell Lori I love her.” What follows this dramatic declaration is an extended flashback explaining the circumstances of Skippy’s life leading up to his death. It turns out that Skippy was not the only one in love with the irresistible Lori—so was his bête noire, the psychopathic, drug-dealing fellow student Carl. Also in love, though not with Lori, is history teacher Howard (the coward) Fallon, whose heart belongs to the attractive substitute teacher Miss McIntyre. Far more than a love story, this is a darkly unconventional but often hilarious study of adolescence that also charts the lives of Skippy’s best friends Ruprecht, who is devoted to string theory; Mario, who is devoted to girls; and Dennis, who is devoted to, well, cynicism. A classic school story like Skippy Dies needs to explore not only the heart but also the mind, and this doesn’t disappoint, examining the intersections of science, metaphysics, and the interconnectedness of past and present. Extravagant, challenging, and compelling, this is a novel not to be missed.
SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS
Guterson, David. Harcourt, 1994. ISBN: 0151001006. HIST, M/S, LOI
Guterson’s first novel is set in 1954 in the Puget Sound area, where a local fisherman is found drowned under mysterious circumstances. In the ensuing investigation another fisherman, Japanese American Kabuo Miyamoto, is charged with the crime, and the novel then becomes a courtroom drama compelling enough to rival John Grisham’s set pieces. Complicating the plot is the fact that local newspaperman Ishmael Chambers finds evidence that could alter the course of the trial. However, the fact that the woman he once loved married Miyamoto instead means he must wrestle with a moral choice. The novel is further enriched by its evocation of another issue of morality: the internment of local Japanese Americans during World War II. Another novel that also deals with this still resonant issue is Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine.
SNOW IN AUGUST
Hamill, Pete. Little, Brown, 1997. ISBN: 0316340944. HIST, ALEX
Michael Devlin, a preadolescent Irish Catholic, lives with his widowed mother in a Brooklyn tenement in the late 1940s. On his way to mass one evening where he serves as an altar boy, Michael happens to meet an immigrant Orthodox rabbi named Hirsh, and an improbable friendship begins. Michael teaches the rabbi English and baseball, while the rabbi teaches Michael Yiddish and tells him fabulous stories rooted in Jewish history and folklore (think Isaac Bashevis Singer). Unfortunately a neighborhood gang, consumed by anti-Semitism, learn of Michael’s friendship and beat him up, then assault his mother and finally beat Rabbi Hirsh nearly to death. Determined that this shall never happen again, Michael calls on the Jewish traditions he has learned with surprising and satisfying results. No one knows working-class New York life better than journalist Hamill, who has been a columnist and editor for both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. Snow in August is a superbly realized book with two wonderful characters who will resonate with adult and young adult readers alike. Readers who want to know more about Hamill might wish to read his memoir, A Drinking Life.
SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS
Pessl, Marisha. Viking, 2006. ISBN: 067003777X. M/S
Blue van Meer’s life has been a peripatetic one, thanks to her father’s penchant for serving as a visiting lecturer at one obscure small college after another. Now that she’s a high school senior, however, she and her single-parent father seem to have settled down, and she’s enrolled in the exclusive St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina. To her considerable surprise she finds herself a popular kid, one of a charmed circle called the Bluebloods, and the protégé of the mysterious film studies teacher Hannah Schneider. When a friend of Hannah’s is murdered at a party the Bluebloods have crashed, the novel takes on the air of a Hitchcock movie—a natural for a film buff like Blue. Pessl’s first novel is often arch and self-conscious in a postmodern way and filled with cinematic and literary allusions. Structured as a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class, the novel is intended to evoke the style if not the spirit of the late Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Not as sophisticated as Nabokov and not as academic as this sounds, the novel is both accessible and intriguing. It was selected by the New York Times as one of the best books of the year. Readers of this will also enjoy Gregory Galloway’s As Simple as Snow.
Hiaasen, Carl. Knopf, 2010. ISBN: 9780307272584. M/S, HUM
Now that the great Donald E. Westlake has passed away, Carl Hiaasen is inarguably the funniest mystery novelist still writing. Any one of his hilarious novels could have been chosen for this collection, but Star Island seems especially appropriate since it is both recent and also features a 20-something protagonist named Ann DeLusia who is a double for legendarily dissolute pop star Cherry Pye. Whenever Pye’s antics have rendered her unable to appear, Ann is called into service. Things lurch along like this with a reasonable degree of success and secrecy until Ann is kidnapped by a hapless paparazzi and the wheels threaten to come off the bus. The consequences are complicated and genuinely funny. Readers of the author’s previous books will be delighted by the reappearance of the character named Skink, a former governor of Florida who has taken to the swamps, where he lives off the land—and assorted roadkill. Skink is particularly cranky about unscrupulous developers who are destroying the Florida ecosystem, and once again he finds one of those involved in this plot. Can chastisement be far behind? Nope! One could say more, but why spoil the fun of discovery? A columnist for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen is also the author of three books for children, one of which—Hoot—was selected as a Newbery Honor title.
STARDUST
Gaiman, Neil. Avon/Spike, 1999. ISBN: 0380977281. SPEC, ALEX
Thanks in part to the enormous success of his Sandman graphic novels, British author Gaiman is now almost in the same lofty league as Stephen King when it comes to popularity with YAs. Though typically more benign than King, Gaiman too fills his work with fantastic creatures and otherworldly premises and settings. Case in point: Stardust—arguably his most popular work with YAs—which is set in the realm of Faerie. To it one fine day goes 17-year-old Tristran Thorn in search of a falling star that he has promised to his girlfriend. That Tristran is only half human (!) and that the star is not a star and that he is far from the only one after the st—er, whatever it is—will only add to the complications that ensue (many of them quite funny). This was turned into a not terribly successful 2007 movie starring the likes of Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, and Charlie Cox.
Gaiman fans will also want to investigate his later novel Anansi Boys. As delightful as Stardust, this has as its conceit that our protagonists, brothers named Fat Charlie Nancy and Spider, are both the sons of the trickster god Anansi from whom they have inherited certain special … abilities. Spider has a penchant for using these to make Charlie’s life miserable and readers’ lives quite happy.
THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE
Wroblewski, David. Ecco, 2008. ISBN: 9780061374227. GF
A remarkable first novel by a 48-year-old software developer, this story of Edgar Sawtelle, a mute boy growing up in rural Wisconsin with his dog-breeding parents, has garnered both critical and popular raves. Edgar has been born mute, but his incapacity to speak is no problem with the dogs, which Edgar helps train. He is especially close to Almondine, a dog of rare breed who manages a special communication with him. It’s a good life until the boy’s Uncle Claude returns to the farm. The boy’s father then dies under suspicious circumstances—could Uncle Claude be complicit?—and Edgar, who wonders just that, is forced to flee into the woods accompanied only by three puppies. The novel’s unusual point of view, obvious gloss on Hamlet, and sympathetic characters make this a natural read for YAs, despite the book’s considerable heft (562 pages). Another recommended novel that finds inspiration in Hamlet is Matt Haig’s The Dead Fathers Club.
SUMMER BLONDE
Tomine, Adrian. Drawn and Quarterly, 2002. ISBN: 1896597491. GN, GF, LOI
Graphic artist Tomine, who began publishing when he was 16 and is now in his 20s, sprang to prominence with his series of comics called Optic Nerve. Summer Blonde is a collection of four of those stories that evoke the work of Raymond Carver. Okay, to be fair, this is a claim of his publisher, but nevertheless, the statement is certainly true in terms of Tomine’s moody, often noirish atmosphere. As for content, the work is more akin to Daniel Clowes. For example, one of the stories here is about a shy novelist with writer’s block (Tomine himself?) who goes in search of the girl he was obsessed with in high school; in a second story, two high school outcasts are brought together in the gloomy shadow of the first Gulf War. Tomine fans may also want to have a look at a more recent, highly praised example of his work, Shortcomings, a full-length novel about the life and relationships of a San Francisco movie theater manager named Ben Tanaka (who, in his solipsism and general unpleasantness, is a bit of an antihero).
SUNDAY YOU LEARN HOW TO BOX
Wright, Bil. Scribner, 2000. ISBN: 0684857952. GF, LOI
Set in a Connecticut housing project in 1968, this first novel is the story of 14-year-old Louis Bowman, who is beginning to recognize his homosexuality. To spare him assaults from the neighborhood boys, his alcohol-abusing, misguided mother forces him to take Sunday boxing lessons from his stepfather, Ben, who welcomes the opportunity to knock Louis around. At the same time, the boy is developing a major crush on the neighborhood “hoodlum,” Ray Anthony Robinson. The enigmatic Ray gradually accepts Louis’s friendship and becomes his unofficial protector. This fine novel was an Alex Award book and also a New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age.
SWAMPLANDIA!
Russell, Karen. Knopf, 2011. ISBN: 9780307263995. GF
The eponymous Swamplandia!, an Everglades-based alligator-wrestling theme park, is in decline thanks to the recent death of its star performer and sudden competition for tourist dollars from World of Darkness, the newly opened rival park. The family that operates Swamplandia!, the self-styled Bigtree clan, is also in gradual dissolution. Our narrator, 13-year-old Ava, tells of her brother Kiwi’s defection to the rival park, her sister Ossie’s elopement with a (maybe) ghost, and her father Chief Bigtree’s disappearance. This leaves Ava to manage the park and, more important, to save her family, even if it means traveling to the very gates of hell. If this sounds like a fantasy, it’s not—quite. But it is an example of American magical realism, wrought with wonderful imagination and wit. If a measure of a book’s originality is the difficulty it poses to a reviewer who tries to synopsize it, this is one of the most original novels of the last twenty years! And, indeed, so it is. To find such a sui generis work of fiction is cause for celebration. Russell’s first book, the wonderfully titled short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was equally lauded by critics, and one of the stories in the collection inspired Swamplandia!
10TH GRADE
Weisberg, Joseph. Random House, 2002. ISBN: 0375505849. GF, ALEX
Weisberg’s first novel is the coming-of-age story of New Jersey tenth grader Jeremy Reskin. Told in his first person, ungrammatical voice that is authentically his own, the story—presented as Jeremy’s journal—charts his sophomore year in high school, much of which is devoted to appreciating (i.e., ogling) the female form divine, especially that of his Spanish conversation partner and would-be love of his life, Renee Shopmaker. In the meantime Jeremy is also engaged in a sort-of relationship with another girl, Gillian. Then there’s his soccer playing, his family—lawyer dad, housewife mom, and two (ugh) sisters—and, finally, there’s the prom, where Jeremy enjoys a sexual initiation of sorts and, in its wake, considers establishing a real relationship with the pulchritudinous Renee. Will he? It seems the reader—and Jeremy—will have to await his junior year to find that out.
THE THINGS THEY CARRIED
O’Brien, Tim. Houghton Mifflin, 1990. ISBN: 039551598X. HIST
With his first novel, the National Book Award–winning Going After Cacciato, O’Brien became a kind of poet laureate of the Vietnam War. He cemented this reputation with his second book, this brilliant collection of twenty-two short stories about a platoon of young American soldiers in Vietnam. Though the stories are individual—and many are based on O’Brien’s own experiences—they cohere beautifully to form a novel in the form of stories. Published nearly a quarter of a century ago, the stories remain as fresh and immediate as they were when first published. It’s hard to believe that today’s teens would regard this as historical fiction, but when one considers that it was their grandfathers who might have fought in this war, it is inarguably the case. The enduing value of this book is nevertheless evidenced by the fact that the New York Times named it to its Books of the Century List, saying, “It belongs high on the list of best fiction about any war.” And so it does.
Hoffman, Alice. Crown, 2008. ISBN: 9780307393852. ROM, SPEC
There are three angels, one of Hoffman’s characters claims: the angel of life, the angel of death, and a third angel, “the one who walks among us.” The highly successful author of more than two dozen works of fiction puts the equation to the test in this collection of three interrelated short stories set over a period of years. Aside from their thematic unity, what connects the stories is their physical setting: a haunted London hotel that adds a ghostly quality to these three tales of star-crossed love and the search for faith.
A great favorite of teen girl readers, Hoffman writes both adult books (like this one) and titles published as YA. In terms of reader appeal it’s hard to go wrong with either category. Hoffman devotees will doubtless also want to read her novel Here on Earth. Its protagonist, March, should never have returned to her hometown with only her teenage daughter for company (or chaperonage [sic]), since an encounter with an old flame rekindles a forbidden romance. What more does one need to say?
THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE
Niffenegger, Audrey. MacAdam Cage, 2003. ISBN: 193156146X. ROM, SPEC, ALEX
A love story with a twist: one of the partners suffers from something called chrono-displacement, which means, in layman’s language, that he is a time traveler. Worse, he has no control over when his journeys will happen or what he might be doing at the time. Thus, when the traveler, Henry DeTamble—36 at the time—first appears to the woman who will become his wife, she is 6, and he appears out of nowhere, stark naked (don’t worry—nothing untoward happens). Time travel is tricky and sometimes head-scratchingly complex, as when Henry encounters himself in his travels or when he and Clare ultimately marry and she is 23 and he is 31, five years younger than when they first met. Happily, the novel is told from both partners’ points of view, which helps keep the story on the rails. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and Henry’s frequent disappearances seem only to strengthen his and Clare’s marriage, which suggests that Niffenegger’s first novel is more interested in romance than in science fiction. It’s worth noting, by the way, that Henry is a librarian working at Chicago’s Newberry Library, though this will be of greater interest to similar working professionals than to most teens.
The author’s second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, is another genre-blender, this one a romance and ghost story that features mirror-image (female) twins, a London apartment bordering a cemetery, a despondent lover, and a crossword-puzzle crafter who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Be still my heart …
TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG; OR, HOW WE FOUND THE BISHOP’S BIRD STUMP AT LAST
Willis, Connie. Bantam/Spectra, 1998. ISBN: 0553099957. SPEC, HUM, ALEX
Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards (six apiece!), Willis is no slouch at writing science fiction, as she proves in spades in this delightfully wacky time travel fiction. The year is 2057, and the wealthy and redoubtable Lady Shrapnell (no foolin’) has offered to fund the Oxford University time travel project in exchange for help in restoring Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. This means considerable time travel, and poor, time-lagged Ned Henry must return to the year 1888 in search of a monstrosity called—you guessed it—the Bishop’s Bird Stump. The fly in the stump, er, ointment is that Ned must also correct an anomaly that might alter the future in such a way that Germany will win World War II. Yikes! Meanwhile the invocations of classic British popular fiction ranging from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat to Dorothy L. Sayers’s mysteries may remind some readers of Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair. This thoroughly delightful romp was—not surprisingly—selected as an Alex Award winner.
THE TRUE ACCOUNT
Mosher, Howard Frank. Houghton Mifflin, 2003. ISBN: 0618197214. HIST, HUM
This marvelous and hilarious picaresque recounts the improbable journey west of young Ticonderoga and his eccentric, madcap uncle, the would-be inventor and teacher True Teague Kinneson. Their goal is to beat Lewis and Clark to the Pacific. Needless to say their journey is a good deal more adventurous (misadventurous?) than the official expedition. Though Ticonderoga is our narrator, speaking in a delightfully vernacular nineteenth-century voice, it is his uncle who is the main attraction, a walking grab bag of eccentricities and a copper dome that protects his head—injured, he claims, when he was with Ethan Allen at Fort Ticonderoga. Some more dubious readers may suspect that alcohol was involved. Readers who enjoy this—and who wouldn’t—may want to look for two similar-in-spirit earlier novels, Robert Lewis Taylor’s Pulitzer Prize winner The Travels of Jamie McPheeters and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man.
2030: THE REAL STORY OF WHAT HAPPENS TO AMERICA
Brooks, Albert. St. Martin’s Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780312583729. GF, HUM, SPEC
This first novel by humorist, screenwriter, director, and comic actor Brooks is not exactly a laugh riot but something better: a thought-provoking near dystopian novel of singular relevance to young adults. The premise is that by 2030 cancer has been cured! As a result, older Americans are living longer—much longer. And as a result they are commanding the lion’s share of the country’s resources for which the younger generation has to pay, leaving it with less—much less. Accordingly, young Americans are beginning to resent older Americans, and the resentment is starting to manifest itself in violence. Indeed, one of the young characters has formed a terrorist cell. But before much can happen in this regard, something else happens: the big one hits Los Angeles, a 9.1 earthquake followed by two 8-plus aftershocks. The city, unsurprisingly, is destroyed. But it will cost trillions of dollars to rebuild, and the federal government simply doesn’t have the money. Where will it come from? Can you say “China,” boys and girls? At this point the novel moves from dystopian to cautionary, but in both cases the most affected Americans are the younger ones, some no more than young adults. Hence, the urgent relevance of this compelling novel. To say that every YA should read it makes it sound didactic, and it’s not, not at all. It’s funny where it needs to be, suspenseful where it needs to be, and cautionary where it—well, you get the idea. Yes, it’s highly recommended.
UNSEEN ACADEMICALS
Pratchett, Terry. HarperCollins, 2009. ISBN: 9780061161704. SPEC
British fantasist Pratchett was recently named recipient of YALSA’s prestigious Edwards Award for the body of his work. Here in this recent Discworld novel he demonstrates why. A bit reminiscent of a Harry You-Know-Who tale, this tells the story of how the wizards of Unseen University find themselves needing to win a football game—without resorting to magic. Fortunately they are coached by Mr. Nutt, a candle dipper who is also a goblin. Or is he? A goblin, that is. There’s no question about his candle dipping … Pratchett was knighted the same year this novel was published for his “services to literature.” Thus, he is now Sir Terry! And don’t you forget it. It should be noted, at least in passing, that Sir Terry also writes for young adults, and in fact, his wonderful, deeply felt novel Nation, written for teenagers, was a Printz Award winner.
UPSTATE
Buckhanon, Kalisha. St. Martin’s Press, 2005. ISBN: 0312332688. GF, LOI, ALEX
This moving epistolary novel tells the story—in letters they exchange—of star-crossed lovers Antonio and Natasha. The lives of the two Harlem teens are turned upside down when Antonio is convicted of murdering his father and is sent upstate to jail. Beginning in the 1990s, the letters continue for ten years as the two grow up and mature. In the process their lives inevitably change as do their feelings for each other. Natasha, proving to be an excellent student, pursues higher education and finally becomes an attorney; meanwhile a revelation about Antonio will also change his life dramatically. But will the two young people be able to revive their relationship? Buckhanon’s second novel, Conception, is somewhat less successful but still well worth reading. It’s the unusual story of a 15-year-old African American girl who is pregnant by a married man. She dreams of aborting her baby, but (here’s the unusual part) the unborn baby also dreams—of the three previous times it has failed to be born. Will this finally be the one in which it finds life?
THE VANISHING OF KATHARINA LINDEN
Grant, Helen. Delacorte, 2010. ISBN: 9780385344173. M/S
When Pia’s grandmother dies in a freak accident, the 10-year-old finds herself a local outcast in the small German town of Bad Müenstereifel. Her only friend is Stink Stefan, the most unpopular boy in school. When these two subsequently decide to investigate a town mystery—the disappearance of local girls—they find inspiration in the ghost stories that an elderly neighbor, Herr Schiller, tells them. Though the two youngsters naively suspect that the girls have been spirited away by supernatural forces, the truth is closer to reality—and far more dangerous. Grant’s first novel, a blend of suspense and horror, tells a compellingly readable story with a richly realized setting, a small town where everyday life is never far from a haunted past.