LGBTQIA+

City of Heavenly Fire

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by Cassandra Clare
First sentence: “On the day Emma Carstairs’s parents were killed, the weather was perfect.”
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Others in the series: City of Bones, City of Ashes, City of Glass, City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls
Also helpful to read before picking up this one: Clockwork Angel, Clockwork Prince, Clockwork Princess
Content: There’s violence, some mild swearing, and some sexytimes. The sex is tasteful and protected (yay!), but it is depicted, to an extent. This entire series is in the Teen section (grades 9+).

I’m not even going to try and sum up what has happened up to this point, or even what happens in this book. Coming in at over 700 pages, to say a lot of stuff happens is a major understatement. But, everyone is here: Jace and Clary, Simon and Isabelle, Alec and Magnus, Jocelyn and Luke, as well as hangers on: Brother Zachariah (yay!) and Tessa each play a role, as do Maya and Raphael. And, of course, the big baddie, Sebastian.

It also introduces new characters in 12-year- old Emma Carstairs and her best friend Julian Blackthorn. They don’t really play a huge role in the story; mostly they just play small roles. But they — and their family — are involved enough that we get to know them. And — and this is a complaint I have — they serve as a linchpin for a start of a new series. At some point, one does have to wonder, I think, if Clare can write any stories in a different world. But then, why should she, when this one is so rich?

It was nice to hang out with Clary and crew again, to see how relationships have developed, and follow them as they try to thwart Sebastian’s evil plan. Like always, Magnus was the most interesting character, and I was thrilled to see the way he and Alec’s relationship went. There’s some heartbreaking moments, and Simon even gets to shine with his Dungeons & Dragons references.

It’s a good conclusion (of sorts) and a fun story, even for all its length.

Everything Leads to You

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by Nina LaCorr
First sentence: “Five texts are waiting for me when I get out of my English final.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There is some swearing, including a half-dozen f-bombs scattered throughout. And a mention of older teen drinking. Plus, it’s really a growing-up story. For those reasons, it’s in the Teen (grades 9+) section of the bookstore.

Emi Price is a golden California girl. (Except, for the record, she has a black grandfather and is NOT the blonde thing you see on the cover.) She as loving parents, a cool older brother who has a job as a site scout in a production company, and a fantastic best friend. She has a job as a set-design intern at the same production company as her brother (nepotism works).

She just broke up with her off-again/on-again girlfriend, though, and that’s getting her down. And so, when her brother leaves his posh Venice apartment to Emi and her best friend, Charlotte, for the summer with the one catch — do something amazing here! — she feels hopeless.

Then she and Charlotte discover an old letter written by a famous actor Clyde Jones (think John Wayne) that is a clue to a mystery: he had a daughter. And a grandchild. And so, Emi and Charlotte set out to find them and deliver the letter.

That’s really only the beginning of the book, and perhaps the least important part of it as well. It’s much more about Emi figuring herself out. The letter helps, but it’s also this job on an indie movie that she lands, thanks to her ex-girlfriend. And when they find Clyde’s long-lost granddaughter, that opens up a whole new avenue for Emi.

I loved this book. Wholeheartedly and unabashedly. I loved the peek into the way movies work, the facts behind the fantasy. I loved the way Emi thought about characters and set design. And I loved how sometimes she let fantasy overtake her reality. The characters were so real, so deep, so complex, that I couldn’t help but be drawn into their lives.

An absolutely perfect summer book.

Grasshopper Jungle

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by Andrew Smith
First sentence: “I read somewhere that human beings are genetically predisposed to record history.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy highly recommended by our publisher rep.
Content: Weeelll….. sh*t is Austin’s favorite word, and all grasshoppers do is “f**k and eat”. Which gives you a pretty good idea of the language. And Austin and Robby smoke. There is some drinking and one very unsexy sex scene (and talk of masturbating and erections and sex). It’s in the teen section of the bookstore, but I know I’m going to find it difficult to find a parent willing to buy this one for their kid. (That’s not to say the kids won’t like it. They might.)

The short version, the one I’ve been pitching at work (after I realized it was more than “grasshoppers and sex” — though it is that), is that it’s what would happen if Holden Caulfield found himself in a Stephen King novel. Austin — he’s the 16-year-old, sex-obsessed boy whose head we’re living in — is confused and lonely (even though he has a best friend and a girlfriend) and angsty and more than a little self-absorbed, much like Holden. And yet, the setting is so utterly antithetical to our character: a strain of mutant bacteria gets out and starts changing people into six-foot-tall praying mantises whose sole purpose in life is to eat — everything, including each other — and procreate.

Who dreams up these sorts of things? (Well, Stephen King and Andrew Smith, obviously.)

At any rate, it’s nothing like what I expected. I think with all the advance buzz — not just from our rep, but also Publisher’s Weekly, and just the reviews on Goodreads — I expected something, well, amazing. And I got… well, a sex-obsessed, selfish, confused 16-year-old boy. I can deal with that, for the most part (I did make it through Winger after all), and I appreciated Smith for giving us a confused sex-obsessed boy; Austin’s not only confused about life, but also about his own sexuality: how can a person be in love with — and desire — both of his best friends at once?

But, reading through the Goodreads reviews, I stumbled upon one from Kellie at Stacked that made points that I think had been at the back of my mind while reading this book. Nominally, it boils down to this: a woman couldn’t have written a book like this about a girl talking so frankly about sex or her vagina and have it receive the same amount of buzz and acclaim that this one is getting. And secondly: Austin treats girls and women as objects.

The first point, I can see and understand and am a little bit miffed about. It really does go back to this “boy books” and “girl books” thing we (publishers/sellers/parents) have gotten into. We “need” this book because boys “need” this book (because they’re not reading anything else). But that least me to point number two, which is what was bothering me while I read the book. I had chalked it up to being inside a 16-year-old boy’s mind, which is not a comfortable place. But, looking back, it’s really because, to Austin, all women (well, perhaps all people) are a means to an end: sex. He says he “loves” his girlfriend, but honestly, he just wants to jump her. And this — at my very core — bothered me. (In fact, when Robby finally confronts Austin and tells him he’s selfish, I cheered. More of that, please.)

I was talking to a friend at work about this and she pointed out that maybe, just maybe, it was meant to be satirical or ironic. That perhaps we, as readers, were meant to see that Austin is a complete jerk, and find humor in that. Or at the very least, self-reflection.  Perhaps. All I found was discomfort.

There were other things I was disappointed in: Austin’s circular telling of his own personal history, his constant repeating of people’s names (yes, I know Shann’s name is Shann Collins and her stepfather is Johnny McKeon, can you PLEASE stop already?), and just the general uneven pace of the narrative. That said, there were things to admire: actual sentences that made me laugh aloud. Or the fact that Austin’s (and Robby’s for that matter) sexuality was just a thing, and not an “issue”. Or six-foot-tall unstoppable praying mantises.

But I don’t think the positives outweigh the negatives on this one.

Winger

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by Andrew Smith
ages: 14+
First sentence: “I said a silent prayer.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy picked up at ABA Winter institute for me. Yes, I have taken that long to get to it.

Ryan Dean (yes, that’s his whole first name) West has a lot going for him: he’s a junior at Pine Mountain, a boarding school for troubled rich kids (his dad’s a high-powered Boston lawyer) in the Pacific Northwest. He is first string winger (think running back in football, but more intense) for the rugby team. He’s pretty smart.

But there are some downsides: he got transferred into O-Hall this year because he was caught hacking into a cell phone account at the end of last year. And, to top it all off: hes only 14.

And when you’re in O-Hall with all the delinquent football and rugby players? It’s not going to be a stellar year.

Add to that some major girl drama (he’s in love with his best friend, Annie, but snogging his roomate’s girlfriend), late night poker games (let’s just say that Ryan Dean is not a good drunk), and lots and lots of testosterone-induced fights. Let’s just say, I was impressed that Ryan Dean — who was decent human being underneath all the 14-year-old boy nonsense — survived until Thanksgiving.

I’m of two minds about this book. On the one hand, I can sum it up in two words: sex and rugby. Actually, the sex is all in Ryan Dean’s mind: he’s incredibly immature, and objectifies EVERY girl, and EVERY situation becomes about sex. In other words: he’s a normal 14-year-old boy. But unlike Carter’s Unfocused One-Track Mind which I couldn’t get through (and which is the best comparison to this one), I found myself endeared to Ryan Dean. Maybe it was the underdog element. Maybe it was because although he was annoying, he was almost mostly harmless. Maybe it was because he really did mean well, in the end.

Because, I found myself compelled by this. I was invested in Ryan Dean’s drama. I loved the camaraderie of the rugby team. I enjoyed Ryan Dean, dork that he was.

My only real problem was with the ending. See: Ryan Dean becomes good friends with the rugby captain, Joey, who also happens to be gay. Joey’s sexuality isn’t a big deal for Ryan Dean (though he feels the need to comment that he isn’t a lot), but it is for other guys in O-Hall. And in the last 20 pages of the book, it takes a sharp left turn and stops being a fun boarding school drama, and becomes Something More. Not that I minded something more, it was the sharp left turn that threw me. It didn’t work. I didn’t feel pain, or anguish, or anything at all at the end, because I was flabbergasted that a fun and entertaining book so suddenly became Serious. It came off as bad pacing and lack of focus rather than anything more substantial.

It didn’t ruin the book for me, but it did take some of the shine off. Which is too bad, because I was having fun with it before then.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

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by Benjamin Alire Saenz
ages: 14+
First sentence: “One summer night I fell asleep, hoping the world would be different when I woke.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

It’s the summer of 1987, and 15-year-old Aristotle — Ari; he hates his given name — is a bit lost. He’s the caboose in a Mexican-American family; he was born after his father returned from a tour in Vietnam. He’s got older twin sisters and an older brother, but since he’s in prison, no one talks about him. Ari’s got a whole lot of bottled up angsty feelings, and is quite directionless with his life.

Then he meets Dante, who is everything Ari is not: vibrant, interesting, talkative. They become friends — best friends — and slowly over the course of the year, that friendship blossoms into something more.

I think I need to just come to terms with the idea that the 1980s are historical fiction now. Though, I’m still at a loss as to why this couldn’t have been contemporary. It’s set in El Paso, and the world that they inhabited didn’t feel like it needed to be in the 80s. Their parents were incredibly accepting of Dante’s homosexuality, and the experimentation with drugs and alcohol could have happened just as well today as it did back then. There side plot that involves violence against Dante for being gay, but again: not necessarily something that needed to be in the 1980s. In fact, even with the violence, it seemed… tame. We have come a long way in the last 30 years.

Though — and maybe it was me — I never really found myself connecting with this book. I think part of it was that I don’t do 15-year-old boy angst well at all. I just found it hard to relate to Ari, to all his angst and his non-communication. And I’m not sure that the spare prose — as lovely as it was, sometimes — helped the situation much. While I understood Ari, and what he was going through, I found I couldn’t sympathize with him. And I do have to say that while I didn’t have a problem with the end, I didn’t think it was terribly convincing, either.

In short, it wasn’t a bad novel, just one that I don’t think was for me.

Lola and the Boy Next Door

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by Stephanie Perkins
ages: 14+
First sentence: “I have three simple wishes.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy provided by an ARC sent me from the amazing A Jane of All Reads

I need to say, first off: I completely and totally regret what I wore to my senior prom. It was white, it was totally late-80s, and it was completely forgettable. What I should have done was be daring (like Lola, who wants to attend her mid-winter formal as Marie Antoinette) and completely memorable.

So, one of my favorite things about this book was all the costume changes that Lola went through. I never knew what she was going to wear, and somehow, that made the book that much more enjoyable for me.

The plot is pretty simple: Lola and Cricket used to be neighbors. Then they were more than neighbors. And then he moved away because his family is pretty invested in following his sister Calliope’s dream of being an Olympic figure skater. But before that happened, he hurt Lola, so she’s spent the last two years trying to forget that Cricket ever existed. It’s worked so well, that she’s happily in love with Max, who’s a punk rocker and (gasp) five years older than she is (she’s barely 17). Then, one day, Cricket (and his family) move back in. Lola figured she was over him, but she didn’t count on him not being over her.

Second thing I adored about this book: Cricket. Seriously. He’s nice. No: he’s wonderful. Swoon-worthy, geeky, genius, awkward, and much, much too good for Lola. It was an interesting twist having the guy be the “good” one, the one that Lola has to aspire to “deserving”. (I find it’s often the guys who are the cads, but in many ways Lola is in this book.) At first she pushes Cricket away, but eventually realizes that she still has *feelings* for the boy next door.

I found, in this book, that it was the little things that made it enjoyable. Anna and St. Clair are back, and even though they only play a small role, they light up the pages they’re on. Lola’s two dads are also a delight: it’s nice to have a gay couple shown as stable and loving without making a big deal about it. (Additionally: they’re great characters in their own right.) That said, I still have issues with True Love (always have, always will) and this one is all about finding and recognizing True Love, but it wasn’t enough to get in the way of me thoroughly enjoying this book.

Perhaps it comes down to the awesome Marie Antoinette dress after all.