It's time to pay attention to Vera Dietz

Please Ignor Vera Dietz by A. S. King

2011 Printz Honor book

Multiple points of view: (Vera, her father (Ken), the pagoda, dead Charlie). Well-written, dark, but with a human touch.

Tightly written.  Strong relationship between Vera and her father.  Character and plot driven. Characters are believable – story line is well-developed and pulls you in.

Vera is, of course, wise beyond her years and her father, though distant, is caring and looking out for  her at every turn. Charlie is wise, too, but in a school of hard knocks kind of way.

Plot line:

Vera’s best friend Charlie is dead.  We don’t know the circumstances, but we come to understand we will by the story’s end. Vera was in love with Charlie, but Charlie’s life spiraled out of control, he ditched Vera over another girl.  Things went very south for Charlie and his life wasn’t idyllic to begin with.  

Vera is being raised by her father, her mother abandoned them years before in favor of a podiatrist.  A bit crazy book, a bit poignant, a bit sad, and a bit hopeful. 

I really like the characters in this book, and I really liked this book. If you like realistic stories about mostly realistic characters dealing with whatever life throws at you, you’ll like this book, too.

Haunting

The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus Sedgwick

The cover of the U.S. edition doesn’t do this book justice. The cover of the British edition has beautiful spirals all over it. They are the theme of the story and play a hugely important part in understanding it. The double helix spiral stair on the US edition is not nearly as beautiful.

Anyway, I loved this book.  It’s a compelling story, so compelling I had a tough time putting it down – even at work.

The book consists of four sections, each with a different protagonist but a similar plot line.  They are tightly written and at times uncomfortably compelling. Hence, the “I couldn’t put it down” part of my day. Author Marcus Sedgwick says you can read the four sections in any order. I read them as they were printed, in chronological order.  When I got to the “end”, I could see what he meant, but you do have to read the whole book first to understand that reading them in any order works.

In the largest sense, this book explains the meaning of life. It examines what motivates us and our emotions and what binds us all together. I found it masterful and I highly commend the student who was so excited after he finished that he barged into the library and said to me, “I just finished this book, and I have to talk to somebody about it. I think it’s changed my life.”  I immediately took the book and started reading so he and I could have a conversation, but also because I love a book that changes anybody’s life.

Thank you, Marcus Sedgwick.

Chocolatte...

Chocolate: Sweet Science and Dark Secrets of the World’s Favorite Treat by Kay Frydenborg

This book contains everything you wanted to know (and possibly more) about chocolate, its origins, its chemical makeup, the politics of chocolate and even how to eat it.  It turns out that the chocolate we like best is the chocolate we ate as a child.  So, if you ate smoother milk chocolate as a youngster that’s the chocolate flavor you will gravitate toward as an adult.

Chocolate moves along pretty quickly. It’s written at a fairly low level, and there’s a lot of white space on the page. For the reading level, the chapters seem a bit long.  The illustrations are not high quality, so they don’t add much to the telling.  Interspersed are pages with special “additional” information, kind of “fun facts”.  The background for these pages is gray with a busy pattern and thin font, making reading difficult. By the end I was skipping over them because they were too hard to read.  I wouldn’t be surprised if students do the same thing.  

This is the unabridged version of a trip to Hershey Park’s Chocolate World. If you can’t get there, this is a great introduction to the world of chocolate.  As for me, I’d rather go to Hershey and get some chocolate at the end of the tour.

Two tissue tear jerker

Ghosting by Edith Pattou, Skyscape, 2014.

This is a two tissue read. Yes, I cried my way through this one with tears of sadness and tears of gladness. One of my students calls it her “favoritist book ever”.  I’d have to agree.  Written by Edith Pattou of East fame, it delivers. Eight teens and one adult tell the story of a fateful late summer night that changes their lives forever.  The story is told in verse. The individual voices are well-developed; the lines punchy and economical.

The action revolves around a frightful accident involving all the teens.  The story unfolds quickly, each delivering their actions and feelings in short one to two page shots. I don’t want to give too much away, but the characters are completely believable and the action unfolds very naturally. (I work with high school students and I’m a parent and they are true to form.)

Just read it.  If you’re a teen, you’ll relate to the kids in the book. If you interact with teens, you’ll relate to them and get some insights into the tricky road they travel as they make their way from adolescence into adulthood. This isn’t a good read, it’s a great read.

Scrub-a-dub

Clean by Amy Reed

I didn’t think I’d like this book, but it turns out I did.  It’s about a group of teenagers (Olivia, Kelly, Christopher, Jason, and Eva) who’ve been sent to rehab. They’re addicts, all of them. Some are “good kids”, some not so good, but all with different addictions, family situations, and relationships.  During the month they’re in rehab we learn their darkest secrets and what they fear most.

The story unfolds person by person, bit by bit.  The characters are well-developed, if a bit typecast: the bad boy, the rich girl, the jock, the misfit, the girl with no self-worth. By the end of the book, I liked all of them and I wanted them to clean up their lives. A month in rehab isn’t long enough to fix all their problems, but we hope like heck it’s long enough for them to get a handle on them. I think Clean is a pretty realistic snapshot of life in rehab for a young person. I think the real key to success for these kids is learning to build social capital and this book does a good job of demonstrating how when we connect with others and learn to trust we can work on our problems together.  

I got a little teary at the end since I’d really invested in the characters, and I desperately wanted them to succeed.

Don't Jump!

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

Odd book.  Four people meet on the top of an apartment building on New Year’s Eve, each ready to jump.  There is a young America, a privileged white teen girl bent on being bad, a middle aged woman with a severely developmentally disabled son, and a has-been talk show host who’s done time in for having sex with a fifteen year old girl. They’re all depressed, to the point of of suicide - all “nutters”, except they aren’t, really.

There are moments when I laughed out loud, which when you think about the fact that it’s a book about suicide is kind of funny in itself…

These four come together and form a “gang” to keep an eye on each other, first, until Valentine’s Day since that’s the #2 most popular day to “top yourself” and then for ninety days. Ninety days is the length of time it takes for things to change enough, so maybe you won’t “top yourself”.

They are an ill-suited gang.  They don’t like each other, but they decide to stick it out, taking a pathetic “vacation” together, coffee at Starbucks and an “intervention”.

The story jumps around from narrator to narrator, so they all get a chance to tell the story through their own eyes.  Hornby writes a bleakly humorous downer, but the message is clear - we all need each other and time does make things change, often for the better.  It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but it can be OK.

“A missing girl. A hungry gator. Only one way out.”

Skink by Carl Hiaasen

I should have paid more attention to the cover: “A missing girl. A hungry gator. Only one way out.” This is classic Hiaasen. Skink is his first “teen” novel, and it’s every bit as fun as his “adult” novels. And, it’s easily as good as his books for younger readers (Hoot, Flush, etc.).

Mallory, cousin of Richard, has disappeared with a dodgy guy she met on the internet who claims to be Talbo Chock.  Except he’s not; he’s a creepy person pretending to be a decorated Afghan War Marine who died in combat.  The creep has stolen Talbo Chock’s identity. Enter Skink, ex-governor of Florida, believed dead. Skink teams up with Richard and they set off on a hunt to find Mallory and the fake Talbo Chock, T.C.

It’s a race against time. We find out some pretty unsavory things about the fake TC and what might be happening to Mallory.  Mallory is pretty flaky, but pretty tough, too.  Richard eventually finds her, but the adventure just gets more complicated because by that time, he’s lost Skink and he finds fake, armed TC with Mallory. Yikes!

In typical Carl Hiaasen fashion, the story spins out of control.  Enjoy it.  It’s crazy, silly, and just this side of believable.

What's it all about?

Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern

The story opens with an unsent email message, “you want the whole story, but you don’t realize - it’s impossible to tell the whole story.  You probably think it was all about sex, but that’s where you’re wrong.”

The action of the story begins many months before this email is written.  It’s intended to draw us into the story, and it feels contrived.

Basic story line: it’s senior year for Amy and her mother wants her to have a “normal” year. It turns out that Amy has cystic fibrosis, is in a wheelchair, and uses a device for speaking.  Her mother is recruits a team of paid peer helpers that will push Amy’s wheelchair from class to class, eat lunch with her, and introduce her to new friends.  One of her new student helpers is Matthew, but only because Amy convinces her mother to choose him for her team of 5. While Amy is a very talented student, Matthew is not and, his OCD constantly interferes with his school and social life.  What follows is the story of Matthew and Amy’s senior year and how they deal with their respective “disabilities”.  It’s probably no surprise that Amy deals with her challenges better than Matthew does with his.

The story takes a weird turn when Amy has sex with one of her peer-helpers (not Matthew) and ends up pregnant.  By this time, she and Matthew are in love with each other, but they are afraid to admit it to each other. Amy has to decide what to do about the baby and what to do about the big plans she and her parents have for her life after high school.

There are elements in this novel that require a leap of faith: allowing paid “peer helpers” to take Amy around instead of trained aides, that Amy would have sex with one of her peer helpers, that her parents would send her off to Stanford University 6 hours away from home, and that she would try to hide her pregnancy from her parents by coming home and living with her old Physics teacher.  

I really had to look for things to like about this book.  I liked the premise of a challenged teen learning to be more independent so she could go off to college, but the pregnancy seemed manufactured to keep us reading. The characters were not particularly empathetic, and the action was slow. I think the book would have been better if it had focused only on Amy and Matthew’s relationship and how they dealt with becoming more independent. I loved the idea that Amy would consider going off to live on her own, but by the time we finally got to that, I’d kind of lost interest.

Positive = HIV = Win

Positive: a memoir by Paige Rawl

Every middle and high school student should read this book.  Paige was born HIV positive. Her life rolled along fairly normally (for someone who is HIV positive) until junior high.  At that point her best friend found out she was HIV and started a smear campaign against her. Nearly every one of Paige’s friends dropped her.  They wrote awful things about her on social media and bathroom walls.  Her life blew up and she couldn’t understand it.  HIV had just been something she dealt with every day.  She never realized it was something that would cause people to hate her, even people she didn’t know.

Paige attempted suicide, but that’s not really what the story is about. It’s about how she overcame the prejudice and built a life for herself in spite of the bullying and being HIV positive. Paige continued to enter and win beauty contests and to use that as a platform for educating people about HIV. In the end, Paige wins, and we all win.

Just so, little Mowgli.

Kipling’s Choice by Geert Spillebeen

Rudyard Kipling. The Just so Stories. Jungle Book. Mowgli. Stiff Upper Lip. WWI.

The year is 1915. This very compact fictionalized account of Lt. John Kipling’s WWI battle experience is difficult to read and yet touching in many ways. It is translated into English from Flemish and the tale is probably more common than a young reader could imagine which makes it all the more poignant, I guess.

John Kipling, son of the famous author Rudyard Kipling) desperately wants to go to war. Finally, his father finds someone willing to give this very privileged small, nearsighted, teenager a commission in the Irish Guard.  And with that, John is set to go to war for Great Britain against the hated Germans.

The action of the story is told in flashbacks of September 26, 1915 and the fatal battle that ultimately claimed Lt. Kipling’s life. Along the way we learn about the “jolly” life of the very rich and privileged John Kipling and the years and events leading up to that fateful Sept. 26th.

We hear a first hand account from the young lieutenant as he lays dying in a trench in northern France. HIs body is never found, but the message - war touches all, the rich and the poor - is clear. Over a million young men gave the ultimate sacrifice in WWI.

It’s a bit difficult to read at first because it jumps from present to past with no warning other than a change in typeface. the story is gruesome, just as war is. You want John to be found and saved and yet, you know he will not be.

Par Avion

I Will Always Write Back: how one letter changed two lives by Caitlin Alifirenka and Martin Ganda

This is one of the best books I’ve read this year.  In 8th grade Caitlin gets a pen pal in Africa because she likes the sound of “Zimbabwe”.  She doesn’t really understand where Martin lives or what his life is about, but she is so excited to have a pen pal.  Caitlin and Martin write each other regularly. Caitlin tells him all about her life in the suburbs of Phila., her trials with her friends, about her pets and her family. Martin shares his life in the slum.  Caitlin misses most of the clues to Martin’s dire circumstances, but eventually she understands he needs money to be able to continue to attend school and she sends him $20.  Twenty dollars goes a long way in Zimbabwe and Martin is able to pay for school and buy some food for his family. Time passes and the situation for Martin’s family gets more desperate. His father loses his job. and there is rampant inflation, the Zimbabwean economy tanks. By this time Caitlin and Martin have forged a strong friendship and Caitlin wants to do more to help Martin and his family.  Soon, Caitlin’s mother gets involved and things begin to really improve for Martin.

Without giving away the ending, Caitlin and Martin remain close and an important part of each other’s lives today. The message: we need to make our worlds smaller.  The book is written at a fairly low level; I think that was done to widen the appeal. It’s a book every student should read;  it’s powerful and uplifting.  We can accomplish so much with so little and in doing so make a huge difference in another person’s life.

Oh, Nessie...

At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen, new by Sara Gruen, is billed as thrilling.  Well, it’s a great read, but not a thrilling read in the traditionally “thrilling” sense. Set towards the end of WWII in the Highlands of Scotland, At the Water’s Edge, is the story of Maddy, her husband Ellis and friend Hank, who set off on a lark to photograph the Loch Ness monster.  

Water’s Edge is, ultimately, a romantic tale, but also a story of greed, abuse, the Great War, and deceit. Ellis and Hank are found unfit for combat (flat feet and color blindness).  To make themselves better and in some weird way, redeem their pride for not serving their country, they decide to document the Loch Ness monster on film to prove it really exists. Their pride is at stake; they look like able bodied men, yet they are still at home and not at the front. It eats at their self-worth, particularly Ellis’s, and causes their uber wealthy families embarrassment.

The journey from America to Scotland is fraught with danger. U-boats patrol the Atlantic and while they are not targeted, they are forced to take on wounded soldiers whose boat was torpedoed.  It is their first face to face encounter with the horrors of war. The story continues, a bit slowly at times, at a hotel in the Highlands of Scotland. More or less abandoned by Ellis and Hank, Maddy friends the locals, especially the handsome Captain Grant, proprietor of the hotel, and a man with a secret. Unhappiness bubbles dangerously below the surface and spills over in a very messy way.  True love will win, and it does,  but it’s a bumpy ride. A very nice historical read, well-developed characters and setting.  You won’t regret reading it.

Swash buckling Faeries - Yee Haw!

The Accidental Highwayman being the tale of Kit Bristol, his horse Midnight, a mysterious princess and sundry magical persons besides by Ben Tripp

Mistaken identities, swashbuckling horsemen, sword fighting, magic, faeries.  The Accidental Highwayman has it all. I think it’s as good as The Princess Bride without the iconic comedic actors and lines. And, it certainly would make a great movie.

The protagonist, Kit, is bound to save a faerie princess from an arranged (and very politically motivated) marriage to King George III of England. Humor, mishaps, high speed horse chases, and we are left hanging after being transported to a different world. It’s non-stop action, but the story line is very basic and like The Princess Bride the action moves Kit and the Princess closer together, but it’s just really just activity - not plot driven.

So, strap on your swords and buckle your seat belts. This is one heck of a ride. It may be a thin plot, but it's a LOT of fun.

Ride the Rails - Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

There aren’t many books I sit down and read in one session, but Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline was that kind of book. The first person narrative told through the eyes of 10 year old “orphan”, Niahm,  is very believable and satisfying. Christina Baker Kline backs up her story with solid research and interviews with actual Orphan Train orphans.  The setting is a fictional town in Maine on Mount Desert Island. The narrator flip-flops between 91 year old Vivian (Niamh) and seventeen year old Molly, a foster child who is aging out of the system.  Molly is in trouble for stealing a library book and has to do community service hours in lieu of “juvvie”.  She ends up in Vivian’s mansion home helping her sort through eighty years of memories to fulfill her sentence.  The result is therapeutic for both of them and an unlikely friendship develops because of their similar backgrounds despite the difference in age and circumstances.

Although some aspects a bit implausible – getting arrested for stealing a library book – come on, I’m a librarian. I suppose it could happen – I really enjoyed the story.  Kline ties everything up prettily by the end, a tad hard to believe, too since everything seems to work out for Molly who has had little luck navigating the system prior to this. The story is character and plot driven. The characters are likable. I wanted things to work out for all them.  Kline descriptive bits seem self-conscious, which makes them tedious. Her real strength is in her character development.  I loved the characters and their stories, particularly Niamh’s.  It’s good historical fiction, but I would also add it to the “tear jerker”  genre.  I cared so much for these characters that I got caught up in their stories and wept along with them.