I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President, by Josh Lieb

Oliver Watson, Jr., is an unpopular, overweight, not very smart seventh grader. Well, at least he wants you to think that last part. In reality, he is the titular genius and also rich and powerful, though he gets other people to stand in for him because little kids can't sign contracts and stuff. You know. Red tape. He absolutely does not care what his father thinks of him, but when he finds out that his dad was once class president, Oliver decides to run. To taint his father's memories of it, of course. But it's not as easy as it seems... Oliver has to deal with opponents and bribe the administration all while working on expanding his evil empire and getting a nice, tasty grilled cheese sandwich. Life is tough!

Yes, this book is that weird. It's also pretty entertaining. What kid didn't wish she had a fake toilet full of candy in his school, or that he could listen in on the romantic goings-on in the teachers lounge? Seventh grade would have been so much more fun! So Oliver is fun, and even pretty realistic outside of the evil genius stuff. He's just a kid who wants to be someone else. And Lieb does a good job of plotting — he throws a few twists and turns in there that I didn't see coming, but that make perfect sense in hindsight, which is definitely a skill. Oh, and there are pictures of important things and also footnotes, and you know how much I like footnotes.

I would totally give this book to my little brother to read, if I didn't think he'd go getting ideas. Maybe after his class elections.

Rating: 9/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

If I Stay, by Gayle Forman

What a beautiful book. I listened to this on my commute, which was possibly a bad idea because my tear ducts get a little overactive when potentially sad things are happening.

Yes, this is a fairly depressing book. It's about a teenage girl who gets into a horrific car accident with her family, and has an out-of-body experience while the doctors are keeping an eye on her unconscious and beaten-up body. She watches her family and friends as they come in to see her and as they interact with each other, and she reminisces about her life to this point — how she started playing the cello, how she started dating a super-cool rockstar, how she was anxious about her future, etc. She also wonders if she's strong enough to try to keep living, which is what that title is all about.

I was often expecting there to be some sort of twist that would show that Mia's life wasn't as normal and nice as she thought it was, but that never happened. I appreciated that, in the end — it made her choice that much more difficult, and made her seem more real to me, as a person who has been lucky enough to have a fairly easy life.

And the narrator is awesome. I highly recommend listening to this book.

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Maw Books Blog
biblio+chic
My Friend Amy

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

I first read this book in eighth grade, and I recall absolutely adoring it. My favorite part was when we discussed it in class, and there were three different interpretations of the ending! I'm pretty sure this was the first book I'd ever read, or at least the first one I had discussed, where there were so many ways to think about it.

The weird thing about this book, which I have read many times since that first, is that every time I re-read it I like it less as a story, but I love it more as a book and as a commentary on society. I attended a library book club meeting about this book, and for all of those adults that seemed to be the consensus: a very interesting book, but not really well-liked. I think it helps to be 13 when you read it first, because all of the plot devices that become overplayed in another ten years of reading are brand new.

If you haven't read it (if, say, you were in eighth grade before the mid-90s!), this is a pretty simplistic book about a dystopian future world. In this world, the focus is sameness: all babies born in the same year are considered exactly the same age and each age level wears the same clothing and hair styles and follows the same rules. The exceptions to sameness are in the form of aptitudes and interests, with children performing volunteer work at different jobs and eventually being assigned to a job that seems to fit them, whether that's Nurturer (taking care of babies), Recreation Director, Laborer, or Birthmother (making babies, but probably not the fun way). However, at this year's job-assigning ceremony, Jonas gets picked for a job that is very different from those: Receiver of Memories. As we read about Jonas's job, the delightful, organized world he lives in starts to fall apart, as dystopias are wont to do.

I really like that this story is low-key — there's a brief period of hurriedness, but the plot generally moves along slowly. It's much more like The Long Tomorrow than, say, The Hunger Games. Good times.

Rating: 8/10 (inflated for sentimental value, probably)
(Flashback Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler

I was totally pulled in by this title. It's pretty much the only reason I wanted to read this book — I didn't know anything about it going in. And I'll tell you this: the book lives up to its title. I read almost all of it in one very quick sitting, and was highly amused when I finished. Good work, book!

She of the Big Round Butt is Virginia Shreves, a tenth grader with, obviously, a few self-esteem issues. She's a bigger girl in a family of tiny people, with a mother who has anorexia athletica (without the diagnosis, but it's obvious) and a father who loooooooves the skinny girls. I think anyone would have self-esteem issues in a family like that! Anyway, the story follows along with Virginia's life as she navigates school with her best friend on the opposite coast, tries to decide if a guy likes her, deals with her revered older brother doing Something Really Really Stupid, and tries to please her parents by shedding a few pounds. Some of these work, some of them don't.

I loved Virginia. She makes lists! She can't be bad! I totally remember what it was like in tenth grade, trying not just to make sense of everything, but to make up rationalizations for things that were never going to make sense. Like her Fat Girl Code of Conduct — completely unnecessary in actuality, but absolutely needed in Tenth-Grader Low-Self-Esteem Land. Even though I felt like she had an inordinated amount of crap dumped on her all at once, I was okay with it because of the way Virginia dealt with it all (or didn't deal with it, as the case may be) like it was as ridiculous as I thought it was.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Persnickety Snark
Blogging for a Good Book
an adventure in reading

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff

I feel weird about this book. I liked it, but I'm not really sure what happened, or why I should care about the ending... I'm thinking that maybe this was a little too complex a story for me to have listened to it on audiobook. I thought I was paying enough attention, but maybe if I grab it in print I'll realize I missed a whole lot of stuff?

The story is about Daisy, a girl from Manhattan who is sent away to live with some relatives in England for a while, which Daisy thinks is because she hates her new stepmother but is more likely because Daisy has some teenage issues (including hating her stepmother) that are the type of thing that a summer in the English countryside is rumored (rumoured, even) to cure. And things do go pretty well... Daisy loves her cousins, and learns a few things about her dead mother from her aunt, and then loves one of her cousins, which is a little weird but possibly not illegal in England, so whatever, and then war breaks out while her aunt is away. Oops. The cousins get separated when their home is sequestered (is that an appropriate construction?) by the army, and Daisy has to deal first with living with a strange new family, then with the realities of war, and then with trying to survive in the wilderness when those realities go crazy.

It's kind of all over the place, story-wise, but I think the overarching theme is just Daisy bildungsroman-ing (that is not an appropriate construction) as best she can given the insane circumstances she is dealing with. Sometimes life throws you curveballs, I hear this book saying, but has it ever thrown you into circumstances where you have to bivouac? The book thinks not.

And Daisy is a really interesting character — she has those teenage issues, and she sort of knows it, but doesn't really know it and thinks that it is totally normal to be like her. An example that really stuck with me is when the war has broken out and everyone is beginning that whole rationing/starving thing, which is something Daisy is intimately familiar with, if you catch my drift... anyway, she's picking at her food and this woman whom Daisy calls a "big girl" or similar is giving Daisy this look, which we all know means, "Goodness, tiny twig thing, it's not like there's that much food on your plate, I'm sure your stomach can handle it," but which Daisy takes to mean, "I wish I had that tiny twig thing's willpower... I am such a heifer for eating this very tiny portion of food which wouldn't sustain an amoeba." It's a great portrayal of that perfect combination of ego and obliviousness that teenagers have, and I love Rosoff for it. Oh, and Kim Mai Guest, the narrator, does a great job of sounding like an egotistical oblivious teenager without grating on my nerves, so plus ten points to her.

So that's all well and good, but then there's this ending part that's like six years later and I don't really understand that part or what it has to do with anything, let alone the story as told. If someone could explain it, that would be delightful.

Rating: 7/10 (and probably better if I could understand the ending!)
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
medieval bookworm
an adventure in reading
Library Queue
Persnickety Snark
things mean a lot
Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher

Hmm. I wanted to like this book, I did. It came with good recommendations, and it's even on one or more of those award lists I'm reading from for my YA lit class. But except for maybe twenty or thirty minutes, I spent the six and a half hours of audiobook rolling my eyes and bitching at Hannah. I'm not thinking I was supposed to do that. I am really getting old before my time.

The story revolves around Clay Jensen, who gets a package of thirteen cassette tapes in the mail. He is intrigued by this strange anachronism and begins listening to them, only to find out that they are essentially the last words of Hannah Baker, a girl who committed suicide a couple weeks back. On each tape Hannah details an event or person who made her life so horrible that she was driven to kill herself, and instructs the listeners to pass on the tapes, lest a second set be released to the general high-school public for everyone to listen to.

So on the one hand, it's an interesting read/listen, because most of the events are teeny-tiny things that no one would think anything of on their own, but you can understand how the combination of all of them might make someone want to just disappear off the face of the earth. However, I had a hard time thinking of these things as being enough to make someone want to stop living completely. There were a couple of events that made me think, "Wow. Those suck. I would probably go into a very deep depression if those happened to me," but those were completely unrelated to the other events and as such I think Hannah's cassette package could have been much smaller.

I imagine that back in high school, when I was even less popular than Hannah Baker (but didn't have any crazy rumors floating around... that I know of...), I might have connected more with this book. As it stands, I was a little too busy thinking about how stupid Hannah was to think about other things, like how her situation might apply to my life or how I might go about being nicer to other people.

Rating: 4/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
books i done read
The Written World
Maw Books Blog
Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'?
My Friend Amy

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Musing Mondays — The Family That Reads Together

Hey, look! A Musing Mondays question! Today's is... "Who in your family (both immediate & extended) are readers, and who are not?"

I've sort of answered this in other posts, but I am enticed to answer it again because I get to say...

My husband! He's a total reader! Hahahahaha!

Ahem. So my dear Scott has always been kind of a reader, but he's been the one or two book a year style reader and the only reading books by Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind or George R.R. Martin style reader. But then... then he married me, a move he surely regrets now! For a while, he would just humor my readingness, but then I gave him Elantris to read, and then the Old Man's War series, and the Codex Alera, and he's now reading the Dresden Files faster than I'm reading my own books! In fact, he's read them so fast that he's going to have to wait a few days for the next one to come from the library. I don't know what he'll do... I'll have to give him another book to read. :)

I should totally put this on my librarian resume.

The Plain Janes, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

Well, this was a seriously perfect beach read — nice and quick, so I didn't get a sunburn! I must remember these things in the future. :)

The plot: After a bomb goes off in Metro City and lands Jane in the hospital for a little while, her parents move the family off to suburbia to start a new, safer life. Of course, this sucks for Jane, especially since she gets to start school six weeks late. At her first lunch, she's invited to sit with the popular kids, but gravitates instead to a group of girls who share her name — Jayne, Polly Jane, and another Jane. They don't accept her at first, but Jane is determined, so she comes up with a way to bring the foursome together: stealth art attacks. The "attacks" are really just art displays like rock pyramids or a balloon solar system, but the school and the police take them pretty seriously, leading to some delightful civil disobedience.

It's not a terribly deep book, but I loved seeing the art pieces the Janes put together — this is a graphic novel, so you really get to see what's going on! I was never really arty, but I would totally have helped build some of the Janes' structures if someone else had designed them. I also remembered not so fondly that need to be accepted in high school and the way that parents want to take care of you but you just want to do your own thing.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Word Snoop, by Ursula Dubosarsky

OMG squee!

Ahem.

I am pretty much in love with this book. It's about WORDS, people. You know how I love words. And it's written for kids (I found it in the children's section of my library) so that THEY will love words. Oh my goodness. I am going to have to buy a copy for my hypothetical children.

Ahem. Sorry. Let me breathe a bit.

Okay. So. This is a great little tour of the English language, starting with the history of the alphabet, and then of spelling, and then of cool things you can do with words, and then at the end it even talks about text messaging and the language that goes with that. There are also coded messages at the end of each chapter to solve (with hints in the back if you get really stuck). I especially loved the "Say that again!" chapter, which covers puns and onomatopoeia and portmanteaux.

It's not a comprehensive history, by any means, and there are some things that are a little bit wrong (acronyms vs. initialisms, for one), but it's for kids and it's a very good starting point for learning about the crazy English language and it is amusing. It makes me want to go track down and read some Richard Lederer books again!

Rating: 10/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Compound, by S.A. Bodeen

I'm not really sure what to make of this book. I picked it for my YA class as a best audiobook award winner, but I actively disliked the narrator, and the story was okay at best, so I'm not really sure how this award was won. Soooo...

Okay, the story. Eli and most of his family live in the titular compound, which Eli's super-super-super-rich dad built to protect them from a nuclear holocaust. When the family got word of that holocaust happening, they jumped into the compound but had to leave behind Eli's twin brother, Eddie, and his maternal grandmother, who were too far away at the time to be able to round up and hide. This was when Eli was nine. Now he's fifteen and really really bored of the compound, which they can't leave for another nine years because apparently fifteen years underground protects you from nuclear fallout. But when, one day, Eli actually talks to his sister, he finds out that she thinks there was no nuclear catastrophe in the first place and that Eddie and Gram are still alive, and this — along with some other suspicious things he notices — makes him wonder just why he's living underground.

That was my first problem with the book. Eli's been living underground for six years and this is the first he's heard of his sister thinking everyone's alive? He's been believing that everyone's dead for six years and this is the spark that's going to make him believe differently? There were many clues that came up after he talked to his sister that would have been better as the catalyst, in my opinion.

My second problem with the book was Eli in general. Ugh. I pretty much hate the kid. He's whiny, he's self-obsessed, he (according to the audiobook) talks like an idiot, he has a tendency to tell me the same things over and over and over again — well, that's more Bodeen's problem, I guess, but seriously, I got it after the first mention that Eli's hair was a hiding place, you don't neeeeeeeed to tell me again.

I would call the pacing a problem, because it moves just so freakin' quickly and stupidly easily, but A Wrinkle in Time is a far worse offender and I love it to death so we will ignore this problem. This is clearly a book for younger kids.

Okay, I need some nice things to say about the book now. Hmm.

Oh! As much as the plot and pacing are iffy to me, I did really like the concept that Bodeen was going with. What if my dad had hurried me into a giant bunker to ride out a nuclear winter? What if I then found out that it was all just a setup? What if there was a chance I was going to have to eat some babies? (Yes, that last one is actually a plot point. Weird, but interesting.) I might be a little old for the story as told, but I bet an adult novel with the same ideas would really draw me in.

Rating: 5/10 (7/10 if you're under the age of 15)
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Going Bovine, by Libba Bray

Again! Again I thought this was going to be a weird book, and it was, but again, it was pretty darn cool in the end. Luckily (or unluckily?) it looks like my next few reads will be "normal" books... we'll have to see how that goes. :)

Back to the weird book. So there this kid, Cameron, who lives a pretty regular teenage life. He goes to school, he gets his C's, he smokes some weed, he has a lame job, he's distant from his parents and sister... fairly normal. But then one day he starts seeing really weird things, with stuff catching on fire and angels walking around and weird people standing in the street but then not standing in the street. His parents, naturally, think he's totally on the hard drugs, and so does the drug counselor they make him see. But soon they wise up, and Cameron ends up in the hospital with a diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob and not much time to live.

In his disease-fueled dreams, Cameron gets a quest from an angel to go find a Dr. X that will cure his CJD and sets off with his dwarf roommate on an awesome road trip. This trip includes stops at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, at the Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack 'N' Bowl (curiously abbreviated CESSNAB), and eventually at the MTV-equivalent Party House in Florida. It's a little weird, but with all the references to it throughout the book, I'm assuming the story follows along with Don Quixote, one of those books that I never had to read in school but should probably get around to reading someday. A quick glance at that Wikipedia page certainly shows a lot of connections in names of things, at least, so I'm going to run with it.

As soon as it was made clear that the whole quest bit was a fever dream, I was 100 percent behind this book. I loved the way that Bray interwove Cameron's dreams with his real life up to this point and his current hooked-up-to-tubes status. And the way she made ridiculous things like dimension-traveling rock groups seem totally real with the perfect small details. And, of course, I am a sucker for a decent road trip novel, and I think that any road trip that involves a Norse god trapped as a yard gnome is a road trip I want to be on. :)

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Back to Books
Book Nut
Blogging for a Good Book

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Monstrumologist, by Rick Yancey

You know, when I started this book, I was thinking, "Oh, this is going to be another one of those weird books, isn't it? Hmm." And, well, it is pretty weird, but something about it really clicked for me. It's got monsters, it's got weird happenings, it's got unresolved problems... it's even got an unreliable narrator, which is like my favorite kind of narrator. This is my kind of book.

Our narrator is William James Henry, an orphan in the care of the eponymous doctor, Pellinore Warthrop. He, like his father before him, is Warthrop's assistant, helping him in endeavors small (the purchase of raspberry scones) and large (the autopsy of giant scary monsters). One night, a grave robber comes by all, "I was totally not robbing a grave, I don't know what you're talking about, but with that as a given, I found this dead giant scary monster in this grave I was robbing." The monster turns out to be an Anthropophagus, a word which here means a giant scary monster with no head, eyes in its shoulders, a 3000-tooth mouth in its stomach, and a brain in its groin. Oh yeah, and its favorite (and only) meal is humans. Nomnomnom. Nom. Ew.

So of course the monstrumologist and his assistant end up going out to see what's what, and then someone dies, and then some more people die, and then some uncomfortable truths come out about just what a giant scary monster colony is doing in a monstrumologist's backyard, and then the genocide begins, as it does when the race in question wants to eat you. Nomnomnom.

I think what I liked best about this novel was its matter-of-fact-ness. The conceit is that the story comes straight from the diaries of a now-dead hundred-some-year-old Will Henry, so the story isn't all plot — it's also about how Will Henry feels about living with Warthrop and dealing with monsters and generally being a twelve-year-old without a real family. There's also a lot of moderately interesting ethical pondering (Should Warthrop have warned the eventual victims about their chances of being eaten by a giant scary monster? Would anyone have believed him?) that makes some good points without beating you over the head with them.

I quite enjoyed this book. There's a hint of a possibility of a sequel within the frame story; this is one that I would be very interested in reading.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.