YA

The Slanted Worlds

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by Catherine Fisher
First sentence: “The Bomb fell in a split second of silence.”
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Others in the series: Obsidian Mirror
Content: There’s some violence and (much like the first one) this takes some effort to follow. Not for the reluctant of readers. It’s in the YA (Grades 6-8) section of the bookstore.

A few spoilers for the first one, obviously. You’ve been warned.

Both Jake and Venn have become increasingly desperate to use the mirror, to make it work right. Jake, in order to find his father. Venn, because he wants to turn back the clock to get his wife back. Neither of them know of the outside forces controlling the mirror — that’s a knowledge known intimately to Maskelyne, an old, old time traveler, who may have been the one who invented the mirror — but both are willing to do whatever it takes to keep the mirror safe, and bring back the ones they love. Including involving Summer, the leader of the Shee, the fae-like creatures.

I have realized while typing the above that I could recount the plot of the entire book and it probably wouldn’t make any sense to those who haven’t read it.

There are other factors, as well: Sarah’s still around, trying to destroy the mirror and rid the world of Janus, and she’s willing to involve the Shee as well.  In fact, the Shee is the wild card here: Summer is the chaotic evil here, working toward her own end, but we have no idea what that end it.

There’s a lot of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff in this book, time looping in and back and forward on itself in incredibly fascinating ways. Jake is the real focus of the book; its his quest to find his father that we follow most closely. It was a good thing to focus on one arm of the conflict, though I did miss having Sarah around.

But at the end, I was left wondering: how is this all going to come together in the next book? How are we going to resolve the tension between needing to rescue those trapped in time and the need to destroy the mirror to save the world?

I suppose I’m just going to have to read the third one and find out.

I Was Here

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by Gayle Forman
First sentence: “The day after Meg died, I received this letter:”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered from the Penguin rep pile.
Content: There is drinking, illusions to pot smoking, language, and some tasteful sex. It’s also a post-high school graduation book. For these reasons, it’s in the Teen section (grades 9+) of the bookstore.

Cody and Meg have been best friends for as long as Cody can remember. Since her mother was gone pretty much all the time, Cody practically grew up at Meg’s house. Meg’s family became her family, Meg’s dreams her dreams. Until they graduated, and Meg got a full-ride scholarship away from their small Eastern Washington town and to a fancy liberal arts school in Tacoma. Suddenly, Cody was the one left behind.

A year later, though, Meg committed suicide. Leaving Cody behind again.

An aside here, in case this sounds crass: this book isn’t about Meg’s suicide. Not really. It’s about Cody, and her reactions to Meg’s suicide. Dealing with grief, dealing with loss, dealing with the reasons why. Meg isn’t a character in this book, even though you kind of get to know her. She’s a reason. A cause.

Cody heads to Tacoma to clean out Meg’s apartment and discovers an encrypted file. Suddenly what seemed like a simple suicide looks more suspicious. And with the help of one of Meg’s roommates (stereotypical Korean computer whiz) and an ex-boyfriend (tortured rock soul whom Cody ends up “saving”) Cody tries to make sense of the senseless.

In the end, it was less of a mystery than I hoped for and more of a romance. And while the romance was okay, I kind of thought it took away from the whole grief thing. Cody is hurt, and maybe one needs a Man to heal, but it kind of felt out of place here. Forman is a good writer, though, and she got across Cody’s raw grief and her questions that didn’t have answers and her need for closure.

A good read, if not an exceptional one.

The Shadow Cabinet

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by Maureen Johnson
First sentence: “The curtains at 16 Hyssop Close hadn’t been opened all day.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy snagged from the box from the publisher rep.
Others in the series: The Name of the Star, The Madness Underneath
Release date: February 10, 2015
Content: There’s a lot of murder in this one, some of it gory, but never graphic. Other than that, it’s just intense. The series is in the Teen section (grades 9+) of the bookstore, but I wouldn’t oppose giving it to a younger kid who was interested in ghost stories.

First off: spoilers for the other two books, obviously. You’ve been warned. (And if you haven’t read them, you really should. They’re excellent.)

Two years is a long time to wait for a book. And in the process, I’ve forgotten all the anxiousness I experienced when I finished the last one. So I do have to admit, that this one took a little bit of time to get back into the swing of things.

It begins forty years ago, with the grisly murder of 10 teenagers by a pair of odd, unusual twins named Sid and Sadie (though in my mind, Sadie was always the Thrilling Adventure Hour Sadie…). It’s a violent way to begin a book (then again, they are murder mysteries) and it’s important, though it doesn’t come to fruition until the end. The main story is the two prongs leftover from Madness: trying to figure out what happened to Stephen when he died and trying to figure out where crazy Jane took Charlotte. Both of those lead Rory and the rest of the ghost team: Thorpe, Boo, and Callum down increasingly crazy paths.

Things I really liked: I loved the addition of Freddie, a new ghost hunter. She was spunky and funny and a breath of fresh air in the midst of Rory’s loss. And I loved that MJ brought back Jerome from book one. Even though he’s mostly kept in the dark, he plays an important role in all of the crazy that follows.

It’s as good as Name of the Star, I think. And it sets up an epic conclusion (I hope). Now, it’s just waiting until that conclusion comes.

Fairest

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by Marissa Meyer
First sentence: “She was lying on a burning pyre, hot coals beneath her back.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: Cinder, Scarlet, Cress
Content: There are some sexytimes, but it’s entirely off-stage and only vaguely alluded to. It’s in the YA section (grades 6-8) of the bookstore, like the rest of the series.

This wasn’t the Marissa Meyer book I was expecting to review this year. I wanted Winter, the final installment in my series, the one that will hopefully bring everything to a satisfying conclusion. So, I kind of jokingly asked our Macmillian rep when he was here a couple weeks back if he had an ARC of it for me. His response? “Oh, you haven’t heard? They’ve pushed that off in favor of telling Queen Levana’s backstory.” Me? “WHAT?”

This one goes back an unspecified number of years (10? 15? 20?) to when Levana was 15, the younger sister of a very beautiful, and very cruel princess. A princess who used her mind-manipulation powers to control Levana. To make Levana do things she wouldn’t usually do. To hurt Levana. It’s also the story of the damaged (emotionally and physically) Levana trying to find love in inappropriate places (ie, with a married guard), and manipulating people to get what she wants. And, it’s the story of how Levana became queen (mostly by an accident of fate), and how she ended up with Winter.

Sometimes, going back and telling a character’s backstory works. Say, like Kristin Cashore’s Fire. It was needed to fully understand what she was going to tell in Bitterblue. But this? I enjoyed Levana as a cardboard villain, the fairy tale Bad Queen. I really wasn’t looking to find her sympathetic, to understand Why she was the Bad Guy.

But I read this anyway. And I still feel the same: I’m not sure it was a necessary diversion, but perhaps I’ll be proved wrong when Winter finally comes out.

The Testing

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by Joelle Charbonneau
First sentence: “Graduation Day.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: It’s violent, but not graphically so. And there’s kissing, but no sex. Which means it’s in the YA section (grades 6-8) of the bookstore. However, much like Hunger Games, I’d be wary of more sensitive readers liking it.

This book has been out for two years now, and I’ve been putting it off for just as long. Mostly because the whole post-apocalyptic/dystopian genre has been SO overdone, that I really didn’t want to read yet another one.

Then we scheduled Charbonneau to come to the store — they’ve been working on it since the first one came out and the rep mentioned it was set in a futuristic Wichita — and I was tasked with reading and reviewing the book before she gets here. And so I did, smacking myself when I finished for waiting too long to get around to this one.

Sixteen-year-old Cia Vale has just graduated from her colony’s small school near the top of her class. She’s excited: in this post-Seven Stages War America, now called the United Commonwealth, that means she’s likely to be chosen to attend The Testing in the capitol, Tosu City (aka Wichita, though it took me nearly the whole book to figure that out). Except her father — a former Testing candidate and University graduate himself — doesn’t want her to go. However, once Cia’s been chosen, she can’t say no; refusing the Testing is an act of treason, punishable by death.

So, Cia travels to Tosu City with her father’s warning — TRUST NO ONE — echoing in her ears, and discovers what he meant. The Testing is not just high-pressure and high-competition for the twenty university slots. It’s deadly.

While the plotting and writing isn’t as tight as Suzanne Collins’s, it’s still a quick, engaging read. Charbonneau sets the stakes high right away, with Cia’s roommate committing suicide, and doesn’t let up until the final pages of the book. There are twists and turns — some of which I saw, some of which I didn’t — and Cia is a good, strong narrator to carry this story on her shoulders. It’s definitely post-apocalyptic; Charbonneau cleverly gave us a brief history of how this country came to be in a series of short written test questions early on. The dystopian part is harder to see — Cia comes to hate the Testing officials, and the government as an extension, but I’m not sure I ever felt the way she did about the officials. Unlike, say, President Snow in The Hunger Games. (Yes, comparisons are inevitable.) I do think, on the other hand, that it’s a tighter, more interesting story than Divergent (yes, there’s a love interest, which I think was mostly unnecessary).

But the best thing about waiting to read this one is that the whole series is out already. And I don’t have to wait to read the second one. And I’m invested enough in Cia’s story that I’m quite curious to find out what happens next.

All the Bright Places

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by Jennifer Niven
First sentence: “Is today a good day to die?”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There’s teenage smoking and drinking and some off-screen sex. Not to mention the several f-bombs, and the weighty subject matter. All this puts it squarely in the Teen (grades 9+) section of the bookstore.

Finch is just coming out of a two month’s “sleep”, as he calls it. Violet is dealing with survivor’s remorse, being the only survivor in a car accident that killed her sister. Both find themselves at the top of the school’s bell tower one wintery day, contemplating the idea of jumping off, ending it all.

It’s a weird way to start a relationship, saving each other from suicide, but Finch can’t get Violet off his mind. And slowly, through a class project and sheer determination, he wins her over.

There’s really not much else to the plot. I’m sure this one will get huge comparisons to Fault in Our Stars (teens fall in love in spite of Obstacles) or Eleanor & Park (teens fall in love in spite of Differences in background and in spite of Bad Circumstances), but I didn’t feel like it was as good as either of those.  I wanted to like Finch and Violet, but didn’t connect with either one. I felt like Niven was throwing WAY too much at me: suicidal thoughts, car accident deaths, neglectful parenting, abuse, depression, bi-polar, actual suicide, and bullying, with a smattering of eating disorders in there as well. It’s like all the crappy things that could happen to anyone in life were happening to Finch and Violet. And that was just too. too. much.

What I did like, however, were Finch and Violet’s trips exploring the state of Indiana. I enjoyed seeing the state through their eyes, exploring the nooks and crannies and off-beat places that people don’t usually go.

But that wasn’t enough for me to truly enjoy this book.

Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future

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by A. S. King
First sentence: “So we drank it – the two of us.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There’s some swearing — including multiple f-bombs — plus some frank talk about sex. It’s definitely a more mature book, and is in the teen section (grades 9+) of the bookstore.

Eighteen-year-old Glory O’Brien has had her mother’s suicide hanging over her for practically her whole life. It’s kept her father from doing his art; he stays home, eating, and working as an on-line tech consultant. It’s kept Glory from doing much of anything, really, frozen with the expectation that she, too, will commit suicide eventually.

And it doesn’t help that no one ever talks about It. Or her mom.

Then she and her best friend (by default, since they live across the street from each other), find a dead, mummified bat in the barn. It gets turned to dust, and they mix it with beer and drink it up. And then they start seeing visions.

Glory’s visions are of a horrific patriarchal future, where women’s rights are completely taken away, and the country ends up in another Civil War. This fascinates and terrifies Glory — what’s her role in this future? How does it come to be like this? Will it? — and the act of having these visions pushes her into action.

Trippy doesn’t even begin to cover this book. It’s wild, weird, trippy, odd… King has bitten off a huge piece of cake here, and I’m not sure how well it worked for me. On the one hand, I was thinking it was a Handmaid’s Tale-esque feminist warning about what will happen if we give up the fight and stop questioning the status quo. But the longer the book went, the more I wondered if there was a point to all this, aside from spurring Glory and her dad to action. Maybe there wasn’t. And while I am glad that Glory actually made decisions and started living her life, I kind of wish there were a less trippy way of doing it.

So, in the end, even though I liked the individual elements of the book, I was unsatisfied with it as a whole.

Mosquitoland

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by David Arnold
First sentence: “I am Mary Iris Malone, and I am not okay.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: March 3, 2015
Review copy handed to me by the publisher rep.
Content: There’s a whole lot of language, both mild and strong. There’s some creepy characters, including a serial rapist, but nothing is graphic. It’ll be in the teen section (grades 9+) of the bookstore.

Mary Iris Malone, Mim to everyone but her mother, is not happy. Her father, in a whirlwind, divorced her mother — who then disappeared — married the waitress at the local Denny’s, then relocated the three of them — Mim had no choice — to the middle of nowhere, Mississippi.

This does not sit well with Mim, who just wants her mother back, her old life back, her home back. So, when she’s called to the principal’s office and overhears her dad and Kathy talking about Mim’s mom with the principal, she snaps. She takes off from school, packs a backpack, grab’s Kathy’s coffee can stash of money, and heads to the Greyhound bus station. She’s headed back to Ohio this Labor Day weekend to see her mother, come hell or high water.

It’s not as easy as it sounds; there’s perils in them thar woods, and Mim is in for one of those life-changing adventures. There are some creepy people on the road, but she makes friends, both causal and the best-friend-types. And she discovers that maybe humanity — and Kathy — aren’t as bad as she’s always made them out to be.

I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Seriously. It started out slow and kind of awkward; Mim is a tough shell to crack and a prickly one at the beginning. But the more time I spent with her, the more I grew to love her. The more she revealed about her family and her life, the more I enjoyed spending time with her. And her adventures were fantastic. The people she met were fascinating and quirky, and I wanted to go on more adventures with them. I was almost sad when the book ended because I wouldn’t be spending more time with Mim and her friends.

I’m not sure this is a book for everyone. But for those who love good road trip adventures, and quirky characters, it’s a gem.

Obsidian Mirror

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by Catherine Fisher
First sentence: “The boy put on the mask outside the door.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: Nothing objectionable, but it’s slow to start and is a  bit confusing. Not for the reader who gives up easily. It’s in the YA (grades 6-8) section of the bookstore.

This has been on my shelves for a long time. Seriously. I had the ARC, but gave that up, and finally, again, decided that I really needed to read this one. And I was in the mood this past weekend to indulge myself.

I shouldn’t have put it off. (Or maybe I should have: I’ve got the second one waiting to be picked up at the library. Shhhh. I know I said I wasn’t going to. But it’s CATHERINE FISHER.)

There’s three parts to this story. One is Oberon Venn, a very wealthy explorer who has spent the last two years in a depression because he was he cause of the accident that killed his wife, Leah. He will do anything to get her back. Including time travel. He and his trusty slave — there’s more to that than meets the eye — Piers are hidden out at Venn’s estate, trying to do just that: travel through time through the Obsidian Mirror.

The second player in this drama is Jacob, the son of Venn’s best fried. Who is missing and presumed dead. Or at least that’s what Jake thinks. So he’s headed, along with his unsuspecting teacher, Wharton,  to Wintercombe Abbey to force answers from Venn. Little does he know the web he will be tangled in.

The final player is the most complicated one: Sarah is possibly an escapee from an insane asylum. Or perhaps she’s a traveler from the future, a future where the mirror has destroyed the world, in order to destroy the mirror and prevent Venn from bringing his wife back.

There’s so much going on in this one, it’s hard to know where to begin. Yes, it’s slow and incredibly confusing to start with. I kept thinking “HUH?” But, I know Fisher’s work, so I stuck it out, and was richly rewarded. It’s time travel mashed with a mystery mashed with faery stories (yes, the Fey show up, and play a role), and if you give it time, it will begin to play out — it’s the first of a trilogy — in some incredible ways.

I can’t wait to read the next one.

Unmade

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by Sarah Rees Brennan
First sentence: “Kami Glass was standing to close to the fire.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: Unspoken, Untold
Content: There’s a lot of violence, some of it brutal, plus some almost sexytimes. Not enough, however, to move it from the YA section (grades 6-8) of the bookstore.

Remember last time when I said the book was a bit of a middle book, and that the ending had me excited for the conclusion? (No? Well, neither did I?) Even so, I was able to fall back into Sorry-in-the-Vale with the Lynburns and Kami Glass with all her snarky confidence and contagious hope with ease.

Rob Lynburn has all the cards, all the power. And that has made Jared and Ash and Kami and their “side” quite desperate. Desperate enough to do desperate and dangerous things. This is an epic battle, a long, slow buildup to an intense climax. And interspersed in all that is heartache and love, loss and life, and a lot of heart.

This is a series, I think, that demands to be binge-read. And, thankfully, now you can. Sit down over a long weekend (like… Thanksgiving!) and immerse yourself in this deep, complex, wonderful world Brennan has created. Enjoy the characters, the good vs evil, the humor, the mystery, all at once without the wait.

I wish I could have. I enjoyed this book, but I think I would have enjoyed it SO much more had I read them all at once.