A Lame Advent Catch-Up Post: Fifteen for Teens (and people with enough guts to shop the YA section)
Yeah, I sucked at that resolution, but I'm trying to improve upon my tendencies not to post anything at all. I still did want to give some suggestions as to what you could be reading, and things that I enjoyed in the past year.
The books on this list were all published in 2009. They are all also young adult titles. I realize some people would rather hear me natter about the adult titles I read this year -- there were a lot of those -- but in the end, I work in a library for teenagers. At the same time, almost all the books on this list are books I would recommend no matter the age of the person reading. They're not good YA books, they're just plain good books. While they have a few commercial giants on this list, some of them are ones you might never have heard of. And you should.
In no particular order.
Gentlemen by Michael Northrop: This is a hell of a first novel, striking from its cover image of a young man in a body bag, easily mistaken for a kid in a hoodie if you're not studying it carefully enough. Four friends, tagged as the classic underachieving miscreants, share an English class with a teacher who always refers to them as 'gentlemen'. When one of them goes missing, they are at first apathetic, but come around to dark suspicions about their friend's fate. This is a quick read, and one that's written in a very straightforward manner. I might give it to a reluctant reader. But don't let that make this book seem dumbed-down, because it handles its suspense better than almost any book I read this year (though I have yet to read Andrew Smith's sophomore effort In the Path of Falling Objects, in the same male-perspective-high-suspense vein). A good pick, and I found its darkness easier to buy into than the slightly more hyped The Morgue and Me by John Ford.
Candor by Pam Bachorz: Stepford makes the perfect wife, but Candor teens are changed for life. It's a premise we've seen before, and the book even name-checks what's going on here: Candor is a Florida development where families can take their troubled youths, and watch them become upstanding citizens. None are more upstanding than Oscar, the son of the man responsible for the subliminal Messages that slowly change the minds of the young people living there - at least, on the surface. Underneath, Oscar is using his knowledge of his father's work to break other Candor teens out, if for a price. While the romance between Oscar and Nia is a little bit uneven, this tale of brainwashing and the messages we absorb just as much as Candor's teenagers do is very hard to put down once you pick it up. Another winning suspense read, which does justice to its borrowed premise and is very memorable right up to its conclusion.
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld: I have only one complaint about this book, which is that its sequel is not immediately out right away. Friends, do you like mecha and things that go boom? Do you like well-crafted political intrigue and countries on the brink of war? How do alternate histories suit you, and retellings of major world events through a steampunk's-Darwin-fancying-cousin lens? Thinking back on it, the only thing wrong with this alternate World War I - told through the viewpoints of the surviving heir to Archduke Ferdinand, secret heir to Emperor Franz Josef, and a British girl who's run away to join the navy and fly in the giant bioengineered AIR WHALE airships disguised as a boy -- is that we're barely through the opening shots. Which are fired by mecha, and possibly gunships made out of squid and bats. Westerfeld also has had this tale marvelously illustrated, and history nuts will get a kick out of the maps alone.
Creature of the Night by Kate Thompson: Kate Thompson's books are rather odd for me. Some of them are as dark and gritty as any book can get, books where you taste the grease and grime in your very teeth and can watch the hope get extinguished in front of you. And some of them are lighter, whimsical things where Thompson exercises her fine first-hand knowledge of Irish music and faerie lore. This book manages to be both these things and neither, at once, and is absolutely unique, and beautifully dark. Its narrator, Bobby, is not the sort of kid you'd normally like, but Thompson so carefully outlines his situation and that of his money-strained family that you can't help but sympathize even when he's being a vulgar, awful little shit. Into this prosaic family drama, however, Thompson throws out still darker undercurrents, as Bobby's mother moves him and his younger brother Dennis into a house which may or may not be haunted - or is it visited by the faeries? The warnings of a neighbor to leave out gifts for the rumored faeries nearby, or the family will be sorry, goes from a laughable jibe to a slowly mounting terror as Dennis, the one person Bobby actually tries to protect, begins having nightly visits with a 'little woman' who breaks into their house. This is a damn scary book in places, but with a subtle and sure hand rather than great whacks of suspense served up in other stories. You can surely tell it was written by someone NOT an American, however.
Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks by Lauren Myracle made me want to call my own sister and talk about when we were younger. This is, after all, primarily a tale about that bond -- in which older sister Carly returns from her summer of deep-thinking activism at nature camp, and comes to find her dependable follower, younger sister Anna, has grown boobs and is starting to drift from her and garner attention on her own. Their bond gets severely tested as the two siblings have to deal with establishing their own identities. Lest this seem a little too fluffy coming-of-age, I'll also say that Myracle does a great job of really making this a struggle without making you dislike either sister nor whitewash her flaws, and her supporting cast is spot-on, both good and bad alike. Myracle also is addressing issues of class through the lens of budding-consciousness Carly, something that can get overlooked as a YA topic. This was Maureen Johnson-good.
Hate List by Jennifer Brown made me cry really hard in Barnes and Noble as I finished reading it there. I don't think I've ever sobbed harder into my latte in a public space as at this book's conclusion, charting Valerie Leftman's senior and final year of high school, when the year prior, her boyfriend Nick was the shooter in a school-violence incident. Though Valerie was injured trying to prevent Nick from killing a classmate, immediately prior to Nick turning the gun on himself, everyone is aware that she and Nick had kept a 'Hate List' of the things and people that bothered them, and that Nick used that list as part of his blueprint on the day of the shootings. Valerie had not seen it coming, but despite her heroism in the moment, she cannot help being seen by some as a perpetrator - and she questions herself just as relentlessly about her own culpability. This book is just unflinching, and puts you smack in Valerie's dilemma and conflicts with her family and the school she returns to. Another book where the voices of all characters are spot-on and well-developed, and the conflict is positively massive, this is one of the first books I'd think of for 'best of this year in YA'.
Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd is one of many good short story collections for teens out this year, but the one that's most eyecatching and well-written in my opinion. Certifiable geek editors Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci have put together a selection of stories that examine all kinds of facets of geek life - sometimes flippantly and humorously in the endpanel-comics between stories, and sometimes with greater depth. If you're a dork like me, you should at least flip through it, and I found Barry Lyga's tale of a dinosaur-obsessed science nerd who turns that obsession onto the Darwinism of high school social structures to be singlehandedly worth the price of admission. While admittedly, I would read Barry Lyga's retelling of the phone book, it's still a powerhouse little tale with plenty of bite.
Speaking of Barry Lyga, Goth Girl Rising, the sequel to his debut novel, came out this year. If you haven't read 'Fanboy and Goth Girl', shame on you, go read that one first -- as well as his other books. I can't make a literary quality argument here, even though Lyga doesn't need me to since he's a fine writer...but I'm just that big of a crazed fangirl. There is something about how he writes that hits the sweet-spot for me, the perfect intersection of literature, experimentation, good first-person retelling, and world-building. Kyra's story is no different in quality than Donnie the Fanboy's, her counterpart, and I was so happy he revisited her life after her return from 'DCHH' time following the events of 'Fanboy'. Even though we STILL don't know what Fanboy's third-thing-he-wants-more-than-anything-in-life is, its mention in this book made me squeal and flail and kind of embarrass myself. I still love that his characters intersect within his same well-drawn town, and the events in one book always bear passing mention somewhere else. It gives his all-too-real people a real-feeling world where they belong.
This is my most commercial recommendation: Just go read Catching Fire and The Hunger Games. Yes, I know that HG is last year, but you can't read this year's hottest, hyped, giant-seller without catching up to the first part of the trilogy. I'm not writing any more about it than this: Go read them. Yes, they have hype approaching Twilight, but the writing is consistent, and consistently good. You can't wave a stick without hitting information about these books, so if you must know before you buy or check out, just Google it. And then read it.
Two books I worry got lost in the hype this year are The Secret Life of Prince Charming by Deb Caletti, and Brutal by Michael Harmon. Starting with Caletti, I'll say that I don't often like her books so well as other authors in the same real-girls-real-stories niche, but I particularly loved this one. The story of a band of sisters with the same charming egotist father who narcissistically uses everyone in his path, and their quest to exorcise his pattern of behavior from their lives by making restitution to the women he has dated and stole from once he dumped them, it's got a 'When Harry Met Sally' vibe of actually studying the ways people use one another and lose themselves in relationships whether or not they're good for them. The road trip narrative works better for Caletti than some of her previous books, and the characters aside from the father are wonderful. (Watch for the bits about their aunt and grandmother, which are also laugh-out-loud funny.) Harmon's tale is also semi-realistic, and may have gotten overshadowed, which is a shame. Poe Holly's story of coming to live with her guidance-counselor father, only to clash with him when a neighbor friend is bullied and physically abused and the school does little to stop it, is dramatic and brave. Even when you sit back and wince at Poe's in-your-face way of handling every problem, it's very true to the personality of many teenagers, and it makes a serious point about how we address bullying as a social phenomenon.
Moving out of the land of realism, can I say how overjoyed I am that Silver Phoenix exists? I can't tell you how many students, having read its Asian-inspired mythology, came to me immediately after and demanded 'more, please, and where do I find it?' I hope this is a trend other writers follow, and we see more folklore from different cultures used in fantasy - a few other books on my radar give me cause to hope that this is the case. Ai Ling, the heroine, is also just terrific, and is written in a way that's progressive and powerful without pinging my 'massively not historical/not true to the folklore it comes from' radar. It's also just a damn fine adventure, and Pon's writing really paints a picture of her world.
Another book that painted me a picture of another world - but in this case, the world of Baltimore's late-night-radio subculture of weirdoes and freaks - was Natalie Standiford's How To Say Goodbye In Robot. It's a tough one to explain why I liked it, as its tone is one part John Waters and one part Ghost World, mixing edgy, elegiac realism with hipster-cool unconventionality. Beatrice listens to late-night radio, and her parents and her world no longer make sense to her, particularly when they move her into a Baltimore school and neighborhood where all those around her have known one another all their lives. Even when she could fit in, she finds she doesn't particularly want to. The virtues of alphabetical order, however, bring her into contact with Jonah, tagged 'Ghost Boy' by their classmates, who has the 'oddball' niche of the school staked out long before Beatrice's arrival, and who finds things in common with her - and a friendship that will be tested by family affairs and social circles, and come out strong. Even this summary, however, doesn't communicate how purely unpredictable this book is. This book fits together perfectly, yet I have rarely been kept so beautifully off-kilter throughout. Definitely literary enough that you can forget it's YA while reading. (And also, may I mention that it's just perfect that the story is about a relationship that is deep and important without having to be romantic to be meaningful?)
Another book that doesn't write off romance while refusing to succumb to it as the be-all and end-all of going literary concerns is A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper. I confess I'm a huge fan of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, among other memoirs of eccentric families both fictional and not, and this book hits all those literary kinks square and adds a dollop of wartime drama. It's told in the diary entries of Sophie FitzOsborne, sister to the heir of Montmaray, a tiny island in the Bay of Biscay which is mouldering away under the influences of the global depression pre-WWII and her uncle, the reigning King John of Montmaray. John's only child is Sophie's sophisticated cousin Veronica, who is more interested in writing a detailed history of their island than in joining Sophie in Britain to come out as proper young ladies. Sophie's younger sister Henry (short for Henrietta) is a tomboy running wild on the underpopulated island, half-illiterate but prone to grand adventures. The family is doing what they can to stay afloat on their tiny kingdom, but the rise of fascism and other threats to stability in Europe even rock their miniscule shores, and affect the lives of Sophie and all her family and associates. This also doesn't do justice to the depth of history and adventure that Cooper presents, even through the lens of Sophie who cares about such things less than cousin Veronica -- as well as her delicate handling of more modern concerns through this historical lens. Full of eccentric relatives, intrigue, historical politics that manage to be interesting and vital to well-written characters, this is a big winner.
I have saved the best for last. As should be apparent in past reviews, humor is my Kryptonite. If you can make me laugh in your book, you are halfway to winning my praise and approval. If it would be a damn fine book even without the humor, even better. This brings me to Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes -- the funniest damn book I read that was published in the last year. We're talking big time funny, the kind of book that made me laugh so hard at work that my colleagues teased me about throwing me out of the library, the kind of humor where I had to put the book down to put my head on my desk to stop laughing. And it's not the kind of humor where I can just tell you what's funny about it. Oh, no. This book has an Arrested Development way of setting up a joke partway through, and then hammering you with an even funnier callback to the previous scene.
As to the plot, it's sort of what you'd get if you put Kevin Smith movies, That 70's Show, and Glee in a blender, and let it have an HBO audience, then put the first six episodes in book form. It follows Karl Shoemaker through the first six days of his senior year in high school in 1973, where he has resolved that he is finally gonna Be Normal if it kills him - and that means extricating himself from the Madman Underground, the school-mandated therapy groups he's been a part of since fourth grade, and the friends he's made across normal social group lines as a result. Karl's dad is dead after a long battle with first alcoholism, then cancer; Karl's mom is a conspiracy-theorist hippie who wants to know she's still a fox, and steals Karl's hard-earned money from many part time jobs to get barflies to tell her so, and drink away her doubts (and everything else). Karl's friends are just as bad off, and everyone in the Underground has their own dirty secrets to tell, but the wonder of the book is how it captures the way such friendships spend more time celebrating one another's strengths and supporting one another than dwelling on the bad stuff. In fact, the entire book is one long celebration of the value of relationships with other people, and the good that comes out of hanging onto them even when they are not perfect and easy. In just six days, we get to witness a turning point for Karl that comes, in the end, as a kind of culmination of the loyalty and goodness we see him pouring into his relationships. Even though Karl gives us a no-holds-barred picture of why people call him 'Psycho' as a nickname, and he may have earned parts of his rep as the class 'scary guy', you cannot help but like him and root for him and his friends just as hard as you can. Somebody should make a movie of this book and not fuck it up, or I will hurt them. GO GET THIS AND READ IT. You will thank me for the big smile it puts on your face.
Here's hoping you enjoyed some of these little reviews. I hope some of you read them, and then go read the books.
The books on this list were all published in 2009. They are all also young adult titles. I realize some people would rather hear me natter about the adult titles I read this year -- there were a lot of those -- but in the end, I work in a library for teenagers. At the same time, almost all the books on this list are books I would recommend no matter the age of the person reading. They're not good YA books, they're just plain good books. While they have a few commercial giants on this list, some of them are ones you might never have heard of. And you should.
In no particular order.
Gentlemen by Michael Northrop: This is a hell of a first novel, striking from its cover image of a young man in a body bag, easily mistaken for a kid in a hoodie if you're not studying it carefully enough. Four friends, tagged as the classic underachieving miscreants, share an English class with a teacher who always refers to them as 'gentlemen'. When one of them goes missing, they are at first apathetic, but come around to dark suspicions about their friend's fate. This is a quick read, and one that's written in a very straightforward manner. I might give it to a reluctant reader. But don't let that make this book seem dumbed-down, because it handles its suspense better than almost any book I read this year (though I have yet to read Andrew Smith's sophomore effort In the Path of Falling Objects, in the same male-perspective-high-suspense vein). A good pick, and I found its darkness easier to buy into than the slightly more hyped The Morgue and Me by John Ford.
Candor by Pam Bachorz: Stepford makes the perfect wife, but Candor teens are changed for life. It's a premise we've seen before, and the book even name-checks what's going on here: Candor is a Florida development where families can take their troubled youths, and watch them become upstanding citizens. None are more upstanding than Oscar, the son of the man responsible for the subliminal Messages that slowly change the minds of the young people living there - at least, on the surface. Underneath, Oscar is using his knowledge of his father's work to break other Candor teens out, if for a price. While the romance between Oscar and Nia is a little bit uneven, this tale of brainwashing and the messages we absorb just as much as Candor's teenagers do is very hard to put down once you pick it up. Another winning suspense read, which does justice to its borrowed premise and is very memorable right up to its conclusion.
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld: I have only one complaint about this book, which is that its sequel is not immediately out right away. Friends, do you like mecha and things that go boom? Do you like well-crafted political intrigue and countries on the brink of war? How do alternate histories suit you, and retellings of major world events through a steampunk's-Darwin-fancying-cousin lens? Thinking back on it, the only thing wrong with this alternate World War I - told through the viewpoints of the surviving heir to Archduke Ferdinand, secret heir to Emperor Franz Josef, and a British girl who's run away to join the navy and fly in the giant bioengineered AIR WHALE airships disguised as a boy -- is that we're barely through the opening shots. Which are fired by mecha, and possibly gunships made out of squid and bats. Westerfeld also has had this tale marvelously illustrated, and history nuts will get a kick out of the maps alone.
Creature of the Night by Kate Thompson: Kate Thompson's books are rather odd for me. Some of them are as dark and gritty as any book can get, books where you taste the grease and grime in your very teeth and can watch the hope get extinguished in front of you. And some of them are lighter, whimsical things where Thompson exercises her fine first-hand knowledge of Irish music and faerie lore. This book manages to be both these things and neither, at once, and is absolutely unique, and beautifully dark. Its narrator, Bobby, is not the sort of kid you'd normally like, but Thompson so carefully outlines his situation and that of his money-strained family that you can't help but sympathize even when he's being a vulgar, awful little shit. Into this prosaic family drama, however, Thompson throws out still darker undercurrents, as Bobby's mother moves him and his younger brother Dennis into a house which may or may not be haunted - or is it visited by the faeries? The warnings of a neighbor to leave out gifts for the rumored faeries nearby, or the family will be sorry, goes from a laughable jibe to a slowly mounting terror as Dennis, the one person Bobby actually tries to protect, begins having nightly visits with a 'little woman' who breaks into their house. This is a damn scary book in places, but with a subtle and sure hand rather than great whacks of suspense served up in other stories. You can surely tell it was written by someone NOT an American, however.
Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks by Lauren Myracle made me want to call my own sister and talk about when we were younger. This is, after all, primarily a tale about that bond -- in which older sister Carly returns from her summer of deep-thinking activism at nature camp, and comes to find her dependable follower, younger sister Anna, has grown boobs and is starting to drift from her and garner attention on her own. Their bond gets severely tested as the two siblings have to deal with establishing their own identities. Lest this seem a little too fluffy coming-of-age, I'll also say that Myracle does a great job of really making this a struggle without making you dislike either sister nor whitewash her flaws, and her supporting cast is spot-on, both good and bad alike. Myracle also is addressing issues of class through the lens of budding-consciousness Carly, something that can get overlooked as a YA topic. This was Maureen Johnson-good.
Hate List by Jennifer Brown made me cry really hard in Barnes and Noble as I finished reading it there. I don't think I've ever sobbed harder into my latte in a public space as at this book's conclusion, charting Valerie Leftman's senior and final year of high school, when the year prior, her boyfriend Nick was the shooter in a school-violence incident. Though Valerie was injured trying to prevent Nick from killing a classmate, immediately prior to Nick turning the gun on himself, everyone is aware that she and Nick had kept a 'Hate List' of the things and people that bothered them, and that Nick used that list as part of his blueprint on the day of the shootings. Valerie had not seen it coming, but despite her heroism in the moment, she cannot help being seen by some as a perpetrator - and she questions herself just as relentlessly about her own culpability. This book is just unflinching, and puts you smack in Valerie's dilemma and conflicts with her family and the school she returns to. Another book where the voices of all characters are spot-on and well-developed, and the conflict is positively massive, this is one of the first books I'd think of for 'best of this year in YA'.
Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd is one of many good short story collections for teens out this year, but the one that's most eyecatching and well-written in my opinion. Certifiable geek editors Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci have put together a selection of stories that examine all kinds of facets of geek life - sometimes flippantly and humorously in the endpanel-comics between stories, and sometimes with greater depth. If you're a dork like me, you should at least flip through it, and I found Barry Lyga's tale of a dinosaur-obsessed science nerd who turns that obsession onto the Darwinism of high school social structures to be singlehandedly worth the price of admission. While admittedly, I would read Barry Lyga's retelling of the phone book, it's still a powerhouse little tale with plenty of bite.
Speaking of Barry Lyga, Goth Girl Rising, the sequel to his debut novel, came out this year. If you haven't read 'Fanboy and Goth Girl', shame on you, go read that one first -- as well as his other books. I can't make a literary quality argument here, even though Lyga doesn't need me to since he's a fine writer...but I'm just that big of a crazed fangirl. There is something about how he writes that hits the sweet-spot for me, the perfect intersection of literature, experimentation, good first-person retelling, and world-building. Kyra's story is no different in quality than Donnie the Fanboy's, her counterpart, and I was so happy he revisited her life after her return from 'DCHH' time following the events of 'Fanboy'. Even though we STILL don't know what Fanboy's third-thing-he-wants-more-than-anything-in-life is, its mention in this book made me squeal and flail and kind of embarrass myself. I still love that his characters intersect within his same well-drawn town, and the events in one book always bear passing mention somewhere else. It gives his all-too-real people a real-feeling world where they belong.
This is my most commercial recommendation: Just go read Catching Fire and The Hunger Games. Yes, I know that HG is last year, but you can't read this year's hottest, hyped, giant-seller without catching up to the first part of the trilogy. I'm not writing any more about it than this: Go read them. Yes, they have hype approaching Twilight, but the writing is consistent, and consistently good. You can't wave a stick without hitting information about these books, so if you must know before you buy or check out, just Google it. And then read it.
Two books I worry got lost in the hype this year are The Secret Life of Prince Charming by Deb Caletti, and Brutal by Michael Harmon. Starting with Caletti, I'll say that I don't often like her books so well as other authors in the same real-girls-real-stories niche, but I particularly loved this one. The story of a band of sisters with the same charming egotist father who narcissistically uses everyone in his path, and their quest to exorcise his pattern of behavior from their lives by making restitution to the women he has dated and stole from once he dumped them, it's got a 'When Harry Met Sally' vibe of actually studying the ways people use one another and lose themselves in relationships whether or not they're good for them. The road trip narrative works better for Caletti than some of her previous books, and the characters aside from the father are wonderful. (Watch for the bits about their aunt and grandmother, which are also laugh-out-loud funny.) Harmon's tale is also semi-realistic, and may have gotten overshadowed, which is a shame. Poe Holly's story of coming to live with her guidance-counselor father, only to clash with him when a neighbor friend is bullied and physically abused and the school does little to stop it, is dramatic and brave. Even when you sit back and wince at Poe's in-your-face way of handling every problem, it's very true to the personality of many teenagers, and it makes a serious point about how we address bullying as a social phenomenon.
Moving out of the land of realism, can I say how overjoyed I am that Silver Phoenix exists? I can't tell you how many students, having read its Asian-inspired mythology, came to me immediately after and demanded 'more, please, and where do I find it?' I hope this is a trend other writers follow, and we see more folklore from different cultures used in fantasy - a few other books on my radar give me cause to hope that this is the case. Ai Ling, the heroine, is also just terrific, and is written in a way that's progressive and powerful without pinging my 'massively not historical/not true to the folklore it comes from' radar. It's also just a damn fine adventure, and Pon's writing really paints a picture of her world.
Another book that painted me a picture of another world - but in this case, the world of Baltimore's late-night-radio subculture of weirdoes and freaks - was Natalie Standiford's How To Say Goodbye In Robot. It's a tough one to explain why I liked it, as its tone is one part John Waters and one part Ghost World, mixing edgy, elegiac realism with hipster-cool unconventionality. Beatrice listens to late-night radio, and her parents and her world no longer make sense to her, particularly when they move her into a Baltimore school and neighborhood where all those around her have known one another all their lives. Even when she could fit in, she finds she doesn't particularly want to. The virtues of alphabetical order, however, bring her into contact with Jonah, tagged 'Ghost Boy' by their classmates, who has the 'oddball' niche of the school staked out long before Beatrice's arrival, and who finds things in common with her - and a friendship that will be tested by family affairs and social circles, and come out strong. Even this summary, however, doesn't communicate how purely unpredictable this book is. This book fits together perfectly, yet I have rarely been kept so beautifully off-kilter throughout. Definitely literary enough that you can forget it's YA while reading. (And also, may I mention that it's just perfect that the story is about a relationship that is deep and important without having to be romantic to be meaningful?)
Another book that doesn't write off romance while refusing to succumb to it as the be-all and end-all of going literary concerns is A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper. I confess I'm a huge fan of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, among other memoirs of eccentric families both fictional and not, and this book hits all those literary kinks square and adds a dollop of wartime drama. It's told in the diary entries of Sophie FitzOsborne, sister to the heir of Montmaray, a tiny island in the Bay of Biscay which is mouldering away under the influences of the global depression pre-WWII and her uncle, the reigning King John of Montmaray. John's only child is Sophie's sophisticated cousin Veronica, who is more interested in writing a detailed history of their island than in joining Sophie in Britain to come out as proper young ladies. Sophie's younger sister Henry (short for Henrietta) is a tomboy running wild on the underpopulated island, half-illiterate but prone to grand adventures. The family is doing what they can to stay afloat on their tiny kingdom, but the rise of fascism and other threats to stability in Europe even rock their miniscule shores, and affect the lives of Sophie and all her family and associates. This also doesn't do justice to the depth of history and adventure that Cooper presents, even through the lens of Sophie who cares about such things less than cousin Veronica -- as well as her delicate handling of more modern concerns through this historical lens. Full of eccentric relatives, intrigue, historical politics that manage to be interesting and vital to well-written characters, this is a big winner.
I have saved the best for last. As should be apparent in past reviews, humor is my Kryptonite. If you can make me laugh in your book, you are halfway to winning my praise and approval. If it would be a damn fine book even without the humor, even better. This brings me to Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes -- the funniest damn book I read that was published in the last year. We're talking big time funny, the kind of book that made me laugh so hard at work that my colleagues teased me about throwing me out of the library, the kind of humor where I had to put the book down to put my head on my desk to stop laughing. And it's not the kind of humor where I can just tell you what's funny about it. Oh, no. This book has an Arrested Development way of setting up a joke partway through, and then hammering you with an even funnier callback to the previous scene.
As to the plot, it's sort of what you'd get if you put Kevin Smith movies, That 70's Show, and Glee in a blender, and let it have an HBO audience, then put the first six episodes in book form. It follows Karl Shoemaker through the first six days of his senior year in high school in 1973, where he has resolved that he is finally gonna Be Normal if it kills him - and that means extricating himself from the Madman Underground, the school-mandated therapy groups he's been a part of since fourth grade, and the friends he's made across normal social group lines as a result. Karl's dad is dead after a long battle with first alcoholism, then cancer; Karl's mom is a conspiracy-theorist hippie who wants to know she's still a fox, and steals Karl's hard-earned money from many part time jobs to get barflies to tell her so, and drink away her doubts (and everything else). Karl's friends are just as bad off, and everyone in the Underground has their own dirty secrets to tell, but the wonder of the book is how it captures the way such friendships spend more time celebrating one another's strengths and supporting one another than dwelling on the bad stuff. In fact, the entire book is one long celebration of the value of relationships with other people, and the good that comes out of hanging onto them even when they are not perfect and easy. In just six days, we get to witness a turning point for Karl that comes, in the end, as a kind of culmination of the loyalty and goodness we see him pouring into his relationships. Even though Karl gives us a no-holds-barred picture of why people call him 'Psycho' as a nickname, and he may have earned parts of his rep as the class 'scary guy', you cannot help but like him and root for him and his friends just as hard as you can. Somebody should make a movie of this book and not fuck it up, or I will hurt them. GO GET THIS AND READ IT. You will thank me for the big smile it puts on your face.
Here's hoping you enjoyed some of these little reviews. I hope some of you read them, and then go read the books.