Holding Court

I knew just a few pages into KC Held's debut, HOLDING COURT, that I was going to enjoy the book--particularly after discovering that Held and I have a mutual adoration of Elizabeth Peters' wonderfully madcap mysteries, and those were part of her inspiration behind this book.

This book was fun, breezy, and witty with just the right touch of romance. Juliet ("Jules") Verity was a delightful main character--smart, loyal, and just self-deprecating enough to be relatable. Part of this, of course, comes from her "PTS"--or self-diagnosed psychic Tourette's syndrome, where she feels an inexplicable compulsion to blurt random things that turn out to be true. (Jules is aware that this isn't real Tourette's syndrome, and even comments on the fact that corprolalia, or the blurting tendency most commonly associated with Tourette's syndrome, only happens in 10 % of the cases). Whatever the cause, her blurts are a source of annoyance and embarrassment to Jules.

As the story begins, Jules is looking for a summer job--and finds the perfect one at a local Medieval dinner theater, where, she believes, she'll get to wear an attractive dress and discretely ogle her long-time crush from a distance. But life, of course, rarely works the way you planned (especially in novels!) and Jules finds herself cast as a mad, fortune-telling nun, of all things, and that her crush's girlfriend is also part of the staff. When Jules stumbles across a dead body (that disappears while she's trying to summon help), things only get worse, particularly as Jules tries to uncover information that could clear herself from suspicion.

Held does a wonderful job with this--it's compulsively readable, quick, and the characters run the gamut from funny to downright creepy. Despite the potential darkness of the murder, Held keeps the tone light even as the tension picks up (a perfect combination for me: there's a reason I read cozy mysteries!). Recommended for readers looking for a light-hearted, escapist read.

The Serpent King

Jeff Zentner's debut, THE SERPENT KING, is a little out of my usual wheelhouse--a more serious contemporary YA. But there's no doubt that this is a remarkable book: characters that stay with you long after the story has ended, a bitter-sweet exploration of friendship and small town life and the indelible affects both past and place have.

Dill Early is the infamous son of a preacher (also named Dillard Early) who was recently arrested for possession of pornographic images of a minor. That reputation haunts Dill--as do the rumors circulating about his grandfather, the Serpent King of the book's title. The only thing Dill cares about are his friends, Lydia and Travis, and his music--but as his senior year dawns, even those are threatened, as Lydia can't wait to get out of their small Tennessee town.

Lydia lives for her fashion blog and her dreams of the future, but she's intensely loyal toward her two friends, both outcasts in their small town. The third corner of their trio, Travis, spends his days working at his father's lumberyard, avoiding his father's temper, and his nights reading his favorite epic fantasy series and engaging in debates (and a possible flirtation) on the reader forums.

The plot, as plots go, isn't high concept or super fast paced. But the book has a way of gripping you and not letting go. The prose is gorgeous (probably award-winning), and the characters--in all their flawed, wondrous glory--are heart-breaking and hopeful. I would not be at all surprised to see Zentner go on to astound us.

Waiting for Callback

I got to interview mother-daughter writing team Perdita and Honor Cargill about their debut, WAITING FOR CALLBACK, for the Swanky Seventeens (MG and YA authors debuting in 2017). The interview was a lot of fun and their book sounded like the perfect fun read: a teen who lands an acting agent and thinks her career is about to start, only to find that life "waiting for callback" is a lot more complicated than she expects.

When I got a copy of the book a couple weeks later, I was thrilled. And the book was just as fun and light-hearted as I had hoped. Elektra (and yes, she's aware that her name is horrible) is smart, spunky, but not as composed as she might like. Her attitude keeps some of the discouraging things that happen to her from being overwhelming, as she navigates first love, friendship, ambition and failure. I read the book in a couple of sittings and left with a fuzzy glow.

Funny, clean, romantic and (at times) poignant, this is a wonderful escapist read.

Calvin

I have loved Calvin and Hobbes for a very long time, and Martine Leavitt's Keturah and Lord Death has been a long-time favorite of mine, so naturally I was intrigued by anything that promised a mash-up of two things I love. Once I got over the initial coincidences: Calvin was born on the last day Bill Waterson's famous comic ended, his grandfather gave him a stuffed tiger and named it Hobbes, and his neighbor is a girl named Susie, I really enjoyed this story.

Calvin's life seems fairly normal--aside from the whole not-having-friends thing (Susie, who used to be the closest thing he had to a good friend, recently decamped for a more popular crowd). But then comes the day when he's about to fail English and biology--and Hobbes starts talking to him. Hobbes, the stuffed tiger his mom dissolved in the wash years ago.

One hospital trip and new diagnosis later, Calvin learns a name for what has brought Hobbes back: schizophrenia. Now, he's convinced that if he can pull off a risky stunt and walk across a frozen lake Erie, he can persuade Bill Waterson to write one more comic of Calvin, as a 17-year-old, without Hobbes--and he'll be cured.

But things, of course, don't ever go entirely as planned.

I loved Calvin's voice--I liked how Leavitt managed to create a believable boy who clearly questioned the signals his brain sent him, but who never despaired because of it. And I was astonished at how she managed to make a long walk across the ice interesting, suspenseful--and even funny. If the ending was a little underwhelming, well, that's sort of how life goes a lot of the time. The story was worth it for the sympathetic portrayal of schizophrenia, Susie's strength, and Calvin's own beautiful brain.

I also ADORED her homages to Calvin and Hobbes. Anyone who's familiar with the original will appreciate the occasional appearances of Spaceman Skiff, his alien teacher, the transmogrifier, and more.

Some passages I loved:

"It was slower going when you were walking on snow and around chunks and ridges of ice. But it felt good to be in the dimension of nothing. Close to four o'clock now, the sun was lower on the horizon, a whiter hole in a white sky. It didn't shine. It looked like a dead sun, a ghost sun, as if the heat had all burned out of it." (Evokes the deadness of the landscape, the dangerous onset of night.)

"Susie: Doesn't it make you feel kind of awesome that the world is beautiful for no other apparent reason than that it is? Like beauty has its own secret reason. It doesn't need human eyes to notice. It just wants to be glorious and unbelievable"

Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here

From the moment you start Anna Breslaw's witty, heart-felt SCARLETT EPSTEIN HATES IT HERE, it's pretty clear that Scarlett is not your ordinary teen--and Breslaw isn't your ordinary writer.

Scarlett's a smart, acerbic teenager who'd rather live on the boards of the fandom for her favorite TV show than interact with the real-live teenagers in her high school. When the TV show is cancelled, Scarlett, desperate to keep some of the top fanfic writers together, proposes a new twist on the show: fanfic with original characters. The only problem? Scarlett models these original characters on real people, including her long-time crush Gideon who has recently, inexplicably, joined forces with the Populars. And that's only the start of Scarlett's complications.

As other reviews have noted, this isn't a plot driven novel, so much as it is an intimate look at Scarlett's life, her struggles to fit into a virtual and real life that don't always have clear-cut boundaries, her strained relationship with both her mother and the writer father she idealizes (but who has left them behind for a new family in NYC). No one in this story is perfect, and that's part of what makes the story so wonderful--a perfect blend of humor and heartache. Really though, Scarlett's voice carries this story--she's the kind of person I would have loved to know in high school (though I'm afraid she would have been too cool for me).

Some language, discussion of sexual situations.

p.s. I still love you

Jenny Han is a genius at writing character: Shug is one of the best middle-grade books I've read, and To All the Boys I've Loved Before was simply darling. I didn't mind the "cliff-hanger" ending some people objected to--to me it was less cliff-hanger and more real-world messy. But I loved Lara Jean's sweetness (and yes, naivety. Some girls are naive at sixteen. I was one of them).

Luckily, there is a sequel that picks up Lara Jean and Peter Kravinsky's relationship almost exactly where book one ended. Of course, there are complications--namely, the fact that Peter keeps being seen with his ex-girlfriend Gen, who he claims is going through hard times (though Lara Jean has seen nothing to prove that). And the not-insignificant fact that the only boy who didn't return her letter from book one starts writing back to her--and they might have more of a connection than Lara Jean realized.

I know love triangles get a bad rap (and sometimes deservedly so), but I think there's a place for them. I remember that feeling of having multiple possibilities, of not being quite sure where my heart really belonged. And both of the boys here are charming for very different reasons--they're not just in the story to increase the drama.

Another thing I really appreciated about the book was it's take on sex: so many YA books seem to either not really address it, or the main characters are all over it. Which, I get: some teens are like that. But there are a lot of teenagers who aren't sure, or even ready for sex. And I loved that Han addressed that openly in Lara Jean's own conflicted feelings (dating someone who's much more experienced while still realizing she may not be ready yet). 

I also loved the perfectly evoked bitter-sweet feel of childhood relationships evolving.

Kiss, Kill, Vanish

Jessica Martinez is a master at combining lyrical prose with tense, sometimes dark plots, and Kiss, Kill, Vanish is no exception. Valentina Cruz, a pampered, wealthy Miami girl, finds herself on the run from everything she knows after witnessing her boyfriend, Emilio, shoot and kill another man on her father's orders. Hiding (and freezing) in Montreal, Valentina tries to make sense of her life and figure out what to do next. Posing for paintings by a spoiled rich boy, Lucien, gives her enough money to live on, but not enough to buy her self-respect. But when the unthinkable happens, Valentine finds herself forced to confront her past with a most unlikely ally: Lucien's drug-abusing, cynical younger brother, Marcel.

Martinez does a wonderful job painting the characters: Lucian's thinly veiled insecurity, Marcel's contempt, Valentina's own struggle to understand herself and the life founded on drug money. And some of her word-paintings for setting are stunning and vivid. Some readers won't like the allusions to drug use and sex in the main characters, and the plot-line is admittedly dark (and sometimes violent). The ending wasn't entirely plausible to me, and I spent too much time wishing Valentine would just get over her ex-boyfriend, but there was so much to love about the book (the writing, Marcel--surprisingly enough!, and the vivid settings), that these didn't detract from my overall enjoyment too much.

Fish Out of Water

There were a lot of things I enjoyed about Natalie Whipple's Fish Out of Water. (I was given an eARC in exchange for an honest review). Like her other books, this is clever and clearly written.

Mika's looking forward to her summer vacation, days spent working at the pet shop (which she actually enjoys), working with her parents on their marine research, and building elaborate sand sculptures with her friend Shreya.

But two things happen, almost on top of each other, that upend her plans. Her manager hires his nephew Dylan, a spoiled rich kid who's at odds with his parents, and training him is a real downer. Then she goes home to find a crazy old lady ranting hateful, racist things about her neighborhood and her family--only to discover the woman is her grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer's. Between learning to care for her grandmother and coming to better understand Dylan, Mika finds her heart stretched in ways she didn't think possible.

I thought Whipple did a nice job with Mika: she's smart (I loved how much she knew about fish) and she's loyal. I thought the prickly interplay with her grandmother was spot on--I also had a grandmother who was hard for lots of people to deal with, so I know what it's like to love someone  you're not entirely sure you like. And I liked that Mika's friendships felt real: complicated and warm and sometimes unpredictable. I loved, too, the theme of second chances: that people could do hard, terrible things, but that wasn't the end of hope for them. The book seems to suggest that people can change--but more importantly, we can change how we approach people we struggle with.

There were some things I struggled with though: I never quite bought Dylan's change of heart--he did something fairly horrific before coming into Mika's life, and Mika is rightly horrified when she finds out. But then she finds herself falling for him without really making him account for what happened. There's also a subplot involving one of her friends getting kicked out by her parents--and while the subplot underscores the theme of dealing with racism/prejudice in our families, it also felt a little unnecessary. The book had plenty of complexity without introducing the subplot, I thought. Finally, Whipple did a little bit too good a job making Mika's grandmother hateful. I felt sorry for her and her Alzheimer's and the way she'd let prejudice destroy her life, but I never actually liked her, so it was hard for some of the scenes to have the same emotional resonance for me.

That said, I think it's worth reading: I think it's a thoughtful, clear-eyed look at the complexity of our relationships when we love (as we always do) imperfect people.

Rebel Belle

 Rachel Hawkins does fun and lighthearted YA with a kick so well sometimes--the first book in Hex Hall was a delight from beginning to end. And a lot of that fun and delight comes through in Rebel Belle, just not quite as much.

For starters, there's the premise, which Hawkins herself described as Terminator meets Legally Blonde. Prom-queen hopeful Harper Price has everything together: her prom-queen nomination locked in, the perfect boyfriend, perfect grades. (Just don't ask her why she's so determined to hold it all together, or anything about her dead sister). But when a quick detour to the bathroom to reapply her lip gloss leads instead to a surprise liplock with the school janitor, who then dies in her arms, Harper's perfect life crumbles into chaos.

Suddenly, she's a Paladin, a super-powerful creature charged with protecting none other than her arch-nemesis, David Stark. Of course, this isn't part of Harper's plan, and it certainly doesn't make her boyfriend happy. So now she has to not only rock Cotillion, she has to save the world while she's at it.

As I mentioned, there was a lot to like here. Hawkins never lets her books get too dark, even when dealing with serious things (like the death of Harper's sister). And sometimes, when I just want to escape, I appreciate that. Harper and David had some great banter and good chemistry, and I thought it was to Hawkins' credit that she made me like David without making me hate Harper's current boyfriend. There were some fun twists in the story--but also some moments that didn't quite make sense to me.

Ultimately, a book I enjoyed reading, but not one that stayed with me long after the reading. But there's something about a heroine who can kill a bad guy with her stiletto . . .

The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy

 I've got mixed feelings after finishing Kate Hattemer's debut, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy. I loved the writing: I thought Hattemer was smart and clever and the English major in me admired the way she managed to weave in both Ezra Pound's Cantos and the rhetorical device of tricolon.

I liked the characters too: they were messy and flawed and they made mistakes and used snap judgments. Ethan's ultimate realization that he'd been idealizing people because it was easier than dealing with them in their messy contradictions and depth rang true to me.

But I wasn't entirely happy with the plot. In the story, Ethan and his friends attend a private high school for the arts that has been overrun by a reality TV series. When their English teacher introduces them to long poems as a form of social protest, Ethan's charismatic friend Luke decides they  need to rebel--through poetry. (Note: I can't imagine very many places besides an art school where this would be considered cool, let alone rebellious). And for a while, it seems to work. Until Luke gets incorporated into the reality TV world and Ethan has to decide what it is that he really wants. The resolution to the whole reality show v. authentic art seemed far-fetched to me.

Aside from that, I think a lot of teens would like the fun relationships between friends, Ethan's hilarious triplet sisters, and the gerbil that's almost another character. Some readers have observed that the lack of romance (it never goes beyond the level of crush in any direction) makes the book seem young, but it seems true to life to me for a boy like Ethan who's still trying to figure out how to read romantic cues and doesn't know enough about himself to even know what he likes.

Things I Can't Forget

 Miranda Kenneally has made a name for herself writing contemporary young adult novels. Things I Can't Forget is a companion novel to Catching Jordan, an interesting look at a young woman (Jordan) who aspires to be a football player and who makes a cameo here.

 

What attracted me to this book was the premise: Kate has grown up in a tight religious community, but after a secret strains the relationship she has with her best friend, she's no longer sure about her place. A summer spent as a camp counselor at a Christian camp raises further questions for her, as she watches the other counselors (esp.) the dreamy Matt, practice Christianity in ways that are foreign to her.

 

As a religious woman myself, I love realistic depictions of religious teens. And I thought Kinneally (who grew up in a similar conservative community) did a fair job with Kate: she does come across as judgmental, but she's also a likeable character. I also liked that the inevitable "mind-opening" character arc did NOT come at the expense of Kate's faith.

 

I didn't love Kate's relationship with Matt, which escalated to pretty physical pretty quickly. I get that relationships do that, esp. for teens, but as Kate was raised to see chastity as an ideal aim, it seemed odd to me that it took her so long to ask herself what she really wanted from the relationship.

 

At any rate, it was an enjoyable read, just not a perfect one.

On the Fence

 Kasie West does contemporary YA romance as well as just about any author I can think of--she ranks right up there in the company of Stephanie Perkins and Jennifer E. Smith (okay, she's not quite Rainbow Rowell, but I can live with that). Her books are sweet, funny, and filled with normal characters who have generally healthy relationships but still imperfect lives.

Charlie (Charlotte) Reynolds has grown up with three older brothers, a neighbor (Braden) who might as well be a brother, and a doting dad. And while Charlie is an outstanding athlete, sometimes she wonders if she missed out on the feminine touch her mom might have brought. When Charlie gets a job at a downtown boutique to pay for speeding fines, she's convinced she's entered an alien world of makeup, frilly clothes, and other girly things she's never really understood.

But to her surprise, there are elements of this girl-world that she enjoys (including friendship with other girls), and as long as she can keep this a secret from the guys (she's not sure she can stand their ridicule) she's good. There's even a boy who might be interested in her. Of course, first she has to figure out how to reconcile all these new, good things with the confusing feelings she has for the boy-next-door, Braden, who clearly only sees her as his friend's little sister.

I thought the friendship-based romance here worked well, and I loved that Charlie was able to experiment with new things (makeup!) without losing the essence of who she was. And West does an excellent job of including just enough darkness (what actually happened with Charlie's mom, and why won't anyone talk about her) to keep the fun, fluffy romance grounded. Perfect summer read.

Only Everything

 Only Everything, by Kieran Scott

Eros, the daughter of Aphrodite, has just been exiled from Mount Olympus--with her mother--for defying Zeus and hiding her boyfriend, Orion. Her task: make three human matches without her powers before her time runs out, or Orion will die. She enrolls in human high school, totally clueless about lots of human conventions (which suggests that she never really paid attention before). She meets Charlie, a charming drummer who's newly enrolled as well and struggling with expectations from his football coach father. With one half of a match in her sights, Eros casts around for a suitable match. Meanwhile, Katrina is struggling to recover from her father's unexpected death and to deal with her unpredictable boyfriend.

I liked both Charlie and Katrina a great deal, but I struggled to connect with Eros, who did not seem very divine (more immature and angsty). But I did come to admire her as she struggled through the task she'd been set. I never did really get the vision of her great love with Orion, and the flashbacks were my least favorite parts of the book. Overall, a cute, fast read, but not a lot of depth.