Fangirl for Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl

Pardon me if I’m a little weepy; I just finished reading Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. It’s a good weepy, the kind that lets you know that you’re not ready to let go of that amazing book just yet. Eleanor and Park, Rowell’s last book, was perfectly sparse. Each word fit precisely into place. Fangirl is just as perfect, but longer and meatier. It’s the kind of book that you disappear into while you’re reading. 

Fangirl opens with Cath (full name: Cather) leaving for college and hurt that her twin sister doesn’t want to room with together. She’s not all that excited about college, either, or anything that doesn’t involve writing fan fiction about the Simon Snow books—a Harry Potter-esque series of children’s fantasy novels. Simon has always been her escape—from her mother leaving, from her father’s mental health issues, from engaging with the world in a way that might leave her vulnerable. But her blunt roommate and her roommate’s handsome and friendly boyfriend won’t let her retreat completely. And a good-looking boy in her fiction writing class is tempting her into writing about something other than Simon. Is she ready to start her real life if it means letting go of Simon?

Lucid Dream: The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

Listening to other people describe their dreams can be the most boring thing in the world. I know this. And yet I still can’t stop myself from telling people, “I had the craziest dream last night…” Dreams come straight from our raw emotional cores, which makes them a powerful experience that so colors the waking world that we need to share them with someone else just to continue our day. This also makes them extremely difficult to describe. “I saw this pink poodle, only it wasn’t a normal poodle, it was really scary,” doesn’t cover the visceral terror you felt when staring into the black, soulless eyes of a girly hell-dog. Dreams have unstable settings, as well as mysteriously vanishing and reappearing characters, and unresolvable plot holes. And yet Maggie Stiefvater’s The Dream Thieves, a book about dreaming, perfectly evokes the otherworldly feel of those nighttime phantoms while still maintaining a stable base of story.

Awkward Beauty: Real High School Romance in Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park

Most teen romance novels are complete fantasy. And that’s OK. Who doesn’t love a good fantasy once in a while? Especially when the alternative is the sweaty, awkward, or even nonexistent reality that most of us endured in high school. But Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park manages to use the standard romance format to tell a high school romance story that is realistic, in all its cringe-inducing glory, while still managing to be swoon-worthy.

Days of Blood and Starlight: Laini Taylor Strikes Back

Last year, I had a conversation with a friend about Book Twos in trilogies, how often they are either boring retreads of Book One or sacrificing excitement and plot for Book Three setup. “I think you have to go full Empire Strikes Back with it,” I told her. Hyperdrive doesn’t work, Han gets captured and frozen in carbonite, Luke loses a hand; in other words, everything goes wrong. So I was overjoyed to see Kevin Nguyen of Grantland call Days of Blood and Starlight “Young adult fantasy’s Empire Strikes Back…” And after reading it, I have to agree wholeheartedly.

The Diviners by Libba Bray

Libba Bray’s newest novel opens at a 1920s New York City party that, despite the presence of illicit booze, is not going well. The hostess, in an effort to liven things up, pulls out a Ouija board, which begins spewing terrifying messages: “I stand at the door and knock. I am the beast.” With that, Bray effectively sets a mood of terrifying foreboding that creeps around the edges of her character’s bright jazz age lives, occasionally rushing in to plunge them all into darkness.

The Kairos Mechanism by Kate Milford

I believe I have made it clear that I love Natalie from Kate Milford’s The Boneshaker. So when I discovered that Milford had written The Kairos Mechanism, a companion novella to The Boneshaker, I knew that above all, this meant one important thing: I would get to spend more time with Natalie.

The Kairos Mechanism finds Natalie struggling to understand the things she learned in The Boneshaker about her town, her mother’s role in the town, and her mother’s illness. But before she gets a chance to do much wondering, trouble arrives in the form of two soldiers returning the dead body of the town saloon-keeper’s younger brother. His younger brother who died in the Civil War several decades previous. His younger brother whose perfectly preserved body is that of a young man.

As Natalie tries to help these soldiers and to once again save her town from dark forces, she displays all the bravery, ingenuity, and intelligence that made me fall in love with her in The Boneshaker. But The Kairos Mechanism is not just a chance to spend more time with a beloved fictional friend, it is also a twisty thrilling adventure in its own right, simultaneously entertaining and deepening the mythology of Natalie’s town, Arcane, Missouri. Here’s hoping there is more to come from this fascinating town and stupendous character.

White Cat by Holly Black

At the start of Holly Black’s White Cat, 17-year-old Cassel is anxious to let us know that he is not a good guy. He comes from a family of curse workers and has grown up learning how to con everyone he encounters. And, most chillingly, he killed the one girl he ever loved.

He can’t remember much about it. His brothers won’t talk to him about it, and his mother, who is in prison for working a wealthy man, tells him to do what his brothers say. For some time that has meant attending a boarding school and trying to stay out of trouble, which, since Cassel is the only member of his family without worker abilities, isn’t difficult. But when Cassel wakes up at the top of a school building’s tower with no idea how he got there, his safe life begins to crumble. As he tries to solve the mystery of his sleepwalking, dreams of a white cat intersect with his memories of Lila, the girl he killed, the mobsters that his brothers work for, and a knot of family secrets and lies.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

Early in American Born Chinese, a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, a teacher introduces young Jin Wang to his new third-grade class: “I’d like us all to give a warm Mayflower Elementary welcome to your new friend and classmate Jing Jang!” She then proclaims that Jin came “all the way from China.” Wrong again. Jin’s parents are from China; Jin was born in San Francisco. This is just a taste of the casual and often deliberate racism that Jin will face at his new school. Yang’s bright and cheerful artwork contrasts nicely with the complex effect that this treatment has on Jin’s own sense of himself and, in turn, on his own treatment of the people he cares about.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynn M. Valente

I have encountered several books in the past year that I was sure—before I read them—would become my new favorites. They each rode in on a wave of print and internet acclaim and had titles and concepts that seemed designed to appeal especially to me. But they all fell flat for one reason or another. And in a book you are prepared to love, that can be even more disappointing than when a regular book that you had no expectations attached to turns out to not be very good. This is all to explain why I avoided reading Catherynn M. Valente’s The GirlWho Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making for so long.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Part of the reason I didn’t date in high school is that I wanted the kind of 17-year-old boy who appears in YA books: sensitive, kind, and desiring of a committed adult relationship. But even teenage me knew the truth: no 17-year-old boy is ready for an adult relationship. (Or 17-year-old girl, for that matter. I certainly wouldn’t have known what to actually do with one if I came across it at that age.) However, Augustus Waters, the love interest in JohnGreen’s The Fault in Our Stars, is ready for that kind of love because he has to be. He’s a 17 year old with cancer; if not now, there may be no when.

The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour

I have been listening to Heart nonstop for the past two weeks, and it is all thanks to The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour. I have always liked Heart, but I have been on a serious love binge, which has helped introduce me to some songs I never knew I loved and reintroduce me to songs I had forgotten I loved. But The Disenchantments is about much more than Heart (even though it does feature a loving tribute in the form of a road trip sing-along that gives this one and this one a run for their money). The Disenchantments is about friends, music, and finally graduating high school only to realize just how terrifying the freedom you longed for actually is.

Dreamland Social Club by Tara Altebrando

 True story: my senior year of high school, I did a presentation about the history of Coney Island. This presentation began with my friend and I singing a commercial jingle for the now demolished Astroland amusement park at Coney Island:

Remember Coney Island, and how it used to be

now it’s everything it ever was AND MORE!

we’re gonna rock, ROCK

we’re gonna roll, ROLL

we’re gonna bop, BOP

and lose control

(That was where we stopped because we couldn't remember the rest.)

I'll Be There by Holly Goldberg Sloan

I put I’ll Be There on my library queue because Tee at YACrush said it was “perfect in every way”. It seemed like it was just going to be a regular book where a boy and girl meet each other, and I generally prefer books with fantastical elements, so it sat in my book pile unread for a couple of weeks.  When I finally got to it, I couldn’t believe I had waited so long. Tee was right; I’ll Be There is extraordinary.

Morning Glories Vol. 1: For a Better Future

by Nick Spencer (writer), Joe Eisma (illustrator), and Rodin Esquejo (cover art)

The first glimpse we get of Morning Glory Academy is a seemingly typical school scene. A female student is caught passing a note. As a punishment, her teacher has her tell the class about her forthcoming science fair project, an advanced-sounding Chemistry experiment. We start to realize that Morning Glory has a pretty good science program. The teacher’s dismissal of the project is a clue that the school's curriculum is even more rigorous than we originally thought. And then the student goes on to say that her Chemistry project can actually be made into an explosive, and that’s when the blackboard blows up.

Among Others by Jo Walton

Before I even start, let me just say: read this book. If you like reading, you need to do it. Among Others by Jo Walton is wonderful. I loved it so much. OK, insane gushing out of the way, here is the synopsis (from the Amazon book description):

Startling, unusual, and yet irresistably readable, Among Others is at once the compelling story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood, a brilliant diary of first encounters with the great novels of modern fantasy and SF, and a spellbinding tale of escape from ancient enchantment.

Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom and promise in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. Then her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, and Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled--and her twin sister dead.

Fleeing to her father whom she barely knew, Mori was sent to boarding school in England–a place all but devoid of true magic. There, outcast and alone, she tempted fate by doing magic herself, in an attempt to find a circle of like-minded friends. But her magic also drew the attention of her mother, bringing about a reckoning that could no longer be put off…

Unearthly by Cynthia Hand

Ever since I read a New York Times article a few years ago proclaiming that angels were the new vampires in YA (an article which I cannot seem to locate and may very well have made up), I avoided angel books. However, as someone who is suspicious of articles proclaiming any sub-genre either “the next big thing” or “so over,” I should have known better. And if I had, I might have read and enjoyed Unearthly by Cynthia Hand that much sooner.

Here’s the synopsis (from the author's web site):

Clara Gardner has recently learned that she's part angel. Having angel blood run through her veins not only makes her smarter, stronger, and faster than humans (a word, she realizes, that no longer applies to her), but it means she has a purpose, something she was put on this earth to do. Figuring out what that is, though, isn't easy.

Her visions of a raging forest fire and an alluring stranger lead her to a new school in a new town. When she meets Christian, who turns out to be the boy of her dreams (literally), everything seems to fall into place—and out of place at the same time. Because there's another guy, Tucker, who appeals to Clara's less angelic side.

As Clara tries to find her way in a world she no longer understands, she encounters unseen dangers and choices she never thought she'd have to make—between honesty and deceit, love and duty, good and evil. When the fire from her vision finally ignites, will Clara be ready to face her destiny?

Review of Dream School by Blake Nelson

Dream School picks up exactly where Girl left off, with Andrea Marr on a plane on the way to Wellington, her number one choice for college. Andrea has high hopes for the coming four years, and for the person they will turn her into. But at Wellington, Andrea finds a population of rich, majority white students, most of whom are not interested in her wild experiences as a part of the Portland alternative music scene.