Fifteen-year-old Meredith is trying to catch a criminal. This terrifying man abused the trust of his small community when he used his position as a school baseball coach to molest children. Sentenced to nine years in prison, he’s been paroled after only three years–and now he’s coming home. You see, Meredith knows him better than anyone, because he’s not just a face in the newspaper–he’s also her father. He may have fooled the parole board, but he hasn’t fooled her. Meredith has come to the awful conclusion that if she wants to make sure he never hurts anyone else ever again, she’s going to need proof of his continued sickness, even if she has to use herself as bait: “I know now that I’m the only one who really understands the threat and if I’m ever going to be free of him…then I will have to bite the bullet and spend time in his company. Stake out the sacrificial lamb. Uncoil the rope so he can hang himself.” I burned through this devastating read in one subway commute, and I’m still shaking from the impact. This chilling debut by Laura Wiess is horrifically real in its depiction of not only adults who abuse but also those who stand by and let it happen. But Wiess balances these descriptions with the angry, amazing Meredith, who’s character showcases the hidden strength of teens and their ability to heal in the face of overwhelming odds. While the transcendent ending makes the horror of getting there all worth it, don’t pick up this book unless you’re ready to travel with Meredith to the deepest, darkest corners of the human soul.
The Luxe by Anna Godbersen
Mean Girls meets The Age of Innocence
Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
Lady’s maid Dashti may look meek, but her inner fortitude is far more than that of her fragile Lady Saren. When Lady Saren is condemned to seven years in a locked tower by her father for not marrying evil Lord Khaser, Dashti is the one who rations the food, sings the songs of healing to ease her lady’s anxiety, and chases the rats from their precious stores of food. When Lady Saren’s true love, Lord Tegus, comes calling through the tower’s only opening (a chamber pot dump hole), it is also Dashti who must speak to him, under her shy lady’s orders. After a few such intimate, whispered visits, Dashti is horrified to discover that she is in love with her lady’s man. She writes it all down in her Book of a Thousand Days; her forbidden thoughts of Tegus, her despair that her lady will ever come out of her depression, her fear that they will not survive the tower imprisonment. But survive they do, and before Dashti knows it, they are on to another adventure where she will need to call on the strength of her ancestors to keep them both alive. Finally, they come to the point where Dashti’s precious Book will either save their skins, or condemn Dashti to death. Will Dashti, a lowly mucker girl, be able to claim both her life and the love of a lord? This rarely told Grimm fairy tale, re-imagined by Hale to have taken place on the Mongolian steppes, is a sweeping romantic epic that will steal your heart even as it makes it race with excitement. It’s one of the best fractured fairy tales I’ve ever read, and the fact that Hale sets it in a real time and place makes it even more rich. Follow this one up with Donna Jo Napoli’s historically imagined Pied Piper story, Breath.
Jen’s 2007 Top Ten Books
The 2007 Top Ten list has been posted! You can find it under “Jen’s Yearly Top Ten Lists” on the right hand sidebar, towards the bottom of the RR homepage. Please check it out and let me know what you think. Am I right on the money? Or have I missed/dissed some of your favorites? Please leave a comment and let me know what would have made YOUR top ten of 2007! (Even though I try to love all my Top Ten Books the same, if I had to pick my very favorite, it would have to be Peter Cameron’s angsty YA debut, shown at right.)
2007 Top Ten
Please note that there has been absolutely no attempt to balance this list by age, gender or genre. These are just my “from-the-gut” favorites. No annotations this year, just click on the title to go right to the review.
Brande, Robin. Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature.
Cameron, Peter. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You.
Ellis, Ann Dee. This is What I Did.
Red Moon at Sharpsburg by Rosemary Wells
Well, fiddle-dee-dee! Picture book author Rosemary Wells has penned a rousing Civil War novel whose heroine is the very antithesis of spoiled southern belle Scarlett O’Hara. India Moody is the daughter of a modest Virginia harness maker who reluctantly leaves home to become an ambulance wagon driver for the Confederates. In his absence, India (who is a daddy’s girl through and through) pines for him as she tries to help her mother keep their family together while the war goes on and resources become scarcer. She is encouraged and inspired by her teacher, Emory Trimble, a young man of science who teaches India all about the wonders that exist beneath the glass of the microscope. After a friend up North writes to tell her that there is a college in Ohio that accepts women, India becomes determined to work her way there, war or no war. Soon Emory follows her father to the battlefield and India finds herself unable to just sit and wait for bad news. She leaves home to find her father, and ends up smack dab in the middle of the bloody battle of Sharpsburg. Will India survive long enough to find her father and realize her dream of a college education? Although Wells succumbs to the occasional bit of melodramatic purple prose (in this example, literally): “Mauve is a pinkish purple of such delicacy I can only hold the silk square to the light and gaze at it. I have seen it only in petunias and stained-glass windows,” it suits India’s rebellious, yet lady-like personality. And who doesn’t enjoy a little historical melodrama, especially of the skirt-swishing, finger-wagging, swooning sort? I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough to find out what would happen to India and her dream of studying science with the big boys, and I will definitely be recommending Red Moon to my 8th grade students next year as a perfect selection for their Civil War book project.
Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan
Beige by Cecil Castellucci
Katy is so safe, so closed up and locked down, that when punk Goth-girl Lake meets her for the first time, she dubs Katy “Beige.†But how else is Katy supposed to act? As the product of a punk-rock love affair between Rat, the recovering drug addict-drummer of the infamous band Suck, and her mom, a reformed groupie who is now a buttoned up archeologist, Katy is terrified to let her true self out in case she ends up repeating her parents’ mistakes. So she smiles sweetly and does what she’s told, even when her mom tells her she’s going on an archelogical dig to Peru, which means Katy’s gonna have to spend the whole summer with her dad, who she barely knows. Talk about SUCK! Now Katy’s steady-eddie temperament is being sorely tested by her chatty, tattooed dad, who never seems to know when to shut up, his loud music, and his best friend’s teenage daughter Lake, who’s been bribed into hanging out with Katy. As I said before, Lake thinks Katy’s beige. Will Katy be able to prove that underneath her unruffled manner she’s really fuchsia? This rockin’ read from Plain Jane Cecil Castellucci is all about not being afraid to show your true colors. And even though it’s a book, it’s got a sweet soundtrack—just download the song titles that start each chapter to get an audio idea of Katy’s state of mind as she moves from beige to brilliant! Want more Cecil? The check out her other anti-chick-lit, Boy Proof.
Tyrell by Coe Booth
Tyrell’s life is in the trash—literally. Everything he owns fits in two black garbage bags. His dad’s doing time, his moms makes endless excuses about why she can’t get a job, and he and his little brother are living in one of the rattiest, roachiest family shelters around. But even though he’s down, don’t count Tyrell out. He’s still got his girlfriend Novisha on his side, and if he can only get ahold of his dad’s DJ equipment, he just might be able to throw down the party of the century, and make enough dough to get outta the shelter and back into the projects. Will Tyrell make it? Only God knows, but He sure ain’t been doing Tyrell any favors lately, so the only person Tyrell can count on is himself. Coe Booth’s debut novel for older teens reminds me of the work of my fav author E.R. Frank. (Both Booth and Frank are social workers who have worked with at risk teens) Tyrell is so real you won’t be able to believe he’s fiction. And his desire to do good in the face of overwhelming odds cuts through the tired stereotype of the fast-talking street thug who’s just trying to get over. Walk a few blocks of the Bronx in Tyrell’s kicks, and see what it’s really like living on the streets.
Another Kind of Cowboy by Susan Juby
Alex Ford wanted a horse so bad when he was little that he named his black bike “Del Magnifico le Noir†and fed it hay after he tied it up in the garage at night. Now that he’s a teenager and owns sweet, swaybacked Turnip, he tries to be grateful for the old cow horse. But what Alex really yearns for is dressage, the English tradition of riding, and poor old Turnip just doesn’t cut it when it comes to performing the fancy steps dressage demands. But Turnip isn’t the only one standing in Alex’s way. There’s also his macho alcoholic dad who thinks that dressage is for pretty boys and pansies, and the infuriating Cleo O’Shea, a spoiled rich girl who boards her horse at the stable where Alex works, and doesn’t half appreciate how lucky she is to have everything Alex wants. Adding insult to injury, Cleo develops a crush on him, not realizing that if Alex ever found time for a relationship outside the stable, it would be with a boy, NOT a girl. Will this reluctant cowboy ever be able to trade in his spurs for jodhpurs? Will he ever be able to find both the horse and the boy of his dreams? And if he does, how will he convince his dad that dressage didn’t make him gay, he was always that way? Mixing laughter with heartbreak in equal measure, Canadian queen of funny Susan Juby has penned an original story about being true to yourself and learning how to trot to your own beat. Experience more of Juby’s snort-inducing, offbeat humor online at www.susanjuby.com
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Imagine being far from home, in a new city where you don’t speak the language and nothing is familiar. Boat-shaped flying machines ferry people to and from work beneath flights of origami birds. Oddly shaped fruits and vegetables are sold from compartments in a giant market wall, and every person you meet has a small animal guide to accompany them, each looking like it sprang fully formed from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. You miss your home. You miss your family. But your job is to work hard and fit in here so that you can eventually make a new life for yourself and those who depend on you. Living as I do in a city of immigrants, I’ve seen & heard the “coming to America†story a million times before. But never like this. There is a magically real gloss on Shaun Tan’s sepia-toned wordless graphic novel that raises the classic “stranger in a strange land†plot to a fresh new height. As the story begins, it would be easy to mistake it for an Ellis Island epic. But it soon becomes abundantly clear that Tan is taking us on a trip to a land none of us has ever seen before, giving us a chance to truly understand the immigrant experience, as we the readers flounder right alongside the weary protagonist, trying to make sense of the beautiful, dizzying landscape Tan has created. So gorgeously illustrated and imagined, you’ll want to own your own copy so you can look at it again and again.
Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb
Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You by Peter Cameron
Eighteen-year-old New Yorker James Sveck is happiest by himself. “People, at least in my experience, rarely say anything interesting to each other. They always talk about their lives and they don’t have very interesting lives. So I get impatient.” Now it’s his last summer before college, and James isn’t even sure he WANTS to go to college. He may just chuck it all and use his tuition money to buy a house in Kansas where he can be completely and utterly ALONE. But his divorced parents, worried about his strange love for the Mid-West and the fact that he may be gay (even though it supposedly “wouldn’t bother them one bit!”) send him to a shrink to in order to clear up his issues and go off to Brown like a good boy. Though James is skeptical about therapy at first, Dr. Adler manages to get him talking about all the things he never thought he’d share: his disastrous school trip to Washington D.C., his unacknowledged attraction to his mother’s sophisticated male gallery employee, and what he might have seen from the windows of his downtown Manhattan high school on 9/11. Suddenly, James realizes he is completely and utterly SAD, and has been for a long time. What he decides to do in order to change his depressed status forms the basis of this neurotic, funny, Woody-Allen-film of a YA novel. Its’ twin sister in the world of YA lit. is Garret Freymann-Weyr’s brilliant My Heartbeat
The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
“Love and hate in seventh grade are not far apart, let me tell you.†In 1967 on Long Island, NY, Holling Hoodhood’s English teacher, Mrs. Baker, hates him about as much as she loves William Shakespeare. How does he know? Because every Wednesday afternoon, when half his class leaves for catechism lessons and half leave for Hebrew school, Holling, the only Presbyterian, is left alone with Mrs. Baker…and Shakespeare. When Mrs. Baker first proposes that they read and study the Bard’s plays together, Holling is less than thrilled. But that’s before he discovers Caliban’s curses in The Tempest, or how to use lines from Romeo and Juliet to woo the fair Meryl Lee. Suddenly, Shakespeare doesn’t seem so stupid anymore. In fact, the long dead playwright’s words help Holling in all sorts of situations: facing a bullying neighbor, speaking up to his overbearing father, and winning a coveted place as the only seventh grader on the school’s new cross country team. And even though it’s harder to find comfort in plays while the Vietnam War rages on and Martin Luther King is assassinated, Mrs. Baker shows Holling that what Shakespeare wrote about wars and kings is just as relevant in 1967 as it was in 1587. Schmidt’s warm, solid autobiographical read is getting mad love from teachers and librarians because even though she’s prickly, Mrs. Baker is smart and cool (like we like to think we are) and well, it’s about the power of SHAKESPEARE! But don’t worry, Schmidt filled his story with lots of funny, subversive stuff for teens too–think Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story. Take a look at this one yourself and see if you agree that its a book that both a teacher AND a student could love.
Tamar by Mal Peet
After fifteen-year-old Tamar’s beloved grandfather commits suicide, it is three months before she can bring herself to open the old box of keepsakes he left her. When she does, the odd assortment of WWII memorabilia that dates back to his days as a spy for the Allied Forces in Nazi-occupied Holland holds little meaning for her. Until she looks closer, and realizes that “Grandad hadn’t been mad when he put these things in it. I knew that these things fitted together in some way, and I had to find out how.†Using a set of maps, an old crossword puzzle, and a bundle of money that adds up to 1945, Tamar sets out on a journey along the English river she was named for to uncover the past of a man she thought she knew. Alternating chapters tell the story of her grandfather’s final dangerous mission into occupied Holland during the terrible “Hunger Winter” when the Dutch people were slowly starving to death waiting for the Allies to come. Working undercover, he and his partner were given orders to try and unite the chaotic Dutch Resistance; desperate rag-tag groups of men who did whatever they could to undermine the Nazi’s efforts, including stealing supplies and bombing roads. What he did there had always been a total mystery to his family…until now. The two stories finally converge in the shocking truth that drove Tamar’s grandfather to suicide, leaving Tamar with a new understanding of the complicated man who asked that she be named for his code-name: a beautiful, winding river that could be both treacherous and calm. Friends, I loved this epic story, but I’m not going to lie, it was a struggle to get into. Clocking in at just over 400 pages, it takes a while to get going. But those last hundred pages make the initial slog through the first hundred all worth it. Full of espionage, romance, and incredibly brave acts of derring-do, this satisfying war-time tome is like six-course banquet, so don’t sit down to it unless you’re ready for a serious feast of historical fiction!