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Every so often you stumble upon a book that is a real gem - and What I Was, by Meg Rosoff, is just such a book. I half wish it weren't so short, but I think its brevity (really only novella-length) is part of its charm.

Before you all go rushing off to read it, let me preface my review by saying that this book is not going to be for everyone. If you like your books fast-paced and crystal-clear, What I Was is not for you. Ditto if your reading preference is thrill-a-minute, macho, or comedic.

This book is for you if you've ever wished you could just NOT do the whole "rat race"/"American Dream" thing, if you've ever wished you could just go somewhere and be left alone to live as you wish. If you watched Castaway and wondered why he was in such a hurry to get home... if you have ever felt like you just don't "fit" in a modern world... then you might fall in love with this book.

Going into too much detail would spoil the story, but in brief, What I Was is the story of a teen boy attending the most recent in a long line of British boarding schools in the 1960s. (His name is Hilary; this is one of those books that doesn't name the protagonist until the very end, which drives me BATTY, so I hope you and the author'll forgive me for telling you his name up-front.) When the book opens, Hilary is an old man in the mid-21st century, reflecting on what was and what could have been. He then tells his story, that of a "square peg in a round hole" who can't seem to pass his classes or make friends, who gets bounced from school to school by thoughtless, frustrated parents who just want him to grow up and join the "real world" without any care to what he wants.

While out on the beach near the school, young Hilary meets Finn, an orphan living the free, simple life that Hilary hadn't yet realized he wanted. They strike up an awkward, sometimes one-sided friendship - the prep school boy with no real-world skills who is frantic for companionship, and the windblown, competent youth who doesn't really seem to have any need for any other humans.

Hilary and Finn's idyll is never perfect, and their friendship is never simple. It becomes more and more complicated as outside circumstances push into their lives - and as their relationship evolves, the reader is filled with a lot of questions about what, exactly, is going on here. If you are like me, you'll be surprised when it all becomes clear.

What I Was is a luxurious soak in a soft-hued story written in beautifully-crafted prose, a story that affirms one's choice to reject "normal" even as it acknowledges how difficult or even impossible that may turn out to be. I was reminded of Frances Hodgson Burnett in some ways, and maybe even a little bit of Maugham or Hemingway, if only viewed through a sheet of gauze. The story appealed to my love of mid-20th century British literature, even though it was neither written nor set in that time period. Definitely a worthwhile read!
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Another Idaho author!

Stephanie Meyer wasn't the first to write bestselling vampire books - at the very least, we've got Anne Rice to thank for that - but her Twilight series definitely rocketed vamp lit into the mainstream. Since then, the publishing market has been flooded with books (some pretty good, some pretty dreadful) populated by denizens of the night.

When I first heard about Christopher Farnsworth's novel, Blood Oath, I was intrigued but skeptical. Turns out I needn't have worried; Blood Oath was awesome. The gist of the story is that a vampire - pardoned from execution by President Andrew Jackson in the early 1800s - has been secretly working for the White House ever since, defending the President and the country from domestic, international, and supernatural threats. It's National Treasure meets Men in Black meets... I dunno, Batman? The X-Files?

And it TOTALLY works. The action keeps you turning the pages. The characters aren't the most rounded you'll ever encounter, but then again, it's an adventure novel, not a character study. It is well-written and well-researched, stuffed with fantastic little historical notes that are accurate and intriguing but not boring or plot-halting. (You know - the kind where you accidentally learn something while having fun.) The neat thing about this book is that you can enjoy it even if you don't read "vampire books" - and you can enjoy it if vampire books are your favorite type of literature. If you're interested in American history... if you're interested in the secret service or how we deal with domestic terrorism... if you're interested in old school horror movies and movie monsters (specifically Frankenstein and his monster, both of whom play an important role in this book)... if you like your heroes tall, pale, and bloodthirsty... then I think you just might love this book.

And the sequel (there are two books in print right now, another on the way, and a full series planned) apparently involves Osama bin Laden as some sort of demon that the vampire hunts and kills. Just, y'know, for what it's worth. :)

On top of that? The author is a really nice guy who answers emails from readers!
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John Green is hands-down my favorite author of books for young adults.

Why?

Well, there are a few reasons. For one thing, I got to know him through his vlog before I ever read any of his books, so it sort of felt like reading something a friend had written.

More importantly, though, I love the fact that he respects teenagers. His books are funny and smart and aren't afraid to be real. He knows that teens live in a hard world, that even if their lives aren't particularly rough that they're surrounded by peers whose lives are. He knows and respects that teens worry about and deal with some serious issues, and when he writes about them, it is honest and unpatronizing - and not sensationalistic, either.

An Abundance of Katherines is probably Green's most lighthearted and silly book. It tells the story of Colin Singleton, a recent high school graduate with some fascinating quirks. He's obsessed with anagrams, for one thing - you know, the thing where you mix up the letters in a word or phrase to create a new word or phrase. (If you rearrange the letters in "The Morse Code" you get "Here Come Dots"!) His best friend, Hassan, is a plus-sized Muslim with a "thing" for Judge Judy. Colin refers to himself as a "washed up child prodigy."

And quirkiest of all, Colin has dated - and been dumped by - nineteen girls. Let me rephrase that: Colin has been dumped by nineteen girls - all of whom were named Katherine. And after this, the most recent of dumpings, Colin is determined to understand why. He and Hassan hit the road in search of enlightenment, truly original ideas, and a Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability.

This book is a goofy buddy road-trip story, stuffed with laugh-out-loud dialogue, annotated with even funnier footnotes, and liberally sprinkled with nerdiness. It's the sort of book that isn't for guys or for girls, even though the main characters are male (and if you happen to be, like me, a Katherine, it makes it doubly funny at moments). It will almost certainly appeal to you if you like smart humor, math and theoretical stuff, and really well-written characters. If you watch The Big Bang Theory or even How I Met Your Mother, you may very well fall in love with An Abundance of Katherines.
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When we talk about the Salem witch trials, we usually end up talking about the contagious nature of hysteria, or about how the repressed sometimes act out in an attempt to gain power. But what, as one of the characters in The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane asks, if the Salem witches really were witches? What if we've got it all wrong?

Deliverance Dane tells two interweaving stories. One of the stories is Connie Goodwin's. Connie is a graduate student, working on her PhD at Harvard. Her area of expertise is the Salem witch trials of 1692. The other story takes place amongst the people of Salem in the late seventeenth century, and follows the struggles of a woman who may in fact be a bona fide Salem witch.

As the book moves on - as Connie's life is increasingly complicated by her seemingly nutty mother, by her deceased grandmother's clutter, by her suspiciously aggressive professor, and by a man who steals her heart - we realize that these two storylines are twisting closer and closer to one another, and that sooner or later, they are going to intersect.

It's difficult to say what genre this book falls under. It's definitely historical fiction, but it's also a little bit fantasy and a little bit mystery/thriller. If you like your history spiced up with a liberal dash of magic, look no further. It's spooky, page-turning, sometimes confusing fun - and although Howe doesn't intend for this book to be historically accurate, so to speak, you'll never really look at the Puritans in quite the same way.

This book, named one of the top ten books of 2009, is not written specifically for young adults but would be a fascinating detour into an alternative look at early American history. If you like The Crucible, or are interested in how people lived in the pre-USA "New World" - and if you're not scared of a little bit of "what in the heck is going on here?" - then this might be a great book for you.

Neat sidenote: the author is a descendent of Elizabeth Proctor (yep, that Elizabeth Proctor) and Elizabeth Howe, the latter of whom was executed for witchcraft in Salem!
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I think you know that a book is good when it can make you laugh and make you cry. Yesterday I finished Crutcher's book Deadline and wow... what a good book.

Chris Crutcher is pretty cool, IMHO, because he's an Idaho author who writes books about Idaho teens - most often teenage guys who like sports. But they're not frivolous little books that assume that all athletic boys are dumb jocks. Instead, Crutcher writes about very real-seeming guys who have to deal with tough, real problems. And they're set in Idaho, with jabs about the state and casual mentions of local curiosities; in this book, Crutcher's description of Boise, its footballmania, and its blue turf made me laugh out loud.

Deadline is about a high school senior named Ben Wolf who lives in Trout, Idaho. Ben is funny, smart, and smart-alec. Right before the school year begins, Ben goes in for his cross country physical and the doctor discovers that he has an aggressive form of terminal blood disease. In short, Ben Wolf has at most a year to live.

Instead of feeling sorry for himself, or milking the situation for special treatment, Ben decides that he's going to pack an entire life into his one year. That means going out for the football team (and proving that small guys can play ball), giving his small-minded government teacher a hard time, and getting the girl. And it means that he can't tell anyone. Ben decides that no one is going to know that he's dying until it's too late to hide it, because he wants to be able to live his last year on life as normally as possible.

What Ben discovers - in addition to the joys of football and feminine company - is that dying isn't for sissies, and neither is living. It turns out that he's not the only one with a tough secret to hide... and with only one year left to live, Ben finds out what the purpose of his life is to be.

If you love football - playing or watching - I think you'll like this book. If you like reading about places you know, you'll feel right at home in Crutcher's Idaho. And if you like reading realistic stories about how people get through tough situations, then this book is definitely for you. It's a light, easy read that really doesn't have any "slow bits," even when Ben talks philosophy with a dream figure named "Hey-Soos." It does have a few $5 words in it, and there are some tough "adult situations" in it (mentions of sexual events, but no details) that make it a solid PG-13 book.
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Sometimes you’re excited about books being adapted into movies – especially if your little heart swells to think of the royalties going to the author.

Other times, other books, the idea of a film adaptation is, at best, cringe-worthy. This is one such book. It’s coming to the big screen sometime this year, and I just simply cannot imagine how they can take this hilarious gem of a book and effectively translate it to video. I first picked up this book based on its deliciously verbose title and its endorsement from Jon Stewart (“If War and Peace had a baby with The Breakfast Club and then left the baby to be raised by wolves, this book would be the result. I loved it.”) When I discovered that its author was one of Stewart’s executive producers, and that it had come out in paperback, I could no longer resist its evil, evil charms.

I was quite wrong about it, though. I thought Genius was going to be more or less realistic fiction about an over-intelligent, misanthropic kid running for student body. As it turns out, I was a tiny bit wrong about that “realistic fiction” bit. The story’s protagonist is Oliver Watson, a thirteen-year-old kid who may be overweight but who is also the third wealthiest person in the world. An evil genius, he built his fortune from a single petty crime (stealing some money from his mother’s purse)  and carved out an empire of subterranean tunnels accessible from his bedroom or a secret locker passageway. He’s a blimp-piloting, minion-smacking, evil gadget-inventing mastermind who, as a seventh grader, holds the strings of any number of puppet corporations and countries.

Oliver is determined not to divulge his crazily successful alter ego, and so he lives his life as a very convincing idiot. He’s got everyone fooled into thinking his shoe size exceeds his IQ – classmates, teachers, even his mother and, importantly, his father. It turns out that Oliver is motivated, not by greed, respect, or a desire to change the world, but by a consuming dislike for what he sees as his self-interested and small-minded father.

He’s also motivated by puppy love, but that’s another story.

As Oliver’s best intentions fall apart around him, he ends up in an amusingly messed-up race for student body president, gets cut down a size or two, and maybe even grows up a little bit. But that’s not why you should read it; you should read it for the footnotes.

I’d say that Genius would be what happened if a Daily Show writer re-wrote Catcher in the Rye as a superhero comic book, but since that’s basically what this is, I guess I’ll just say that it’s now available in paperback and as a $6 hardcover through Amazon. If you’re ready for a good, smart laugh, find yourself a copy and buckle your seatbelt.

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As I finish reading Empress of the World, I am wondering wherein lies the correlation. The majority of the books I’ve been reading for the LGBTQ Book Club feature teens who are not only LGBTQ, but also brilliant. Do authors feel uncomfortable writing average (or, heaven forbid, unintelligent) gay characters? Are the sort of authors with the guts to write about such things also the sort of authors who want to write smart characters? Or am I unconsciously selecting books that feature interesting, intelligent characters? I’m thinking all three ideas may be correct; goodness knows I’m often guilty of the last. Empress takes place at a summer camp for brainy kids at a local college. The teens are taking a wide variety of college-level mini-courses, learning more about topics from music theory to computer programming. Our narrator and protagonist is Nicola, who has come to camp to study archeology and determine whether she wants to be an archeologist when she grows up.

Ultimately, the main thing Nicola seems to learn about archeology (since she’s already more savvy about the subject than most of the other kids in her class) is that it all depends on grants and fundraising. Instead of archeology, Nicola learns about her heart – specifically, that it can fall for, and be broken by, a girl.

This book is the story of the romance that blooms, explodes, collapses, and regenerates between Nicola and a female camp-mate, Battle. It’s a story about young love, and it’s – more directly so than some of the other books I’ve read – a story about lesbian love. Indirectly, it’s a story about (obviously) coming-of-age, exploring possibilities at that crucial pre-college transition point in our lives, and negotiating expectations. It is really well-written, and the language, story, and narrator’s voice kept me engaged to the end.

On the flip side, as a character-driven reader, I felt uneasy about the two central characters’ development. Battle is, in many ways, the more interesting character. Her father is a minister whose past life as an actor suggests a certain artificiality in his life, and her mother has an idealized vision for Battle that is seemingly devoid of interest in what Battle actually feels or wants. Battle’s absent brother is a dark shadow in her life, and all of the affection she would have focused on her brother and her distant parents is poured into her two corgis. Rejecting her mother’s autumn-in-the-Hamptons vision for her, Battle shaves her head bare and begins a passionate romance with Nicola. Frustratingly, the summary I’ve provided in this paragraph is almost as much insight as Ryan gives us about Battle. There is so much provocative material to work with, and yet Battle is still drawn in two dimensions – a caricature of a rebellious preacher’s daughter away at summer camp.

We have so much more insight into Nicola, as the book is written from her perspective – and we have the added benefit of glimpsing into her “field notes” that she keeps throughout the camp. And yet there’s a curious hole in all that remarkable character development. One moment, Nicola is thinking about her (male) crush from high school and being slightly surprised at how riveting she finds a female camp-mate, and the next moment she’s as comfortable in a physically-intimate lesbian relationship as if she had been in one her entire life. There’s never any fear or doubt, and despite being a painfully reflective person, she doesn’t really try to understand whether she is lesbian, straight, or bisexual until the book is nearly over. I kept wondering how realistic her almost thoughtless coming-out could be – does anyone just come out, to themselves and their friends, so seamlessly and quickly? (It’s a sincere question – I don’t know. But it struck me as being a little too tidy.)

I see, on Ryan’s website, that she’s written a sequel that apparently focuses on Battle and her estranged brother. I’m hoping to track it down and see Battle’s character rendered into 3D, even though I’m a little disappointed that the blurb seems to suggest that Nicola won’t be making a reappearance. She was a fun character, and I’d like to see what happens to her as she grows up, too.

Confession: This book pushes my comfort level a little bit; I would have to have a very good relationship with a student before I’d recommend it, and there’s a part of me that squirms when I imagine leaving it on the shelves for students to browse. There’s no graphic sexual details, but it’s very clear that Nicola and Battle shed clothing and are intimate, and there are some mildly crude (but wickedly funny and realistic) comments between the teens. Maybe it’s just because it’s late at night and I’ve been thinking about some of my more conservative students today, but… yeah. I’m squirmy. That being said, it will be on my shelves. It’s a good story, and it may be exactly what some of my students need to read.

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Everyone loves a Cinderella story, even (or especially) sports fans who never acquainted themselves with the Brothers Grimm. It’s an ancient tale, with early versions traceable as far back as the 1st century BC, and variations appearing in different cultures including Ancient Egypt, China, the Philippines, the Arab nations, and your usual line-up of European peoples. Today, the Cinderella theme shows up again and again in movies, television, sports legacies, and of course books.

Malinda Lo has unwoven the Cinderella story and re-knit it into the somberly beautiful Ash. Ash, or Aisling, is the requisite girl orphaned and left in the care of her cruel stepmother and thoughtless stepsisters. In this telling, Ash’s parents illustrated the transition between the older pagan beliefs of their land (magic and fairies, in which her mother believed) and the new scientific beliefs moving in (her father’s beliefs). Ash is caught in the rift, wondering why her parents loved each other so much but were unable to see eye to eye about the nature of their world.

Ash succumbs to a natural grief and denial after her mother’s death; the supernatural comes in to play when she tries to slip away with the fairies’ Wild Hunt in order to rejoin her mother beyond the veil. One of the fairies turns her back, though, and becomes a constant haunting presence in her dreams. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that there is some strange bond between the fairy, Sidhean (pronounced sheen), and Ash. Later, he will help Ash in the same way that Cinderella’s fairy godmother helped her. All the while, Ash begs Sidhean to take her away with him, to stay with her and take her away from the painful life she lives.

The plot breaks away from the familiar story with the introduction of the King’s Huntress, an office held by a series of women whose clothing, mannerisms, and relationships stand in stark contrast to the feminine finery of other women in the kingdom. As Ash reaches her late teens, she meets Kaisa (KY-suh), the King’s Huntress, and is fascinated. It’s a gently drawn fascination – is Ash envious of her freedom and confidence? Desirous of a friend and confidante? Admiring of a strong and kind female role model?

Ultimately, as familiar Cinderella plot points drip beautifully through Lo’s filter, the situation crystallizes. Ash is infatuated with Sidhean and with the idea of regaining what she has lost – or at least, of losing the pain. And just as Ash has within her grasp the power to join Sidhean forever, she discovers that she has a reason to live and love in the world of the living. It’s certainly true that this is, as fairy tale retellings go, a lesbian retelling – but it isn’t a (cue exaggerated broadcaster voice) “gay book”. It’s a story about the complexities of love, the process of navigating grief, and that all-important choice between holding on to the past and embracing the future.

This book hit all the right chords for me. I’m nuts for fairy tales, so it really had me at “retelling of Cinderella”. I loved the Irish names. I loved the idea of the King’s Huntress, the humanization of Sidhean, the light hand Lo has as she paints what turns out to be an intricate layer of symbolism. And after reading some considerably more heavy-handed approaches in LGBTQ literature, I loved that Lo didn’t make this a book about lesbianism. This is what I hoped to find: a book with characters that we care about, that we respect and root for, who incidentally happen to not be straight.

This is one of the books I checked out from the library that I’ll be looking to purchase – maybe a copy for home, too – and I’ll be looking for more books by Lo in the future. Apparently there’s a forthcoming book set in the same universe, about new characters, including some who are lesbian. I enjoyed browsing her website, particularly her four-part article about avoiding LGBTQ stereotypes when writing YA fiction (link goes to part 1).

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I’d like to think that there are precious few people out there who didn’t have the childhood joy of reading James Howe’s Bunnicula books. (I, myself, will never forget my embarrassment after discovering and sharing the titular pun in The Celery Stalks at Midnight with my trying-hard-not-to-laugh parents.)

At the time that Howe first wrote about his vege-vampire rabbit, he was married to the first of his two wives. His writing career didn’t really take off until the early 1980s, about the same time that he came out as a gay man. Since then he has written more than seventy books, including the much-acclaimed Misfits and its stand-alone sequel, Totally Joe. I couldn’t get hold of Misfits, but I found and quickly fell in love with Totally Joe. Finally, here was a laugh-out-loud funny book about a boy who liked other boys – no misery, doom, gloom, profanity, or allusions to sordid sex. It’s probably the gayest book I’ve read so far (if you measure gayness in terms of flamboyance, which is pretty unsuitable, but probably unavoidable) but at the same time, it is the most innocent and sweet.

The protagonist and narrator, Joe Bunch, is a twelve-year-old student who has been assigned to write an “alphabiography” of his life. The book, presented as his completed assignment, is broken into 26 abecedarian chapters, each representing some aspect of his life as it unfolds during his seventh grade year. B is for Boy, and what it means to be a boy, and how he can’t make himself fit within that mold. D is for Dating, and his musings about how his straight friends can publicly date while he and his boyfriend almost have to pretend not to know one another. Q is for Questions. S is for Surprises. X, predictably, is for Xylophone; unpredictably, it may be the funniest chapter (at least for this keyboard percussionist) of the book.

Even at the age of twelve, Joe is pretty comfortable with himself and the fact that he isn’t, as he puts it, a guy-guy. He sometimes wears nail polish, gets his ear pierced, and enthuses about weddings, fashion, Cher, and cooking. He’s precocious in that regard, but his maturity is realistically inconsistent as he expresses disgust at things like “exchanging saliva.” Perhaps the least realistic thing about him is his restraint and patience in interacting with his friend-turned-boyfriend-turned-nonfriend-turned-friend, who can’t yet be as comfortable with his sexual identity. Even so, Joe is vividly drawn, loveable, and so, so funny.

The silent counterpart to Joe is the teacher, Mr. Daly, for whom Joe is writing. Even though we never hear or see Mr. Daly, except for brief moments when Joe describes school events that include the teacher, he serves as a solid sounding board for Joe as he verbally explores his feelings. Structurally, this is like a younger, light-hearted version of Perks of Being a Wallflower; even though the “listeners” are invisible, they play a crucial role in the protagonist’s development. Joe’s trust in Mr. Daly is heartwarming, and I found myself envying him as he was placed in that position of trust.

One line in particular stood out to me. It is spoken about a school administrator who changes his mind about a proposed GSA club, and I think it’s something that all we teachers ought to bear in mind: “It’s nice to know that educators can be educated.” I’m going to try to talk more about that at the end of this whole reading experiment, but in short: I’m learning so much from these books, and it seems to me that other educators could do the same.

Oh, and I totally want my students to write alphabiographies now. :)

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English teacher’s ugly confession time: I’ve never read The Metamorphosis. I’m familiar with it, of course (one of my favorite childhood shows was Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers, after all) and so the reference in Lockhart’s book didn’t miss me – but even if you’re entirely ignorant of Kafka, you’ll still get your money’s worth out of this short novel.

The protagonist, Gretchen, is a sixteen-year-old student at a prestigious art school in New York. Even in a school full of extraordinary students, though, Gretchen struggles to fit in. Her comic book-style art isn’t the kind of art that her teachers want, and she worries excessively about what other people – especially boys – think about her. One day she wishes that she could be a fly on the wall of the boys’ locker room, so that she could find out what everyone says behind her back… and when she wakes up the following morning, the wish has come true.

Gretchen-the-fly spends the next several days trapped in the boys’ locker room, witnessing – sometimes against her will, since flies lack eyelids – what happens in that inner sanctum of adolescent masculinity. She has her first, moderately traumatic look at male anatomy (followed, of course, by many more) and learns quite a little bit more about the boys and their opinions than she’d bargained for. Lockhart’s descriptions of what Gretchen sees are, well, descriptive, and conservative parents may be uncomfortable with some of the language.

Gretchen’s metamorphosis from insecure kid to confident young woman (by way of diptera) is aided by her voyeuristic discovery that other people have bigger problems with fitting in than she does – specifically when she observes boys launching, and being the target of, homophobic attacks. When she is returned to human form, Gretchen not only has a greater understanding of people outside her own head; she also has a cause that helps her find her place in the school community by securing a place for others.

Fly on the Wall isn’t a book about LGBTQ students, but the message and gay secondary characters certainly make it a good fit with a LGBTQ theme. The ideas that everyone has problems, that most young people are unhappy about some aspect of themselves, and that understanding one another is key to accepting and embracing one another, are the thematic bullet points to the story’s principle message: helping others will help you help yourself (or, for the cynical, stop obsessing so much about yourself and go do something productive!)

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