Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman

I always pause and investigate when I see book jackets that look remotely Indian-- I blame it on my Bollywood obsession. The thing about YA books from/about India is that you can, in my experience, count on them having the same basic plot:  young teen girl, everything starts out nice but then, uh-oh, you are getting old, you should put away your girlish dreams of education/ independence/whatever, instead we should probably arrange a marriage for you, but hey, maybe by the end something will happen that will make us think that you should get to do what you want.  The only real difference is that with those Shabanu books it took a trilogy and a lot of depressingness to get there, whereas here it all happened in a couple hundred pages.  Of course, it makes sense--the melodramatic Bollywood style of storytelling wouldn't really work in book format, and this remainder is, I am forced to assume, a realistic picture of typical Indian teenage life?  It was a pretty good book, all things considered.  It takes place in the early 1940s, mid- WW2, pre-Indian-independence, so there's a layer of "Jai Hind, down with the British oppressors, way-to-go-Gandhiji" freedom fighting to set against the main character(I already forgot her name, I am awful)'s personal struggle for independence.  As far as these books go, it was a good one.  No Huger Games of course, but then, what really is?  Thank you, Suzanne Collins, for ruining my life.  Everything else will just be okay.  

Looking for Alaska by John Green

So, the story on why I am reading all these John Green novels is that over the summer my library at home had An Abundance of Katherines, which I picked up because of the nice looking cover art and because my name is Katharine.  You understand.  Anyway, it was pretty good, and the style was fun and funny, and so I thought, "Huh, John Green, his picture on the flap looks kind of like Bryce Lowder, that is weird,  he's a pretty funny guy though."  And then lo and behold months later I'm browsing around the return shelves and I find all kinds of his other books, and so I snagged them.  I'm sad that it's been such a while since I read Katherines, because it would be interesting to compare with these two that I've just read.  These two were really similar, but I don't remember Katherines having an alluring but mysterious and unattainable girl who then disappeared and led to the main character's long soul-and-world-view-searching-and-revising internal journey.  But perhaps my memory is just faulty.  

Anyway, the quirk of Alaska is that the main character (still a smart, skinny, lovable nerd) is just starting off at a boarding school in Alabama, so we get to watch as he makes friends with really cool funny people in an enviably short amount of time.  But I'm not bitter.  Ahem.  Anyway, one of his cool funny friends is an alluring but mysterious and unattainable girl named Alaska, who disappears half way through and leads to the main character's long soul-and-world-view-searching-and-revising internal journey.  I realize that I'm sounding really snippy and snarky and all other adverbs beginning with "sn-", but I don't really mean to be--I'm the one who read these books overnight and will continue to read anything Green ever writes. Honestly, I think that these books are a testament to the magical power of fun, quirky writing to make even the same basic plot lines seem fun and refreshing and new, no matter how many times they're told.  

Paper Towns by John Green

Okay so here is the thing about John Green:  I both love and am frustrated with him.  Love:  He writes teen banter that is actually funny.  Seriously, I chuckle, and sometimes laugh aloud.  He makes me wish I had had friends in high school, because apparently there were good times to be had!  Also, though this is where we get into the frustration, I like how his characters are the almost-misfits who are comfortable with themselves--they're happy being band geeks, or loners, or nerds.  Huh, I'm struggling with myself here, because the frustration happens here because part of me sits here and thinks "Yeah I was a nerd and an orch dork (yes, I know, we all make mistakes), and I never had half the good times these fellas are having, so what gives?" but then I remember, yeah, since when has ANYTHING written about high school been realistic?  There's just no way to capture it, and anyway since when is realism the best thing since sliced bread? So, okay, I won't lay all my bitterness about life at John Green's door.  The remaining actual frustration I have is his tendency towards swearing and teen sex etc, which I'm sure IS very realistic, but that doesn't mean I want to read all about it.  And it's really just a shame because he's a smart guy, and his characters are smart, and so much of his books work on a really fun, inventive, cerebral plane, and then he puts in teen boys being teen boys and it all crashes down.  But anyway.  Enough.

Paper Towns was pretty good, but perhaps my least favorite of his books so far?  It's about this boy Q who is wild about his next door neighbor Margo, but she is literally too cool for school and they haven't spoken for years until one night out of the blue she makes him come with her on this pranking rampage, and then the next day she disappears (see, I was not using 'literally' just as an intensifier back there!).  So then Q spends the rest of the book trying follow these clues she left behind and trying to figure out what the deal is with this girl he loved from afar for so long.  

It's really funny and intense and it does make you think about how well you know people, and how far you can ever trust your perceptions of others.  Q and his merry band of band geeks are likable and hilarious, and Johnny really does excel at creative these captivating femme fatales like Margo--every boy wants her, every girl wants to be her.  Having also just read Green's first book, Looking for Alaska, Margo seems like just the next avatar of the character he created in Alaska--in fact, a lot of things about these books are similar, to the point that I almost wonder how Green got away with writing this second one.  BUT, that is for another post.

Oh man, I read so many books this week

So this is the first time I can remember when I was sick, and instead of working through it and being tough and what not I let myself stay in bed for three days and be sick. It was WONDERFUL. All my professors were cool with turning in homework next week, so I got to just chill and finally work my way through my stack of library books, all of which were going to start collecting fines.  Anyway, it may take me a minute to get through the whole list of them, and I hope I don't forget any... but you won't mind, eh Becca?  Cool.

Curse as Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce

This book was a really interesting take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale.  Huh.  I'm still sort of digesting it.

It starts when Charlotte Miller's father dies, and she is left in charge of running the mill with her younger sister.  Of course, the mill/ family is cursed, and have been victim to awful luck for the past billion generations.  Most of the book is taken up with Charlotte trying to keep things together and horrible accidents and whatnot getting in the way and almost ruining things.  Of course, right when they're on the brink of ruin (which happens a couple different times) a mysterious stranger comes and saves the day in return for random jewelry and whatnot.  Eventually it comes down to "Holy crap he wants my baby in exchange for saving the mill now um what?" and so they finally look into the history of the curse and get things sorted out.  Oh, and midway through there's a nice little romance (hence having a baby for the Rumpel-type to get all grabby with).  

So, I will say in its favor: I never really had any idea of what was going to happen next in this book, which is a)rare and b) especially rare in a YA fairy tale retelling, when you generally assume you know how it's going to go.  However, I can't really say I loved this book.  I know it was intentional and so forth, but the constant stress of "holy crap nothing will ever go right and financial shenanigans oh my gosh what are we going to do oh this dude will help but that will clearly only screw us over in the end, this really sucks I wish I were dead" kind of got to me, and made it hard to really have a good time whilst reading.  

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Okay so I remember when this book came out, sometime mid-high school, and it got all popular and famous and everyone read it, so then even though I was somewhat interested I was like NO I will not read it it is for PLEBES.  Then when I started going on a reading rampage a couple weeks ago I thought Um okay why not, also since Liz Lemon mentioned it somewhere last season of 30 Rock (when she's interviewing with the board of that condo place and she's apologizing for saying she read it when she really didn't. . . anyway it's funny).  OKAY so: Turns out I think I was right to begin with?

So, okay, it's about this young teen girl in the 70s who gets raped and killed by this creepy neighborhood guy and then goes to heaven and watches her family and friends dealing with it for the next ten years.  So um, okay, knowing, going into it, that that was the premise, I was skeptical, but then you know hey if the rest of the universe loves it there must be something that makes it okay, right?  Um. . . nope.  Not in my book at least.  First of all, way too much detail about the gross murder-ness.  Okay not like GROSS detail of anything, but still.  Ugh.  And then it's all just depressing because it's her family grieving and falling apart and then yeah eventually coming together again, but still.  Still.  Nothing fabulously enlightening enough to make up for the basic premise being bleak and awful.

BUT that being said, I hear they're making a movie with Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg, and okay I will totally see it.  Probably in the dollar theater though.  

Underworld by Catherine Macphail

Guys I have been reading some duds lately.

I checked this book out after finishing Hunger Games, because after reading that little piece of delight I did a library search for books about survival (this was also after The Road, so you know, yikes) and this is the first one that came up.  Turns out books about teens and surviving and whatnot are not all created equal.  Duh, I guess.

Anyway it's about these 5 kids in the UK who go on this class trip and end up getting trapped in this underground cave system, and they're all very different (cue Breakfast Club soundtrack) but then somehow none of them are at all sympathetic or likable, until the very VERY end where they're all like "Oh yeah probably this experience should be teaching me how to relate well to others, I guess I had better go do that real quick; also, I guess there is a mythical beast down here, and sometimes there are excerpts from a German soldier's memoirs talking about this one time he got trapped down here as well?  Um?"

So yeah, meh.  It got better when I started skipping pages and skimming.  That's never a good sign.

Beating Heart by A.M. Jenkins

Guys, this book was not that good.  That's all there really is to say.  I was disappointed.  But I suppose my expectations were somewhat high--this purports to be a ghost story with some sort of romantic element, and the last book I read with that basic idea turned out to be one of my top ten YA books of ALL TIME (A Certain Slant of Light, by Laura Whitcomb--I hear she's working on/about to publish another book, I could basically die with excitement and anticipation)--SO I was going into it assuming it would be somewhat similar in awesomeness.  And then it was just some book.  Meh.

It's hardly worth summarizing, but okay:  This teenage boy moves into this old house with his recently divorced mom and little sister.  There is a teenage girl ghost in the house.  She died a tragic and mysterious early death, which becomes less mysterious because she basically tells it to you in these weird 5-words-on-a-page stream-of-consciousness whimsicalities, and it all happens to mirror this stuff going on with the boy and his girlfriend.  And um everyone learns a lesson, and the ghost decides to accept death and move on to the light, and the boy decides to be nicer to his little sister.  Um.  Yeah.  

Seriously.  The only good thing about this book is that it is small enough that I was able to unobtrusively sit and read it in linguistics class, and ANYthing is better than paying attention to linguistics class.

Hawksong, by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

I don't know why they decided to have pictures of ugly people on the cover of this book--the only reason it is worth reading at all (and I'm not really saying it is...) is for teen romance value, which is only interesting at all if you have really attractive mental pictures.  This is scientific fact.  Anyway, this book is basically what would happen if instead of vampires Twilight were about the teenage queen of the bird shape shifting folks and how she had to stop a never-ending war with the snake shape shifters by marrying their teenage king, and they were all distrustful at first and it was kind of awkward but then in a couple hundred pages they realized that they were in love.  Which is to say, the story is pretty thin, but you keep reading for the kissing parts.  Which aren't even that good. Is that okay to say?  Oh gosh.

Anyway, the internet just informed me that this might be the first of a series, which I would actually think about pursuing, because the only real problem I had with this book is that it was so obviously just about the romance that though she spent a lot of time talking about these random societies of shape shifters she invented, none of it was interesting or deep--it was clearly just the afterthought to the tense glances and you know, whatever other things typify angsty teen romance.  BUT if it continues into a series maybe that means that she'll expand more on some actually solid story-building things that will make it seem like something worth while and recommendable.  As it is, Becca, it's pretty okay fun, and a kind of interesting romance, but not really worth going out of your way to find.  

The Lady in the Hat by Uri Orlev

Something funny about my experience with this book is that I read the whole thing thinking it had been written by a woman, and then at the end actually looked at the authors name and saw that it was a man!  For some reason the gender of the author frequently affects my reading of a book (or a whatever) so it kind of threw me off.  Anyway.  Fun fact.

Okay so this book is about this teenage boy who is a Polish Jew who is the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.  It follows two parallel story lines-- (1) the boy, Yulek,  joins a refugee group and makes his way to Israel, and forms relationships with different folks, the most important being with this other Jewish girl Theresa who was saved from Nazis by joining a convent, which makes it all weird because she's going to go live in a Jewish nation but she has serious Catholic tendencies, having spent the formative years of her life basically training to be a nun.  Anyway, they have a nice little understated romance which is sweet.  So they all work and train and dodge the British government and whatnot who try to keep Jewish refugees out of Palestine (since Israel hasn't been formed/recognized as a nation yet).  Very exciting. then there's story (2) about Yulek's long lost aunt who was disinherited by her family years before the war because she went to study in London and married a Gentile.  She figures out that Yulek is alive, and spends the whole book trying to track him down since they are the only family members each other has left.  Her story is sweet because it's a big journey of self discovery as she travels to Jerusalem and deals with balancing her developed Britishness with her ancestral Jewishness.  

All in all, it kind of felt like Exodus for beginners, but that was okay.  It's like Exodus if there were no Paul Newman character and most people didn't die at the end.  Hooray!

King of Shadows by Susan Cooper

Usually I don't like the whole genre of kids traveling in time and hanging out with famous people.  I like that it teaches kids abut famous historical people--dude I thought I knew everything there was to know about Paul Revere from that one book I had when I was a kid, the name of which I cannot recall.....Anyway, I get that there are benefits, but in general I don't like it when historical figures get involved (no matter what era the kid hero comes from!) because it's always mildly offensive to me how arbitrary the characterization is--I mean, maybe Paul Revere was a total jerkface in real life, but by gum we're going to make him a kindly gent in order to let these kids interact with him and have a grand old time.  I just don't like messing with the lives and personalities of real people.

HOWEVER, all bets are off when the author is Susan Cooper, it turns out.  

King of Shadows is about this American kid who gets to go to England with a youth acting troupe and perform some Shakespeare plays in the reconstructed Globe theater.  He's recently been orphaned, so he has serious parent/especially father issues.  He falls ill (whilst rehearsing in England) and wakes up to find himself in Elizabethan times!!  He is very coincidentally somehow being mistaken for some kid with his same name who is playing the same role in Midsummer Night's Dream as he has been practicing, and also oh my gosh "Will Shakespeare" is there and will be playing Oberon to our young hero's Puck.  Anyway, he finds acceptance and happiness in olden times and Shakespeare is his new father figure (put your tiny hand in mine) and everything is great, but then of course Oh no sometime he will probably have to return to modern times, dun dun DUN.

So anyway the whole premise is vaguely ridiculous, but somehow I found myself being inexplicably emotionally moved!  It was just really sweet to see the kid finally have a mentor-male-role-model type, and even though I hate it when they do this, it really was kind of awesome to have the basic point of the novel be  "Oh my gosh, Shakespeare has the kindest eyes!  What a tender caring intuitive soul!  Will you be my father figure if I put my tiny hand in yours?"   It's cheesy, it's ridiculous, it has no historical proof--but I was okay with it.  

I was also okay with the fact that she never really even attempted to explain how the time travel/place switching stuff happened--it was almost nice not having to read through some made up rationale for it. Especially because in the end all of that was peripheral-- the main point was a pretty messed-over kid getting some guidance and camaraderie from the most famous writer of the English language.  And that is something we can all get behind.

Statement of Intent

So, lately Becca has been in a reading mood, and has gone to all kinds of extreme lengths to feed her craving for fun-time, low impact books.  In the pursuit of such she found some girls' website which was full of young adult book reviews and such, and upon perusing it myself I became jealous.  The thing is, I read boatloads of YA lit, and I have some opinions on what is good, and what is not good but still fun, and what is total garbage, and I want a place where I can proclaim these opinions to the world!  And thanks to the Internet, the world will suffer.