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.