I did not expect this. CBR11 Review 7.

Last week, my boss gave me this book and asked me if I would prepare a presentation on it for some workshops we have coming up. It looked cute: pink and white stripes on the cover and a girl spilling her ice cream. Sounded fine to me!

And the book was indeed fine. Blended tells the story of Isabella, a sixth grader with divorced parents. She struggles to adapt to the back-and-forth custody arrangement that her parents have, and doesn’t feel like she can call either her mom’s or her dad’s house “home.”

In addition, Isabella is trying to figure out who she is. You see, her mom is white and her dad is black. Her mom works as a waitress and has a boyfriend who manages a bowling alley. Her dad is a high-powered businessman and lives in a giant house, and has a girlfriend who wears beautiful suits and shops in the most expensive stores.

Is she more like her mom? She loves bowling and driving around in John Mark’s pick-up truck. She likes to go to Dunkin Donuts as a special treat. Or, is she more like her dad? She loves new clothes and hanging out with her almost-step-brother. She has a great time going out to eat in expensive restaurants wearing nice dresses. Isabella is also a piano prodigy, and is getting ready for an important recital. At her mom’s house, she practices on a small Casio keyboard, and at her dad’s she uses a huge concert piano.

But which Isabella is the real Isabella?

I appreciated Sharon Draper’s insight into how a young girl might tread through these waters. What gives someone their identity? Is it where they live or the color of their skin? Or is it something more?

AND THEN.

With 20 pages left to go, this book takes a turn I did not expect, and suddenly becomes The Hate U Give, Junior.

I think its important that younger kids are made aware of some of the racial injustices in our country today, and this book most definitely presents some of them in a very uncomfortable way. Good on Sharon Draper to take that on in a middle grade book.

My only complaint is that I felt as if Isabella didn’t get any closure on some of the things that happened to her toward the end. But then I realized, that’s life. Not everything is wrapped neatly with a bow. Life is messy. And this story might provide some worthy discussion topics for younger (4th-7th grade?) readers who aren’t quite ready to dig into Angie Thomas or Jason Reynolds.

 

 

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it takes a huge amount of fake blood to keep a Halloween theme park running.” CBR11 Review 6.

I could not have been more excited about the release of Two Can Keep a Secret. Karen McManus** — who has been such an amazing supporter of the Cannonball Read — currently has TWO books on the NYTimes bestsellers list, which is amazing. So many of us read — and loved — her debut novel, One of Us is Lying last year, and its been great to see that book is still attracting new readers and new fans.

TCKAS is a mystery about missing girls in a small town in Vermont. Twins Ellery and Ezra are sent there for their senior year to live with their grandmother, who they don’t even really know. Their mom, an aspiring Hollywood actress and successful Hollywood drug addict, is in rehab, and their trip to New England is court ordered.

They don’t know much about the life that their mom Sadie left behind in Vermont, other than that she left after her twin sister, Sarah, disappeared after their homecoming dance — where Sadie was homecoming queen — and has never been seen again.

But Sarah’s disappearance ins’t the only mystery that this small town has in its past. Five years ago, Lacey, the homecoming queen, was found murdered at the town’s famous Halloween theme park.

And this year, an anonymous someone has been threatening to kill the homecoming queen.

Ellery is a true crime addict and jumps head-first into trying to figure out who is behind the menacing threats. And what does her arrival in town have to do with any of it? Will something bad happen at the halloween theme park? Why won’t her mother or her grandmother ever talk about what happened to Sarah? Who killed Lacey? Now that Ellery has been nominated to the homecoming court, is her life in danger, too?

Here’s an interesting tidbit: recently, I’ve read a book (Broken Things) about an unsolved teen murder in Vermont, and I’ve read a book about an unsolved teen murder at a Halloween theme park (There’s Someone Inside Your House) and this book is so much better than both of those. I guess small town halloween theme park teen murders are this year’s vampire dystopian love triangles. Fine by me. I am here for it.

The setting of the other theme park book didn’t really make sense to me. But here, for this troubled town, it does. At one point, Ellery notes:

All of Fright Farm’s success is based on how much people love to be scared in a controlled environment. There’s something deeply, fundamentally satisfying about confronting a monster and escaping unscathed…Real monsters aren’t anything like that. They don’t let go.

I could not put this book down. I had no idea what was going to happen, and was 100% wrong every time I tried to guess how it might end. I’m happy to report that not only does TCKAS keep the reader in suspense for the entire book, but it ends on a shocking, kick ass MIC DROP. I read the last sentence, closed the book, and said “Hell, yeah” out loud to myself.

**PS, Karen and I went to college together. I am so proud of what she has accomplished and cannot wait to read everything she puts down on paper. If you follow her on twitter you know that she is a great supporter of other YA writers and just an absolute pleasure in general. Looking forward to seeing her at a Barnes & Noble Q&A next week!!

Best read with a pint of IPA and a Rolling Stones record on the turntable. CBR11 Review 5.

I’ll start this review by saying I am a massive fan of Ian Rankin, especially his John Rebus series of books. So basically, he could write up Rebus’ shopping list, and I’d probably give it a 5 Star review. Just so you know.

There have been at least 20 books about John Rebus and his adventures in the Edinburgh  police department. And this was the first one that wasn’t really about John Rebus that much. Yes, he was in it, and yes, he played a major role, but he wasn’t the primary character, and it had a bit of a different feel to it. Almost like Ian Rankin was feeling out what it would be like to have a John Rebus book without John Rebus in it.

The bulk of this story was about the re-opening of an unsolved case from 2006. New evidence has been uncovered, bringing in a new investigative team that includes Siobhan Clarke, and also involves the original team, which of course, involved Rebus. The missing persons case from 12 years prior is now officially a murder case.

All of the old suspects are brought in, but the original team is brought in too. Was there maybe someone on the team who was working for the other side? Were there mistakes made (on purpose) in order to keep the mystery unsolved?

This is a Rebus story, so rest assured, all of our old friends like Malcolm Fox and Big Ger Cafferty are going to have parts to play here. As does the lovely city of Edinburgh.

But I was more interested in the secondary story. It seems that Siobhan has been getting threatening phone calls regarding a case that was closed several months prior — a young man murdered his girlfriend and was sent to prison. But was it really that simple? Siobhan is convinced to take another look at the case, but she has her hands full with this new murder investigation…so she hands it off to her old mentor.

And here, I’m going to have to include some spoilers. If you are a Rebus fan, but haven’t read this one yet, tread carefully.

This turns out to be a rather upsetting story about the dangers of social media and what its doing to teenagers today, especially girls. The murder was the result of incessant internet (I think Instagram, but can’t be sure) bullying. And Rebus had a really hard time wrapping his head around it.

Rebus is no friend to technology. He likes to do things the old fashioned way. But he understands that he needs to make an effort in order to exist in the modern world. But he doesn’t have to like it.

It saddened him that so much these days happened online, with every keyboard warrior suddenly a ‘commentator’ or ‘pundit’ or ‘news-gatherer’. There was a lack of quality control. Anyone and everyone felt they had something to say and they weren’t about to hold back. The public probably reckoned they were better informed than ever. They were, but not always by the truth.

Adding in impressionable young minds just made things worse.

He was thinking about families and the lies they told each other. From the outside, it was hard to know what was happening behind their walls and curtained windows. Even once you’d crossed the threshold, there’d be secrets unshared. In an age of the internet and mobile phones, kids and their parents lived ever more separate lives, sharing confidences but also hiding bits of their true selves behind masks. It had been hard enough in the past to read people, but these days you had to push your way through so much that was fake and misleading.

This secondary plot was depressing, especially as I am the mother of a teenage girl who is ALWAYS on her phone. The bullying and the depression and the staged lives were really tough to read about, and yet, I wish there had been more to it. I wish this had been the primary case that Rebus and Siobhan had worked on.

As always, it was great to get back into the little world of Rebus and his friends. And next time, I’d like to know more about Big Ger’s pig farm that he keeps threatening people with. I can’t even imagine what goes on up there.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I am a sucker for a decent Austen retelling. CBR11 Review 4.

Newsflash: I’ll pretty much read anything that is tangentially related to Jane Austen. Unofficial sequels. Modern retellings. Historical fiction. Whatever. Some of it works. A lot of it doesn’t. But I’m usually game to give it a go.

I really enjoyed the books that were part of The Austen Project a few years ago. There was Emma, driving around her little town in a Mini Cooper. Cat and Henry, with lots of references to Twilight. Liz and Darcy and a dating reality show in Cincinatti. And a social media fueled version of Sense & Sensibility that was fun but definitely a product of its time.

I’m gonna say that I liked this one, despite its faults, better than the official retelling by Joanna Trollope. And although that one was ridiculous, it really wasn’t half bad. But I just liked this one more. It was like a comfy sweater that has a few holes in it.

Jane and her older sister Celia run a tea salon in San Francisco, and are the legal guardians to their younger sister, Margot. For reasons. Blah, blah, blah, they lose their lease and have to move halfway across the country in order to try and start again. They have a distant cousin in Austin who offers them a guest house on his massive, Texas-sized property, but they are clearly fish out of water outside of San Francisco.

The set up of this, and the first third of the book are honestly pretty clunky. We know the plot, and she tries so hard to make everything fit where it should. And some of it is just awkward. The dialogue was messy. The situations were somewhat forced.

But once things got moving with the Jane/Sean/Callum (Marianne, Willoughby, and Brandon) love triangle, I was all in.

Callum is a veteran who lost his leg over in Iraq, and is still dealing with what happened over there. He is living with his friend’s family while he gets his life back on track, and of course, that friend just so happens to be Jane and Celia’s cousin.

Callum’s chapters are really interesting. He goes to therapy to talk about his experiences in the war. He talks about the family that pushed him away. There’s a lot to him that we don’t usually get in a standard Sense story, and I liked it. He was truly a good man. With a good dog.

Another interesting addition to this version was that it included recipes at the end of some chapters, explaining how to make some of the treats that Jane and Celia sold in their shop. I’m never going to make any of these things (seriously, they looked really difficult), but I liked the idea of having them included.

Bottom line: this was a cute story that I read in a day and in the end left me wanting more.

PS. I’m still waiting for the Austen Project to provide me with Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Wither thou, Captain Wentworth?

“It’s a cruel, cruel world. And the people are the worst part.” CBR11 Review 3.

In Justina Ireland’s America, nobody won the Civil War. The war simply never ended, because of the shamblers.

The shamblers are the dead that rose up from the battlefields of Gettysburg and began to walk, hungry for blood and flesh. The country needed to band together to fight this new threat, and the war simply petered out.

Most of the cities in the South are simply gone. Burned. Destroyed. Overrun by shamblers. The cities in the North are doing slightly better, but its hard to get a straight answer out of the politicians about what the future may look like.

Young African-Americans are taken from their homes in their early teens, and brought to special training academies, where they are taught to be “attendants.” They learn to fight and kill. And they learn to protect their white employers. No matter what.

Jane McKeene is one of these girls, training to be an attendant. She’s smart, she’s fierce on the battlefield, but she hasn’t been hired as an attendant yet, because she has opinions of her own, and she keeps failing her etiquette classes.

While the other girls at school, including the beautiful Katherine, dream of landing a job in a fine house, with nice dresses, all Jane wants is to go home. Back to Rose Hill, the farm where she grew up, and back to her mother.

But of course, as this is a novel about zombies, we know that things probably aren’t going to go the way Jane wants.

Bottom line: I really enjoyed this.

It was fresh and fun. Jane was smart, even when she did things that she knew were stupid and might get her in trouble. I liked that Jane was a loyal friend, who would do anything for those she cared about. I liked that the main characters did not all fall in love with each other. I liked that this book could clearly continue with a sequel, but that there really isn’t any need for it to.

And I loved that the girls and women in this story all kicked ass, while the majority of the men sat around being stupid.

But what I liked most about it was that while it took place during the Civil War era, the themes and subject matter (not including zombies) were 100% contemporary. Racism. Sexism. Financial inequality. Education. Political power.

“See, the problem in this world ain’t sinners, or even the dead. It is men who will step on anyone who stands in the way of their pursuit of power.”

Justina Ireland has a lot to say, and we should all be listening.

I just can’t quit you, Lauren Oliver. CBR11 Review 2.

Lauren Oliver is sort of my Cannonball nemesis. I adored her first book, Before I Fall, but have been disappointed ever since, and my disappointment is somewhat well documented. I disliked her Delirium trilogy (yet kept reading). I didn’t care for Rooms, and Panic was just ok. But for seem reason, I just can’t quit her. And I know, I have no one to blame but myself, really. Lauren Oliver owes me nothing. But still. I want more. I know that someday she’ll write something as good as Before I Fall, and I want to be there when she does.

Broken Things falls firmly into the “not terrible” category of Oliver’s books, which I guess I should be grateful for at this point.

From Amazon:

It’s been five years since Summer Marks was brutally murdered in the woods.

Everyone thinks Mia and Brynn killed their best friend. That driven by their obsession with a novel called The Way into Lovelorn the three girls had imagined themselves into the magical world where their fantasies became twisted, even deadly.

The only thing is: they didn’t do it.

On the anniversary of Summer’s death, a seemingly insignificant discovery resurrects the mystery and pulls Mia and Brynn back together once again. But as the lines begin to blur between past and present and fiction and reality, the girls must confront what really happened in the woods all those years ago—no matter how monstrous.

Mia and Brynn have spent the past five years hiding from the world — Brynn (tough as nails, gay & proud, fiercely protective of others) keeps herself in rehab (even though she doesn’t use drugs or alcohol) to avoid home and school, and Mia (shyer than shy, a perfectionist, loyal to those who deserve it) has been homeschooled by her hoarding mother. Their town turned against them and the police turned them against each other. Once best friends, they haven’t spoken since the charges against them were dropped.

But now, five years later, Mia and Brynn want to clear their names and figure out what happened to their friend, the beautiful, shining Summer.

The girls put their own little Scooby Gang together and attempt to solve the mystery, bringing along Mia’s friend Abby, a YouTube beauty celebrity, who may have a crush on Brynn; Brynn’s cousin Wade, who is obsessed with Summer’s murder; and Owen, the mystery boy who was also a suspect. Mia’s been in love with Owen for as long as she can remember, but it was Summer who kissed him on the dance floor at Homecoming just before she died.

As the book progresses, we find out that Summer, who Brynn and Mia adored and looked up to, really wasn’t so nice or such a good friend to either of them. She manipulated them to do what she wanted and then punished them when she was done with them. But she was beautiful and so alive, and Brynn and Mia couldn’t stay away from her.

The mystery itself wasn’t all that tough to figure out. I guessed who did it about halfway through the book. But I didn’t really care. I was more interested in the imaginary world of Lovelorn, and whether or not these girls really went there, or simply believed that they went there, or were just pretending the whole time. Why would three girls in middle school spend so many hours pretending to be in a fantasy world that doesn’t exist? What was missing from their own realities that made them so obsessed with this pretend one?

I really sympathized with Mia and her situation at home. After the murder, her parents split up and her mother became a hoarder, and Mia was uncomfortable with the fact that her mother’s behavior wasn’t something she could control. Her introvert tendencies were really well developed by Oliver. I also felt bad for Brynn and her home situation — being shunned by her mom and sister for causing so much trouble and making things hard for them. Ugh.

This was a quick read, and a pretty good one. Nothing groundbreaking, but so much better than a lot of crap out there. One thing about Lauren Oliver, she has original ideas and isn’t just putting out retreads of whatever love triangle or dystopia is popular. Her books seem much more personal, and I’ll give her credit for that.

I don’t know why I keep coming back to Oliver. I always say that this book is the last one I’m reading, but then I see a pretty display at the library and suddenly find her new book in my car coming home with me. I guess I’ll just keep giving her another chance. Sooner or later she’s going to surprise me, and all of this will have been worth it.

“Not a wind, not even a high, exactly, but an elevation. A sense that you had gone beyond yourself and could go farther still.” CBR11 Review 1.

The latest “book” from Uncle Stevie leaves me a little confused, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Elevation is a short book, shorter than many of the “short stories” that King has famously published over the years — definitely shorter than The Mist, or Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, or The Running Man. I’m not quite sure why this was released as a stand-alone novel. I think it would be better suited as the featured story in a new collection. But I’m not a publisher, so what do I know?

Another weird thing is that Elevation seems to be borrowing plot points from some of his earlier work. Like in Richard Bachman’s Thinner, this story is about a man who is losing weight against his will. Every day he weighs less and less, and he knows that sooner or later he won’t be able to survive. Except there are no gypsy curses here. Scott just starts weighing less, even though his body looks the same as always. Of course, this all takes place in Castle Rock, Maine, a town that is no stranger to weird things.

And like Joe Hill’s short story, “Pop Art,” about a boy who is more or less a balloon, nobody seems all that worked up about the details of what might be happening to Scott. Yes, they are worried for him, but if I lived in Castle Rock, I would for sure be questioning ALL OF THIS.

King also shoves in a subplot about tolerance and bigotry, which doesn’t quite work here. Scott has been feuding with his new neighbors, a married lesbian couple who came to town to open a wonderful restaurant that none of the locals will go to BECAUSE LESBIANS IN MAINE. Scott becomes obsessed with making things right between him and the women before he weighs nothing. I understand that being neighborly is a nice feeling, but this whole thing never really works for me.

And yet.

Constant Reader, I still kinda liked this story, Warts and all.

I liked that Scott never feared what would happen to him when he hit zero on the scale, and that he was filled with happiness just living his life and appreciating the beauty of the world around him. The joy he describes while running in the rain, or breathing fresh air, or eating a wonderful meal were just lovely.

Even though very little of this story made sense, I still enjoyed it. There are no monsters, no evil clowns, or gunslingers here. This is just a strange little story about a man coming to terms with the end of his life as he knows it, and surrounding himself with people that matter to him to help him figure out what comes next.