YA Angels, Demons, and Dead People

I think angels are really coming up and replacing vampires as the hot new thing with a paranormal twist.  It seems like we are buying a new angel book with every book order we place!

I must say, however, that the "dead girl" phenomena kind of disturbs me.  It seems so anti-girl power, to have all these dead girls floating around.  But I can see the appeal to teens, who may be curious about death and use that as a way to explore the concept.

I'd heard bad things about this book.  The main male character was a jerk and treated the female character badly.  The female character was weak.  The story was creepy.  I'd heard so many bad things, in fact, that I didn't order this book until a patron specifically requested it.  By then it was already a popular book and I relented (even though the reviews at Goodreads are TERRIBLE).

To me, this book is in a similar vein to Twilight; the female character isn't particularly strong and, yes, the male character is kind of a creepy jerk, but the tension between the two keeps your nose in the book long after you should be in bed.

Nora meets Patch when they are given new seating assignments in Biology class.  Patch unnerves Nora and she finds him cocky and kind of a jerk.  After the new seating assignment, he seems to pop up wherever she is and she starts getting worried.  Is he stalking her?  How does he know so much about her?  Nora eventually starts to feel as if she's being watched, especially in her home and believes Patch is responsible.  She starts to believe that he's trying to kill her.

She's not wrong.

It is hard to go into too much detail about this book without giving the whole story line away.  But I stand by my original statement: it is bad, but hard to put down.

Now this book, this book I really enjoyed.  I thought the concept was really unique: what if someone was practically dead but there was a teeny, tiny part of them still alive, and we could build them a new body and put that teeny, tiny part inside and make them new.

Jenna wakes up one day knowing she is Jenna and not much else.  She has few memories and the few she does have are a bit fuzzy.

Jenna lives in a world where there are lots of antibiotic resistant bacteria and a bad virus wiped out a good portion of the world's population about 25 years prior.  As a result, the government stepped in and created a point system; once you've used up your 100 points it doesn't matter how rich or smart or powerful you are, your medical treatment stops.  Every medical intervention has a point value, obviously the bigger the issue the bigger the point value.

Jenna's dad is a biotechnology genius and Jenna was in an accident that used up all her points. And yet, here she is, alive, with not so much as a scratch.

As Jenna learns more about her world, and re-learns things that were lost during her coma, she starts asking hard questions and pushing her parents to the brink.  They are stressed to the max and her grandmother, whom Jenna has very fond memories of, will hardly have anything to do with her.  Jenna feels like something is off, but she doesn't know exactly what until she accidentally cuts herself and, instead of bleeding, sees blue nanogel inside her body.

This book evokes about a million questions about ethics.  In fact, I'm considering using it for this summer's book club since the theme is "beneath the surface."  This book would fit in perfectly.

YA Vampires and Beyond

I will admit to being a total Twilight fangirl about 3 years ago.  I was totally uninterested initially, but read the book on a whim and was hooked.  Thus began my crazy trips to movie theatres and reading the books one after the other and over again.  So, needless to say, I enjoy a good paranormal book!  Although my love of Twilight  has since faded, I still enjoy picking up a good vampire or similar book on occasion.

I think these books appeal to teens for a variety of reasons.  I mean, who doesn't want to think about all the cool things you'd see if you could live forever?  Or think about how awesome it'd be to have a cool power?  Teens already have a sense of invincibility, so paranormal books in which many of the coolest characters are immortal can be a huge draw.

This was a vampire novel with a twist: vampirism is spread through intimate contact and, wait for it....cat breath by a parasite.  So unique!

Cal is a peep, he was given the parasite during a one night stand while he was drunk.  He is different, though, because he doesn't show symptoms.  There are several others like him, although he is not especially common, and the peeps who don't exhibit symptoms become peep hunters for the Night Watch.  They go out and hunt the peeps that are considered dangerous.  Cal is in the midst of hunting down all the girls that he gave the parasite before he was aware that he had it.  He's also hunting for the elusive Morgan, the girl who infected him, who has essentially disappeared.

Due to his inebriation, Cal can only remember bits and pieces of his night with Morgan.  Things begin coming back, slowly, and one night he ends up at her apartment building.  There he meets Lacy, who clues him in that the entire floor where she lives became vacant all at once and the rents are way below value.  As he explores more and more into this fact, he stumbles upon hordes of red eyed rats in the basement and, unexpectedly, finds Lacey has followed him down.  He likes Lacey and doesn't want anything bad to happen to her (the Night Watch tend to make people who know too much disappear), so she ends up staying at his apartment for several nights.

He eventually realizes that the peeps he's stumbling upon are showing more and more sanity, even in the depths of their psychosis.  In fact, the last batch almost hold a conversation AND they seem to serve a cat.  Something is obviously going on, but the Night Watch doesn't seem willing to fill him in.

Another unique thing about this book is that, between every chapter, there are some facts about different parasites and how they affect their environments.

This is a cool twist on the story of Little Red Riding Hood.  When the March sisters, Scarlett and Rosie, were young, a fenris (a twist on werewolves) comes to their home, transforms and kills their Oma March and leaving Scarlett terribly disfigured in the process.  The fenris seek out young girls to feast on and are particularly drawn to the color red.

Now on their own, with their mother having officially abandoned them once they were in their mid-teens, they are trying to eek out a survival while Scarlett hunts the fenris in their small Georgia town and is training Rosie to do the same.  Scarlett is a girl possessed; every waking minute is devoted to hunting or preparing to hunt.  Rosie realizes that she owes Scarlett her life and, as such, does as Scarlett wants.  If Scarlett wants to train Rosie and have Rosie dedicate her life to hunting, then that's what she's going to do.  Even if it isn't what she wants.

Few people know about the fenris but there is another family near the March sisters that does.  Silas is nearest to the age of the March sisters and has known both girls since childhood.  He's been gone for about a year, visiting family in California, but when he's home he hunts with Scarlett.

Every seven years, there are a group of potential fenris that come of age.  This just happens to be a part of that cycle, so the fenris are much more active.  The trio decide that they should probably head to Atlanta since the population is much more dense (which means more fenris and more chance to find the potential), so off they go.  And, indeed, the fenris population is essentially crawling around and through Atlanta.  There is no problem killing several wolves a day.  But they also need information, namely about who the potential is and how they know he's a potential.

There is build up and a big battle/finish with a twist.  I saw the twist coming, but I don't want to spoil it!  This book was easy to lose yourself in but still had a lot of good plot points and action that barely ever stopped.

YA Books in Verse

This seems to be a really "hot" thing to do right now, to write novels in verse.  I think Ellen Hopkins is considered by many to kind of be the "mother" of this trend, but I have trouble with her content so I have avoided her books this week.

I think this is a great way to expose teens to poetry in a non-scary way.  Many teens think of poetry as difficult to read and even more difficult to understand, but novels in verse are a very far cry from old school traditional poetry.  Most novels in verse are written in free form poetry and are super easy to follow and understand.

I ordered this book a while back and it has only circulated a few times, so I thought this would be a good option for me to read so that I could use it for readers' advisories.

This is a book told from multiple perspectives during the era of the Vietnam War (and just before it).  You essentially have two couples, although one is just a loose couple and the girl in that pair is considered kind of slutty.  These teens basically just talk about things that teens in the 60s might talk about: drugs, abortion, sex, and, eventually, the Vietnam War.

The story line is kind of vague and undefined until the boys are sent to basic training, then most of the correspondence revolves around things happening at home or things happening in the Marines/Army or in Vietnam.

This book would be great for teens who enjoy historical fiction and I've been sure that it is included on our library's historical fiction list that the teens look at periodically.

This was one of my favorite books I've read during this class, as evidenced that I've used it for several assignments!  And it was one that I was simply CERTAIN I wouldn't like.

Told in multiple perspectives, we mainly follow Maura, a young wife and mother, Peter, "the help" at a local club for the wealthy, Celestia, the daughter of a wealthy man and who is staying at the club for the summer, and Kate, a nurse who is seemingly unconnected to the others in the beginning.  All of these people are forced to survive and rebuild after a dam breaks and millions of tons of water crash down from a mountain in  New England.

Each character really endeared themselves to me.  I loved Celestia for her total dismissal of "society", for daring to love someone beneath her social status, and for the the way she loved her family.  I loved Peter for his willingness to take a chance on Celestia and for knowing the reality was that they could probably never be together.  I loved Maura and her fierce love of her husband and willingness to protect her children so faithfully.  And I loved Kate for her realism and bluntness.

I had never heard of the Johnstown Flood and this book made me want to learn more about it.  The author includes a phenomenal list of resources in the back, perhaps knowing that the stories of survival would make people want to learn about it.

YA GLBT Books

When I began working at my library two years ago, this was an area that was seriously lacking in the YA department (in both fiction and non-fiction).  I can understand why: we're in a rural library and it might be easier to simply not have those book vs. facing a challenge.  I don't like it, but I do understand it.

So when I started doing the YA ordering, I got online and ordered what were generally considered to be some of the best of the best in YA GLBTQ books.  I tend to think that, being a more rural library, these books are even MORE important to have.  While a teen in a big city might have a support group to turn to or be "out" so that s/he can be friends with others who are also "out", that simply isn't an option here.  The "good 'ol boys" network in my town is strong and bullying for being different is a part of that.

In my library, the person who was working as the Teen Librarian at the time this book was popular felt it was "too mature" for the teen area.  Considering the book was falling apart when I went after it, I'd say the teens were seeking it out anyway.  And then I got irritated (I mean, it is published in partnership with MTV books, for goodness sake!), so I ordered another copy for the teen area this year.  I knew this book would come back around in popularity, especially because the movie was coming out soon.

This book follows Charlie through a series of letters to a friend, who is never identified.  Charlie is a freshman and having some trouble making friends and fitting in in high school.  Charlie is a wallflower, someone who is there but not noticed.  Until, one day at a football game, two seniors, Sam and Patrick, who are step-siblings.  They are beautiful and worldly, both things Charlie is not, but they befriend him and it means the world to Charlie.

They help Charlie cope after the death of an aunt he loved dearly (and around whom there is a significant twist at the end of the book) and help him with his depression and anxiety.  There are tough issues in this book and they are dealt with in a way that seems to ring true.

It'll sound hokey, but I think all of us have a bit of Charlie in us.  Even the most popular person in the room has probably, at one time, felt like a wallflower.  I think this is one of the reasons this book is still popular (and remains very challenged); everyone can relate, even if only a bit.

Ava is from a super liberal family; she calls her parents by their first names and when she declared herself a lesbian, her parents literally broke out the champagne.  Ava has a girlfriend, dyes her hair a deep black, and wears very little color.

But Ava has a secret: she longs to be a girl who wears pink.  She loves the color.  She also loves skirts and dresses and kitten heels, she just doesn't feel that she can get away with wearing those things.  In order to get a fresh start, she transfers to a private school and, on the first day, wears a pair of fitted jeans and a new pink, cashmere, argyle sweater that she just adores.  

Even though she's struggling a bit with the new, heavy course load, she feels that she's off to a great start.  She's fallen in with a good crowd who conspire to hook her up with a boy named Ethan (Ava thinks she might like boys as well, so she's totally ok with this).

Things start to get dicey, though, when she auditions for (and completely makes a fool of herself while doing it) the school musical.  She ends up signing up to work with the stage crew, or Screw, as they call themselves, which Ava's new cool friends think is just awful.  At this point, you get to see how very confused Ava is about a lot of things in her life.  She is confused about what she wants and who she wants to be.  She wants to be "normal" more than she is normal and has a hard time accepting that.

YA Books With Alternating Narrators

I tend to be very wishy washy on this type of narration.  I think it can be done really well or it can be a disaster, so this isn't typically an easy grouping of books for me to read.  I hate to pick up a book that isn't good enough or well done enough to finish!  When an author has two different narrators, I think it tends to be easier for one of the narrators to feel "off" or not authentic to the story.

Fortunately, the selections in this realm were wonderful and I had no trouble enjoying the books that I've read over the course of this week.

I had picked this book up to read once previously and wasn't able to get to it before it was due back to the library, so I was excited to see it on the list.

This story essentially follows a group of beauty queens, winners of each respective state in the Miss Teen Dream pageant.  The story starts with a plane crash.  The contestants are headed to the exotic island location where the pageant for the overall Miss Teen Dream will be held when there is an explosion and their plane goes down.

Many contestants are killed.  Many more are injured.  And what happens next I absolutely didn't expect: this turns in to one of the best books on feminism I've ever read.  Through this trial (being stranded on an island, having to provide for themselves) the girls are transformed.

The reader learns that many of these girls are not what they seem.  Some are going through the pageant system because they really do love pageants.  But lots more are doing it for their mothers.  Or doing it to send a message. Or truly doing it for the scholarship money.

What the girls don't know is that the Corporation, the organization that is in charge of the pageant, is losing tons of money on the deal and has arranged the entire plane crash and intended for all the girls to die.  That some of them survived is a huge issue.  They also have more nefarious goals in mind for a nearby island nation that is rich in natural resources.

It was really interesting to see the story line of the contestants merge with that of the Corporation.  And it was fun to read because the reader is actually privy to some information that each group doesn't have yet, so you get to wait and see the reactions once the other group starts putting pieces together.

This is where I got nervous as I've discovered having two different authors is a great way to have a story that may not mesh well.  Fortunately both authors are able to stay on-point and keep things together.

Lily wants a boyfriend. In a stroke of madness, she leaves a notebook on a shelf in a bookstore and leaves a dare for the reader.  Lily is an eccentric and accepted this years ago, so she kind of needs a boyfriend who can keep up with her.

Dash picks up the notebook and is intrigued.  And a little bit irritated.  If she gets to place a notebook with a dare, so does he.  And back and forth the notebook goes. It is the holidays and while the reader knows that Lily loves the holidays, Dash is not such a fan.  Unfortunately, many of the dares are holiday inspired (like feeling up Santa, going to FAO Schwartz, to a Jewish/Hanukkah "rave", etc.).

As this notebook goes back and forth, they get to know each other a little bit, but not as much as you'd think.  In reality, this book is just a fun (and funny), easy, holiday type read.  I found Lily a bit more easy to relate to.  Some of the side characters, like Lily's crazy aunt, became my favorites.