Today we’re 7!!
Hooray!!
Heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s been a part of our journey so far.
- Cori & Jade
Happy Birthday PBC!
Unholy Night
Everyone knows the story of the Three Wise Men who followed the Star and found the Baby Jesus lying in his manger in Bethlehem. But what if I told you that the “wise men” were nothing more than escaped convicted criminals who had stolen their priestly robes from unsuspecting victims and while fleeing Herod’s army, stumbled into a stable in Bethlehem in hopes of ditching their pursuers? And what if the leader of this gang of thieves and murders was someone both vile and virtuous, bloodthirsty and deeply sentimental, and as bitingly sarcastic as he is sincere? How did one of the most wanted men in Ancient Judea end up helping the Messiah and his earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, flee both the tyranny of Rome and Herod across the burning desert to safety in Egypt?
In Seth Grahame-Smith‘s Unholy Night, such a story is imagined in brilliant detail. This book is at times hilarious and rife with irreverence, reminding me of Christopher Moore’s Lamb, and at other times a deeply complex look at a flawed human being. A chorus of voices, from Mary and Joseph to Herod and Pontius Pilate, share in telling this mesmerizing tale, but it’s Balthazar’s voice that rises above them all and brings them together into a richly textured narrative about human weakness and the ultimate healing power of hope and forgiveness.
- Posted by Cori
No Safety in Numbers
Making her young adult debut, author Dayna Lorentz’s No Safety In Numbers has everything necessary to be a big hit: great premise, palpable tension, social commentary, a cast of interesting characters, and solid, well crafted writing. Not to mention the creative marketing Penguin has put into the book already (ARCs came with bottles of hand sanitizer stickered with the bio-hazard graphic from the cover). Lorentz’s all-too-plausible tale of suburban panic is gripping and unsettling because it’s very easy to see how this plot could become a reality no of us want to face. Comparisons to Lord of the Flies are right on and the modern setting makes this an accessible, engaging bridge to the classic.
What starts out as a regular Saturday at the local mall quickly morphs into an unimaginable nightmare for thousands of innocent shoppers and mall workers: a device has been planted in the mall’s HVAC system and something has entered the air circulation system. Quietly, a lock down is initiated, trapping people in the mall while the authorities try to analyze and get control of the situation. At first, people in mall are relatively content to sleep on the floor, shop by day, and meander around the mall. But soon, when people start coming down with symptoms and even start dying, a quarantine is issues and the mall is permanently sealed off from any hope of outside assistance. As you can imagine, all hell breaks loose and most people drop any semblance of societal niceties and people turn against one another in a horrific melee.
Among the thousands trapped are four teens, Shay, Marco, Lexi and Ryan. Each was at the mall that day for a different reason: Shay with her grandmother and little sister looking to get lost among the nameless crowds; Marco, dreading another day at as a busboy at a mall eatery; Lexi, drug to the mall by her parents for an outing as a “family”; and Ryan, freshman JV Football player sent to get costume supplies for the varsity team’s Halloween prank. When they find themselves in a situation they never expected, not knowing if they will live or die, they somehow manage to forge meaningful connections with each other and some of the other teens trapped amid the chaos as the adults around them fall apart.
No Safety in Numbers comes to a tension-filled ending well before the outbreak has run its course. Not knowing who will live, or how they will die, has left me pretty much dead-set against any shopping trips to the mall for a very long time.
- Posted by Cori
A Midsummer’s Nightmare
Readers who enjoyed King of the Screwups by K.L. Going (Harcourt, 2009) will find a similar theme and characters in Kody Keplinger’s A Midsummer’s Nightmare, which features a female protagonist. On her first night in Hamilton, Kentucky, recent Indiana high school graduate Whitley Johnson argues fashion choices with fashionista, Harrison Carlyle, who offers to be her best friend, but Whitley doesn’t “do” friends. In her experience “friends turn on you, abandon you, and lie about you” (61). Because Whitley sees friends as a waste of time, selfish and fake, she decides she’s better off being a loner, with tequila as a best friend to make her giggly and happy.
Before going off to college, Whitley had planned to spend her last summer bonding, drinking, and lounging in the sun with her dad, who over the years has been more brother and drinking buddy than parent figure. But her dad—finally ready to accept the responsibilities of a family—is engaged to a woman with two teenage children, and Whitley finds herself an unwelcome interloper in her father’s house—“the puzzle piece that didn’t fit” (195). To exacerbate the awkwardness of the arrangement, her soon to be stepbrother, Nathan Caufield, emerges as the one night stand from graduation night. Prepared to play out the cruel summer, Whitley resorts to her Girls Gone Wild act, drinking to drown her depression and to find happiness. Neglected by her summers-only father and her depressed and angry divorced mother, Whitley is starved for attention from the right people.
In small towns known for their big rumors, Whitley’s aloof attitude and loose morals make her the subject of a Facebook page where she is portrayed as a drunken whore. Her famous television anchor dad doesn’t confront nor comfort Whitley during her humiliation and shame. Whitley would have welcomed his anger, preferring it to the abandonment, which makes her feel like an untagged Facebook photo. After allowing certain habits to define her life for the past four years, Whitley doesn’t know who she’d be without the parties or drinking or boys. Drinking had made her happy, but with college looming on the horizon, she knows she can’t major in alcoholism.
Looking for a greedless kiss, looking for affirmation, acceptance, and unconditional love, and looking for family, Whitley has given up on people and happiness and anything good. But Harrison and Nathan refuse to give up on her.
- Posted by Donna
Dark Eden 2: Eve of Destruction
Will and the other 6 teens who were cured of their debilitating phobias in Patrick Carman’s Dark Eden have been reunited in the sequel, Dark Eden 2: Eve of Destruction. Will and Marisa convince Ben, Kate, Alex, and Connor, who are all now suffering from “elderly” ailments like arthritis, dementia, and hearing loss, to join them in a trip back to Fort Eden after Will receives a letter from the hated Mrs. Goring. Ostensibly offering them a new “cure”, this time for the problems ravaging their bodies, Mrs. Goring convinces the teens to descend into an abandoned missile silo below Fort Eden in search of vials of blood taken from them during their last visit.
Still the focal point of Mrs. Goring’s plots and schemes, Will is again separated from the group and forced to serve as intermediary between Mrs. Goring and the rest of the group as they face the treacheries of the silo. Trapped in a locked observation room while his girlfriend Marisa and the others face countless dangers, Will is brought to the brink of madness at his inability to help the group. Too soon a terrible secret is discovered in the silo, throwing everyone into greater peril than simply the radiation, electrified pools, and cavernous holes in the deep, dark tunnels. Certain death seems the only possible outcome in this cat and mouse game against the clock.
There’s little more than almost pointless frenetic page turning going on in Dark Eden 2. Readers don’t get to know any of the teens any better than we did in Dark Eden, so there’s really no point in caring about what happened to them and why. Keeping Will trapped in the observation room lessens the tension that the rest of the teens face since it removes the immediacy and impact of any actual thrills or life-threatening danger. Focusing on Will also ensures that only a superficial amount of character development, if you can even call it that, does occur. Of course, maybe you don’t want much character development in your thrillers. That’s fine, as long as there’s pulse-pounding, visceral action, imminent danger, and actual thrills to experience. Dark Eden 2 falls short on this count too, which is disappointing because there’s an interesting premise at the core of the Dark Eden series, but so far it hasn’t gotten the treatment it deserves.
- Posted by Cori
Don’t Turn Around
Michelle Gagnon’s first novel for young adults, Don’t Turn Around is unquestionably a thriller, certain to resonate with social activist readers and those who know the power of computers to perform invasive functions. With echoes of the hacktivism but not the dystopian angle from Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Gagnon takes on shady big business, the issue of government cover-ups, and the very real plight of children in the foster care system.
Gagnon tells her story primarily through the parallel threads of two adolescent lives whose paths cross and eerily connect. Sixteen-year-old Noa Torson, who lost her parents when she was just an infant, spent several years in the foster care and juvenile detention system before her escape to independent living. A foster kid with a history of running away, she found her way out of the system by hacking into the Children’s and Family Services database to change paperwork and to set up a fake foster family. For income, she took on the identity of Ted Latham, a brilliant yet reclusive IT consultant who worked freelance for a west-coast-based company named Rocket Science. In her spare time away from computer system security consultations, Noa participates in an online hackers gang called /ALLIANCE/–a reference to the World of Warcraft counterpart that battles the evil Horde. Brainchild of seventeen-year-old Peter Gregory, /ALLIANCE/’s mission is “to wreak justice by pranking the bad guys” (9). /ALLIANCE/ questers can wipe out someone’s credit history or destroy a person’s privacy with a few keystrokes. These hacker geniuses take on bullies and perverts, helping people and animals that cannot protect themselves.
When Noa awakens on an operating table and manages to escape an experimental facility, she is on the run from men in black wearing combat boots. Online searching leads her to the AMRF and to Project Persephone, an apt name for a hellish experimental medical project using kidnapped homeless children as human test subjects to find a cure for PEMA. An awful disease that mainly afflicts teenagers by attacking the endocrine system, PEMA symptoms imitate those of Chronic Wasting Disease. Determined to bring down the criminal exploitation, she is joined by Peter and A6MO—a computer moniker but very real guardian angel focused on wartime raids. Despite their skill, the forces the teens have taken on are too powerful, making /ALLIANCE/’s efforts seem “pathetic and laughable, like a gnat buzzing around a water buffalo” (302). In their valiant fight, Noa and Peter discover that laws contain a labyrinth of loopholes designed to help powerful, moneyed people and to oppress the disadvantaged.
- Posted by Donna
Jake and Lily
Jake and Lily are twins. Sure, they are a little different – Lily’s got a temper, Jake’s always calm – but in many ways, they feel like two halves of the same person. When one of them is in trouble or in pain, the other one just knows it; they can communicate without words; it’s a secret “power” they call the goombla and sharing it means everything.
But the summer they turn 11, things change. Their parents decide it’s time for them to have separate rooms. Jake starts hanging out with a group of guys from down the street, and Lily, well, Lily feels lost and alone for the first time in her life. As she struggles to find a life of her own and work through her anger at being abandoned, Jake finds it really challenging to deal with the neighborhood bully and decide who he really wants to be.
Jake and Lily, Jerry Spinelli’s latest, captures with perfection the languid summer days spent waiting for something to happen while everything is changing. Jake and Lily take turns narrating the story of the summer that changed their relationship, and through each one’s eyes, you can easily share in the confusion and the possibility that defines this time in life.
- Posted by Cori
Fall From Grace
Tackling some of the same powerful questions he did in his stunning debut You, Charles Benoit’s latest for young adults is Fall From Grace.
High school senior Sawyer’s life is already neatly planned out for him: finish his above average high school career, packed with all the right extra-curriculars and volunteer work, go to the local liberal arts college and major in accounting for a career as an insurance actuary, and after college marry his beautiful, perfect high school sweetheart. And until the day at the Mock United Nations assembly when he meets Grace, Sawyer has never bothered to question the plans his parents so painstakingly make for him. As he sees it, it’s much easier to just go with the flow and let his future unfold without any fuss, bother, or effort on his part. But when quirkily-cute, dark haired Grace says “I need you to steal something for me,” Sawyer’s eyes open for the first time in his life. Here’s a girl who’s eccentric, who dares to challenge the status quo, who causes him to question just about every decision he’s ever let anyone else make on his behalf, and who actually expects him to think and act like a real human being.
As Sawyer and Grace start spending more time together (as friends, even though Sawyer, like any guy, thinks about a little more) he really starts taking a hard look at how easily he’s allowed himself to be directed, molded and controlled by all the people in his life. Grace’s life plan is 180* different from anything Sawyer ever imagined: not only does she want to be famous, but every choice she makes has to be about having fun. Sawyer can’t honestly remember if he’s ever made a choice purely for fun. About the time Sawyer is starting to take some of Grace’s lessons to heart and stand up to his parents, the plans he and Grace have been making might well get seriously out of hand. And it may all prove that Grace is no different than anyone else in Sawyer’s life – she was just controlling him for her own ends.
In the end, Sawyer and Kyle (from You) both fall prey to a “villain” who zeros in on them because they don’t stand up for themselves and they are both content to let other people make all their choices for them. Aside from Grace and Sawyer, who are both multifaceted and engaging characters, the other people who populate Fall From Grace are more like stereotypes of controlling parents, jealous perfectionist girlfriends, etc. But there’s a real emotional resonance to Sawyer’s story that anyone who feels their choices are not their own and the life they’re living isn’t the one they wanted will immediately appreciate.
- Posted by Cori
The Stone Girl
New York City resident Sarah Beth (Sethie) Weiss is seventeen years old and obsessed with food and fat. From Sethie’s perspective, lanky Janey won the genetic lottery and Sethie lost; even her 49 year old mother Rebecca looks better in a bathing suit. Sethie’s two favorite words, svelte and lithe, are etched on her bedroom mirror, along with the mantras: Don’t Eat and Bones Are Beautiful. 5’4 Sethie weighs 111 pounds but she still sees fat on her boney frame. Rules and definitions, order and control, rituals and routines govern Sethie’s life, unlike best friend Janey and almost boyfriend Shaw, who stroll through life unhurried.
After over-eating a Thanksgiving style meal and in a moment of friendly support, Janey teaches Sethie how to force herself to vomit, purging her body of the over-consumed food. After all, Janey has boiled the central preoccupation of Sethie’s life down to a phase, but this new power sends Sethie on a downward suicidal spiral, a descent accelerated by her break up with Shaw, who—she discovers—has been using her as a pot-smoking partner and friend with benefits. Heartbroken, humiliated, and hoping to salve the wound, Sethie exerts control in the one area she has it: over her body image. If only pretty could be objective like a math problem, she wishes.
When she meets Ben, Sethie begins to see herself differently. Maybe she isn’t a real anorexic, a girl who curls over toilets and counts calories, but a girl who is “brazen and brash, flirty and opinionated” (154), a girl who will attend Columbia University and write papers about Ernest Hemingway. Sethie likes this girl, but by this time— besieged with feeling unwanted and undesirable and unaware that she is princess pretty—she has already begun sleeping with a knife to cut the pain in half.
The Stone Girl by Alyssa B. Sheinmel is a heartbreaking story of a girl so hungry to be lithe and lovely, so filled with hate for her body, that she turns to stone—becoming a lifeless recluse relying on others for happiness instead of finding it within herself.
- Posted by Donna
The Secret Tree
Everyone has secrets. Some are small and innocuous “I am going to surprise my friend with a special lunch” but others carry much more weight “I am betraying my best friend in a terrible way.” We carry these secrets, large and small, light and heavy, around with us every day. But when the burden of these secrets, hopes, and fears becomes to much, we have to find ways to lighten the load. In the woods behind 10 year old Minty Mortimer’s house, there’s a big old oak tree with a gaping hole in the center, and as she discovers one summer afternoon, it’s the tree where people hide their secrets.
Discovering the Secret Tree unlocks a whole world of mysteries and secrets Minty never knew existed; it seems everyone in her neighborhood is living a secret life she had no idea about. And in addition to these private, every day secrets, there are bigger mysteries too: the Witch House , a spooky old farmhouse with a crazy lady living inside; the Man-Bat, a seven foot tall half-man, half-bat who flies through the night; the Mean Boys who terrorize the other kids in the neighborhood; a reclusive boy who hides in the woods, taking pictures of people; and thefts all kinds of things from people’s homes and garages. While Minty tries to unravel the mysteries in her neighborhood and match her neighbors up to the anonymous secrets left in the Secret Tree, she’s also faced with uncertain changes of her own: in this summer before middle school, her best friend Paz is drifting away from her towards a clique of popular girls; her older sister is acting stranger than normal; and her new friend has a secret that may change everything.
Natalie Standiford‘s The Secret Tree is a charming little novel about the time in life when we realize that growing up is going to be a lot harder than we thought. Minty’s awakening over the course of this summer to the mysteries of people’s inner lives, their hopes and fears, and the ways in which others can both let you down and lift you up, is handled with a delicate grace and an authenticity that will ensure the reader connects with her in a real and heartfelt way. Standiford creates a smart, likable girl, whom I’d like to imagine would be good friends with some of these girls in books I’ve enjoyed: Sunny, Millie, Zelly, Madeline and Raine.
- Posted by Cori
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