Tag: YA

Review: Golden Boy

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Review for “Golden Boy” by Tara Sullivan (2013)

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Ay, I loved this story.

Before I read this book, I was only slightly aware of the killings of albinos in Africa, specifically in the country of Tanzania. Tanzania, an eastern African nation, is home to an above-average number of albinos, who are targeted for murder by witch doctors and folk healers because it is believed that their skin, hair, and body parts will bring good luck as ingredients for potions and other rituals. In addition to this, they are ostracized in their own families and communities–discriminated against, abandoned, cast out, sometimes even killed as infants.

13-year-old Dhahabo (called ‘Habo’ for short) lives in a small Tanzanian village with his mother and siblings. His father, we learn, left when he was an infant, convinced that his albino son was a portend of bad luck. His mother shows little emotion towards Habo and has reduced herself to tolerating him. His brothers ridicule him, he has no friends. Everyday life fares no better–because of the lack of pigmentation in his eyes, Habo cannot see very well. His skin easily burns in the sun and he is forced to stay indoors, which makes him useless in the eyes of his family. The only one who shows him any hint of kindness is his older sister, Asu, who makes a point to look after him. When dire straits strike the family, Habo and his family leave their village and go to another, where he is shunned once more by his aunt and forced to hide there, due to the fact that her village is known for the murder of albinos. Eventually Habo leaves this situation as well and goes to the larger city of Dar es Salaam, where he finds himself face to face with a man who is determined to murder him for his body parts.

I won’t give away the whole story, but I will say that it is definitely a good one. Habo is a person who you can’t help but to feel empathy for. You want to give him a hug and invite him home for tea. Despite his lot in life, there isn’t a bad bone in his body. When he describes the stares and the pain he feels when people call him a zeruzeru (a word that literally means “zero”, “nothing”) you feel the same pain he feels. It touches your heart.

This novel was a classic adventure story. The author did some great research, and it definitely shows in the writing. Habo’s journey is incredible and worth reading about. Its completely appropriate for middle schoolers, not too weird and definitely not boring

Review: Asking for It

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Review for “Asking for It” by Louise O’Neill (2016)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This book hits you like a sledgehammer. It’s sad, it’s sadistic, it’s cruel. It makes you angry. You want it to be false, pure fiction made up by an ambitious author. But you know from the headlines dealing with this topic that it’s all true, way too realistic.

Emma O’Donovan is an 18 year old high school student in a small Irish town. She’s gorgeous, smart, a promising student, surrounded by beautiful friends and a loving family. In the standard YA novel Emma would be the stock ‘mean girl’ character, the popular bitch, the Queen Bee we love to hate. Because the story is told through her point of view, you are privy to all of her thoughts, many of which are downright obnoxious. In the first pages of the book you learn that she is actually quite insecure–she’s shallow, narcissistic, and jealous of anyone who makes an effort to be part of the same attention that she desperately seeks. When it comes to boys, Emma must be noticed. When they don’t, she wonders why.

One night, Emma and her friends go to a party. She flirts with other boys, including the boyfriend of one of her friends. She drinks heavily, she has consensual sex with one of the guys there. She willingly takes a pill that a partygoer gives her, which causes her to lose consciousness. She awakens on her front porch with no underwear and her dress turned inside out, sunburned and bleeding, with no memory of the night before. Pictures of her gang rape by 4 male classmates are uploaded on social media. People make comments. No one questions the boys. Everyone hates her.

Emma is left to deal with the consequences of that night, and they are awful. Her friends shun her, her parents are ashamed of her. The community blames her. She acted like a slut, she got what she deserved. She took drugs. She drank. She flirted with other boys, and yes, did have consensual sex with one of the accused at the party. She changed her story to the police. She contacted another of the accused boys after the incident. The bullying that she is subjected to by her peers was some of the most sadistic instances of harassment I’ve ever read before. It’s terrible.

Louise O’Neill’s decision to make Emma O’Donovan’s character an unlikeable one was a bold move. No one feels sorry for this victim, and in a lot of ways, YOU don’t either. The author’s choice to portray Emma in all of her flawed humanness forces you to confront your own prejudices about what rape is and what a rape victim is supposed to ‘behave’ like. It’s a spot-on, timely book; specifically in today’s age, where we are still (in 2016, mind you) debating the very definition of rape and consent.

The ending was just that, an ending. It isn’t happy. Nobody apologizes to Emma, nobody gets their day in court. Nothing is wrapped up. The scorn of the community continues, and Emma’s emotional torture (by others and upon herself) does not end. She will deal with this ugliness for the rest of her life, and she knows it.

This is a book that makes you pause and think. It’s not so much plot driven as it is a character study that is meant to challenge our understanding of what a rape victim is. In a perfect world we would extend Emma our support because she was taken advantage of without her consent. We would care. Sadly, we don’t. Louise O’Neill reminds you that it still isn’t a perfect world, and crimes like this continue to go on, whether it’s in Ireland or America or anywhere. It’s an ugly story, and I was all too glad to read and learn from it.

Review: One

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Review for “One” by Sarah Crossan (2015)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Loved this book. It’s written in verse so it’s a quick read, a couple of hours of uninterrupted time will take you straight to the end. Anyway, “One” focuses on a unique topic I’ve never seen in fiction before: the lives of conjoined (or, “Siamese”) twins. Due to this fact, Tippi and Grace (I love their Hitchcock-themed names, btw) are typical teenage girls that share vital organs and have never attended school–until now. This book follows them on their first day at school and beyond, on their quest for a sense of normalcy in their lives.

However, Tippi and Grace’s home lives are no picnic. Their dad is a drunk, their sister has body issues of her own, and their family has little money, which leaves the family with the difficult choice of deciding whether or not to allow a film crew in their home to document Tippi and Grace’s lives. Eventually a dire medical situation arises with the twins’ health and they must decide whether to stay “one” or be separated.

I won’t reveal the end, but I will say that this book was a definite tearjerker. For me, it says a lot about a novel written in verse, because I typically like my fiction to read like fiction, with neat little paragraphs. However, this book was special. There were passages I found myself reading aloud because they seemed to leap right off of the page. Beautiful writing.

I rated this four stars because this book isn’t without its flaws. For one, it is narrated completely from Grace’s point of view, which is somewhat of a end spoiler. A dual narration probably would have kept the suspense going at least until the middle of the book. Second, it just kinda…ends. You never find out what happens with many different aspects of the story that seemed to be quite critical.

I definitely recommend this book. And bring a box of tissues.

Review: Dime

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Review for “Dime” by E.R. Frank (2015)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This book is horrifying and heartbreaking. I was holding out on four stars, but this book is incredible. Five stars.

When the novel opens, Dime (we are never told her real name) is a 13-year-old girl living in a foster home in New Jersey with a guardian who drinks and physically abuses her. Her only true love is reading, which she quietly does whenever she has a moment in between caring for her foster siblings and fighting off the sexual advances of her foster brother. She walks the streets cold, sick, and hungry in the evenings until she meets another young girl who takes her home to meet her ‘boyfriend,’ a charismatic, smooth talking man named Daddy. Dime becomes enamored with Daddy, whom she soon discovers is a pimp. Dime resists the reality of her situation until she is told that in order to ‘earn’ Daddy’s love, she must bring him money and work the streets.

This book is gritty and raw. It spares no details of all of the ugly realities of human trafficking you’ve probably already seen on tv. Dime describes in vivid detail the particulars of being regularly beaten and raped, along with life on the street as a pimp’s ‘property,’ sex work in dirty hotels, degrading sexual acts requested by johns. It’s adult stuff, yet this book is completely appropriate for a YA audience. Although I cringed through most of the story because even though she only hints at times of what’s going on, I knew what was happening to this 13-year-old child. Dime manages to detach herself from the ugliness around her and never quits school (even though she’s encouraged to), never stops reading, and towards the end of the story, begins to see her way out of a life of prostitution.

I’m determined not to spoil this book for this review. However, I was definitely impressed with this novel. Dime is such a likeable girl that you can’t help but to root for her in the face of such insurmountable odds. It took me about 4 days to read this book and all through that time I could not help but to think about her and the thousands of girls just like her being held against their will.

This book is definitely a must-read. Get this book right away!

Review: How it Went Down

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Review for “How it Went Down” by Kekla Magoon (2014)

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

One of the struggles I remember having as a middle school teacher was finding books about current issues that are timely and relevant to urban youth. In 2012, I was teaching 8th grade when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch guy in a supposed act of ‘self defense’ near Orlando, Florida. None of my students were there, but I remember the deep sense of anger that they felt about it. Perhaps they understood for the first time in their young lives that because of the color of their skin, their lives were expendable. Perhaps they saw their own mortality in the picture of a young man dressed like them in a hoodie in a country that doesn’t give a damn about their success or failure. Whatever their reasons were, I remember them coming to school in the days after the shooting went down wearing hoodies, carrying Skittles (reportedly young Treyvon had a bag of Skittles when he was murdered), practically daring the teachers and admins to say something to them about it. I remember giving a lesson in response on the complexities of the Stand Your Ground law and how most of them perked up, excited that I took the time to even care about an issue that interested them.

Fast forward to 2014. How it Went Down is published. It’s a fictional story but has all the earmarks of the Trayvon Martin case. It’s a moderately paced urban tale about the events surrounding the shooting of a unarmed young black man by a white man who mistakes a Snickers bar in his pocket as a gun. It’s a powerful and relevant story, and the two stars I’m giving it have nothing to do with its message or its sense of importance in today’s society.

I just didn’t like the way this story was written. For me, there were too many perspectives (the victim’s mother, the shooter, the shooter’s friend, bystanders, the victim’s sister, the victim’s friends, a minister, etc) —everybody has a ‘say’ in this story and it was far too confusing for me to keep track of who is saying or doing what. There are labels at the top of each section before each character speaks, but with over a dozen people ‘speaking,’ it was just too much. About a third of the way in I tossed my hands in the air and didn’t finish. While I’m not knocking the inclusion of the differing perspectives, I didn’t like the manner in which it was included here. I have no doubt that multiple perspectives are absolutely necessary–especially in the hazy aftermath of sudden movements and adrenaline responses. We will probably never know what truly went down in Florida, in New York, or in Ferguson, only that a young man is dead and another gets to walk away scott-free, the outcome already decided due to the color of their skin.

I would not recommend this for personal reading satisfaction. I would, however, recommend this to people who were in the situation I was in in 2012, desperately searching for reading materials to penetrate the zeitgeist of today’s youth.

Review: Firsts

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Review for “Firsts” by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn (2016)

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Man, this book sucks…

Possible spoilers abound. #sorrynotsorry

Mercedes (or, Mercy) Ayers is a 17 year old girl who provides a unique ‘service’ to the boys at her high school. Boys looking to get their first time awkwardness over with and ‘learn the ropes’ come to her for their first sexual experience. All she asks for in return is their secrecy and that they give their girlfriends the perfect first time, something that she herself never had. All goes well until she hits a snag with Zach, a boy who wants to be more than just an occasional a sex partner, and her best friend Angela, a ‘prayer group nerd’ whose boyfriend Charlie throws a monkey wrench into Mercedes’ life.

Lemme say this: I knew this book would be about sex. Sex scenes, sex positions, sex, sex, sex. I don’t have a problem with it, but the way it was executed was way over the top–particularly for a high school context. Like who would think there would be so many male virgins at ONE school, scared of how they would perform sexually? Mercedes also spends extensive amounts of time with other things sex related, like her lingerie collection (satin, leather, lace, negligees, etc). Dude, she’s seventeen. How does she know so much about this topic? Yeah, she’s no virgin, but the author portrays Mercedes as practically a porn star with specific knowledge on how to please each boy she takes on, based on his perceived attributes. Bitch, please.

As far as the character herself…make no mistake, girlfriend is a train wreck. Mercedes’ mom (not called Mom, but by her first name, Kim) is a liquored-up, Botoxed divorcee who’s never at home, her father abandoned the family long ago, and “her first time” was far less than ideal. The author spends a lot of time in this novel discussing Mercedes’ home life, trying to get you feel for her and to empathize with why she does the things she does. And I understand, I really do. But come on…I’m not saying Mercedes is a bad person for having sex (she does use condoms, btw) but did she really think she could have sex with a double-digit number of guys at one high school and for it not get out? And not just any guys, but OTHER PEOPLE’S BOYFRIENDS? Come on, now. I’m not one for slut-shaming, but you can’t blame an entire school for incurring their wrath upon her once they heard the truth about her side chick exploits…

I just can’t believe this book is anywhere near a realistic portrayal of the sex lives of high schoolers. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve been in high school, but still. No way.

Review: Exit, Pursued by a Bear

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Review for “Exit, Pursued by a Bear” by E.K. Johnston (2016)

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

As soon as this book came up on NetGalley I immediately wanted to read it. I didn’t request it there because I’ve got so many books in my NG queue (I’ll probably be reading until Christmas), so I downloaded this from Amazon. At only 250 pages it’s a quick read, but one that completely perplexed and frustrated me. Let me explain.

NOTE: Spoilers abound here. #sorrynotsorry

Hermoine Winters is a talented cheerleader in a small Canadian town, surrounded by friends and high expectations for her senior year. On a summer evening during the last night of cheerleading camp, she is slipped a drug in a drink by an unknown assailant and raped. When she awakens, she remembers nothing of the attack.

In theory, I should have loved this book. Hermoine defies everything about a rape ‘victim’ that we have ever been previously told or read about. She is bold, undeterred by people’s whispers and stares, and determined to move on with her life. Her friends, family, cheerleading coach, and her therapist rally to her side and support her. But that’s where the ‘good’ part of this book ends. I had incredible difficulty with Hermione as narrator. She is so emotionally detached here that she may as well have been on another plane of existence. Her whole ‘I don’t remember it, I’ll be ok’ attitude perplexed me. I understand that this is more than likely due to the trauma of not remembering her attack, but it distanced me from the story and did not make for a compelling narrative here. There were also deeper, more introspective events in the story that warranted discussion that were glossed over by the author with little to no fanfare at all. Her best friend comes out as a lesbian. Hermione has an abortion as a result of the rape. Although she senses who her perpetrator was, he is never caught or prosecuted. Throughout the book I kept waiting for that YES! moment in the story for Hermione to break out of her shell and claim her right to get fucking angry, but it never happened. The story managed to take all of its issues and wrap up neatly and then…exeunt.

A blurb in the back of the book by the author discusses how she wanted to stress the importance and value of support networks for rape victims. I certainly understand this, but perhaps this trope is overstressed here, to the detriment of the believability of the book. I mean, shit…we live in a society that still does not know how to discuss or even begin to address rape as an actual crime. The fact that there continues to be a raging debate over whether or not Bill Cosby’s admitted drugging of women was wrong in the year 2016 shows that many people still do not even consider this deplorable action to be a crime. Hermione drifts through this book facing the scorn of no one, and, other than an unnamed reporter who tries to slut-shame her, she faced little, if any, actual on-screen harassment. Her reality just did not feel real, it felt rushed and unrealistic.

Overall, the writing here is nothing to brag about. It wasn’t the point though, as I would have went higher in my rating had the main character connected with me. I’ve praised many books where the writing wasn’t that spectacular, but I formed a bond with the character. Despite my harsh criticism, I do recommend this book. Just because the main character did not connect with me does not mean she will not with you, or that you won’t get anything out of this book. If anything, I came away from this novel appreciating the fact that the author chose to write about the topic of rape/sexual assault, as it takes courage to do so.

Review: The Last Girl

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Review for “The Last Girl” by Joe Hart (March 2016)

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Didn’t care too much for this. The premise is interesting enough–a virus has led to a dramatic decline in the numbers of female births, reducing them worldwide to zero. The remaining girls are locked away in a facility where they are bred to repopulate the earth. This isn’t a spoiler, because honestly anyone reading this could have come up with the same conclusion within 5 minutes of reading this book. Zzzz.

Zoey, the main character, is a completely unbelievable character. For a person locked in a facility for most of her existence away from normal human contact, she seems to have an excellent knowledge of weapons (okkkkay) and her shooting ability is dead-on. The author explains the progression of the girl-destroying virus through the narratives of several other characters, but you don’t care about these people and honestly about 100 pages could have been cut from this book and it wouldn’t have suffered. The science here is kind of weird too. Isn’t the sex of a baby determined by the father? Hmm…

In addition to that, this entire book is written in a funky kind of present tense that I didn’t like. Example: She reaches out, wishing she could smash the protrusion of the calendar off the wall but knows they’ll just put another one up, and an act like that would earn her time in one of the boxes. I’m all for alternative points of view, but to read an entire book where it’s written like this makes you wonder if she’s in the process of doing something, just thinking about it, or if she even did it at all.

I imagine that plot comparisons to Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and P.D. James’ “Children of Men” are inevitable here, though this book isn’t even in the same league. I am also wondering why the author insists on continuing this book as the first of a trilogy. Then again, I’m not surprised, as it seems to be trendy for all dystopian YA, whether it’s good or not these days to be part of a trilogy (Hunger Games, Divergent, the 5th Wave, etc). Whatever.

[NOTE: This copy was provided to me from the publisher and Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.]

Review: Rikers High

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Review for “Rikers High” by Paul Volponi (2010)

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Martin Stokes is a likable 17-year-old teenager who gets locked up in one of the nation’s most notoriously violent jails for “steering” (telling an undercover officer where to buy drugs) and is sent to NYC’s Rikers Island. Due to the terrible backlog of the city’s criminal justice system and his family’s inability to pay bail, he is forced to spend several months in custody until his case comes up and is heard by the judge. To make his situation worse, he becomes an innocent bystander during a scuffle between two other inmates and gets slashed on the face, physically scarring him.

Martin is eventually transferred to an area where he is forced to go to school, and it is here when the real action of the story begins. Be warned though, this book is filled with tons of “lock-up” slang that only those who have spent some time in a NY state correctional facility would understand. Even though the author does a decent job of explaining the lingo (a blurb on the back of the book says that he was a teacher on Rikers Island for several years), it still makes an awkward narrative. Riot officers who break up fights in housing units are “turtles,” solitary confinement is “the bing,” the dorms where youth are held are known as the “Sprung,” and members of violent gang crews are referred to as “doldiers” (a combination of the words ‘dummy’ and ‘soldiers’), and so on.

Even though you understand Martin’s plight, his character and everyone else’s in this book was really thin and undeveloped. Part of this may have actually been intentional, due to the fact that we as a society tend to view all prisoners as the worst of the worst, the literal “throwaways” of society. The problem though is that even though this is the case, it’s just not enough to help you care more about what’s going on with the characters here. It’s also woefully unrealistic: Martin, a young black male, serves his time, learns his lesson, goes back home and moves on. This is usually not the case in real life. As we all know, many young black men with a felony on their criminal record are more likely to eventually return to jail: mostly due to factors such as a lack of resources, low employment prospects, poor quality education, etc. Prison is a giant revolving door, and few manage to break this destructive cycle. I would think that the author would use this book to make a statement on the effed-up state of the criminal justice system, but I digress.

I do recommend this book for YA readers, specifically for teenage boys, who we all know are notoriously hard to engage in reading. It’s a fair cautionary tale, and even though I didn’t like it, they will.

Review: Cutter Boy

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Review for “Cutter Boy” by Cristy Watson (to be published in September 2016)

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

As I’ve said earlier, the 10 years I spent as a 7th and 8th grade Language Arts teacher guides my reading choices. In addition to simply liking the genre, I often I select YA books to see how they deal with particular issues in our society. This was one such book. Right now I’m undecided about this. Three stars is out of the question, two is being generous here.

The rundown: Travis is bullied in school and ignored by his parents at home. Cutting himself with a razor blade is the one way he finds relief from his anguish and a way to control his pain. He becomes friends with a girl at school, Chyvonne, and eventually reveals his secret to her. Inspired by an unconventional teacher and his new friend, he eventually takes up the art of paper cutting as a way to avoid harming himself.

While I appreciate the author’s attempt to write a book about boys who self harm (an important subject that doesn’t get written about much) the ending seemed forced and terribly unfinished. The suggestion that art is a better form of therapy than cutting is suggested as a resolution here, but further details beyond this are left out. For such a large problem that cutting can be for a person, the resolution here just seemed too convenient, too simple. I am not a person who self harms, but I do know people who do. Pushing a piece of paper in front of them to cut instead of their bodies is an interesting prospect, but hardly a ‘solution’ to resolving the anger, pain, and depression that drives them to cut in the first place. I also did not like the way that the act of cutting was romanticized either. We don’t need to read about “beauty” swirling down the drain, or the smooth surface of a razor being “like ice, like glass” to understand what you’re referring to. These are tired, boring metaphors that don’t really portray cutting as the harmful action that it truly is. Like just...stop already.

Character development is also lacking here, big time. Travis, Mom, Dad, Chyvonne, and “the twins” (Travis’ sisters) all seem to move about this story with no real solid sense of purpose. I still don’t feel like I know anyone any better than I did when I first started. For a book that aims to engage reluctant readers, this book succeeds, but that’s about it.

[Note: I received a free publisher’s copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]