Hello

I so enjoyed Erin Estrada Kelly’s book You Go First, that I had to read Hello, Universe (also by Kelly). This one is a Newbery Medalist.

The book started a bit slow for me, and then something started to happen. The ideas of fate and coincidence were introduced and I was hooked. Virgil is a lonely and very shy character. His only friends are a quirky psychic named Kaori Tanaka (and her sidekick younger sister). When he confides in Kaori about a crush he has on special education classmate Valencia, events start to tumble together in amazing ways.

Virgil is bullied at school by a mean-spirited (but also lonely) boy named Chet. Chet throws Virgil’s backpack (with his pet guinea pig inside it) down a well. Virgil climbs down to get it and becomes trapped. He must face his fears while a wonderful coincidence/fate leads his rescuers to him.

I enjoyed the story and loved the closing of the book; “Hello” is a powerful ending. This book is about making connections, being willing to take chances, and of course, about fate occurring at just the right moment.

Gone Baby

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena hooked me immediately. Marco and Anne are having dinner at their neighbor’s house. The night is not going well for Anne, who feels insecure around vivacious, flirty Cynthia. The night gets much worse when Marco and Anne return home to find that their baby daughter, Cora, is gone.

This story took me on a wild ride through the investigation into Cora’s disappearance, and all that it uncovers. Every character has something to hide and sharing their secrets gives too much away. Even though this book has some unrealistic aspects, I really enjoyed it! It’s one of the few books that warrants the comparisons to The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl.

Scrabble

For some reason, the board game (Scrabble) keeps popping into my life in weird ways. Most recently in two cases: as a clue in an adventure game I brought my daughter to for her birthday, and also in my latest book. The book You Go First by Erin Entrada Kelly was a quick read and a perfectly crafted story.

The two main characters, Ben and Charlotte, are opponents in an online Scrabble game. They never meet, and their only contact is their game play and occasional short phone conversations. Their stories are told in parallel format. Both are dealing with tough life situations. Charlotte is coping with her father being in the hospital after a heart surgery, while also being ditched by her lifelong friend Bridget. Ben’s parents are divorcing, which prompts him to start his sixth grade year by going for student office. Through this, he has no friends to support him and is bullied.

It drove me a bit crazy that they never shared their problems with each other. Yet, somehow I think it’s a realistic depiction of this age group. Their relationship is based on challenging each other through their gaming, but also to be the best version of themselves with one another. That point of contact gave them someone to reach out to who was removed from their personal drama.

My favorite part of this book is the characters. I love their quirkiness. Each of Charlotte’s sections starts with a “Rabbit Hole.” Her dad often used this saying to describe when she would get caught up in a topic. She shares many random facts in this way. She is strong and smart. Ben is my favorite. He has this odd way about him, but it is endearing to me. I enjoy his way of thinking, talking and reacting to others. When he gets ketchup smeared on him by a bully, he goes to the office to get a shirt. He asks for a medium even though he is a small kid. “Ben carried his shirt to the boys’ bathroom knowing the medium would be too big. But it’s not often that you’re given a choice of what you want to be, and Ben decided he didn’t want to be small” (152).

This story made me smile, get a bit misty eyed and is one I won’t forget. Triple word score.

Thirteen

13 Minutes by Sarah Pinborough is a memorable read. I say that because I finished it almost two weeks ago and I still remember so much (unusual for me)! Let me try to do this review in 13 sentences:

Natasha is part of the most popular group in school coined the “Barbies.”
Natasha almost drowns and suffers amnesia after the incident.
Natasha questions her two “Barbie” friends; were they involved in her near-death accident?
She reaches out to a former, more trustworthy friend (Becca) for help.
Becca is willing to try being friendly with Natasha to help her.
Becca helps Natasha by hinting to the other girls that Natasha is getting her memory of that night back.
The girls are getting nervous and it seems they are guilty.
Meanwhile, Becca’s current friend is feeling left out.
Suddenly, another terrible accident occurs, and this time there’s a casualty.
Everything twists in an unexpected way!
I didn’t see it coming at all and I am not giving away spoilers on this one!
Becca proves to be a smart, strong person.
The ending is the only part that I just couldn’t figure out; it made no sense to me!!

Fighting for Life

Look for Me by Lisa Gardner is a page turner. It’s a criminal detective mystery to discover who killed a teen girl’s (Roxy) entire family. Roxy is the sole survivor of the attack who happened to be out walking the family dogs during the shooting. She is now missing and a person of interest.

The story offers Roxy’s background through multiple perspectives: excerpts from her 11th grade writing assignment entitled “What is the Perfect Family?”, female detective D.D.’s investigation, and Flora, a vigilante and founder of a survivors’ support group that Roxy had recently connected with. Readers get pieces of Roxy’s difficult past, with its most horrible moments beginning the year she and her younger sister Lola are put in foster care with two manipulative, abusive older teens. Her mother regains custody of her children giving them some reprieve, until she moves in with a new boyfriend in the same town as the foster home. Roxy and her sister are forced to face their horrible pasts all over again.

We get a little background information about D.D. and Flora along the way as well. The book starts with a prologue in which a college student, Sarah, witnesses the brutal murder of all her roommates. Flora seeks out Sarah in the aftermath of this attack to give her tools to stop living as a victim. Sarah becomes the point person between Flora and Roxy. Women in the story have endured horrible incidents, and are attempting to overcome their tragedies in different ways.

The dramatic ending in a community theater (fitting location!) surprised me, while the constant shift in viewpoint kept my attention through this story. I will keep Gardner on my reading lists.

Follow the Clues

Book Scavenger, by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman, was my final read from the Intermediate 2018 Nutmeg book list. This one took me some time to get through. It has been compared to Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library by Chris Grabenstein, which was a Nutmeg nominee last year. Lemoncello was a book I started and never finished last summer! I feel that these titles should be favorites considering their plots centered on love for books. Not the case for me.

Scavenger is told from seventh grader Emily’s point of view. One of the most intriguing elements of the book for me is that her family is on a quest to live in all fifty states, so they move almost yearly. Emily quotes from her dad’s favorite author, Jack Kerouac, “What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?” (234); I like this idea! Anyway, as luck would have it, they move to San Francisco, home of Book Scavenger’s creator Garrison Griswold. This game is like a computer-based hide and go seek that uses books and ciphers that game players must solve in order to hide and locate books. Fun idea.

The opening of the story shows Griswold being accosted and shot, leaving his special copy of Poe’s The Gold Bug in the BART (subway) station. Someone knows that his next game will be valuable and is after its prize. The next day, Emily is out with her upstairs neighbor James when she happens to pick up The Gold Bug. The rest of the story follows their escapades as they discover the clues in the book and begin to follow them to the prize. The men who shot Griswold are in pursuit too, which adds some tension.

Upon finishing the book, I felt that a couple of loose ends remained. The first is the classmate Maddie. I thought for sure she might become friends with James and Emily based on their shared interests of solving puzzles. Instead, they kept the competitive animosity going throughout the book. Second is their odd, meddling teacher, Mr. Quisling, who is also a Book Scavenger player. He is strangely obsessed with getting The Gold Bug back to its rightful owner, and once he takes the book from Emily we don’t really hear anything else about him.

This book has many fun elements (literary allusions, love of books and solving puzzles) and is a nice read. Nice because everything comes together well for everyone (SPOILERS AHEAD): friendships break and mend (Emily and James, Griswold and Hollister), Emily and her brother become close again, Mr. Griswold survives being shot, the bad men don’t hurt anyone else and are caught, even Emily’s parents decide to halt their ambition to live in every state unless their kids are ready for a move.

For me, it’s all a bit too nice and neat, although it is probably just right for its intended age group.

Reality?

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline transported me into another world. The setting is a bleak future in which the majority of the population prefers spending time in the virtual reality world named Oasis. This video game is free to users and is wildly popular, even giving its users the opportunity to shop, dress their avatars, socialize with other players in personally designed chat rooms, AND go to school! Players can either acquire special powers or accessories through experience points. They can teleport to locations within the Oasis universe.

There is SO much to this story. The central plot deals with the main character, Wade, who lives in a towering trailer home with an aunt and other random family members. He uses the Oasis to escape his miserable life. When one of the Oasis’s founders dies, he leaves behind a massive treasure hunt to discover his multi-billion dollar fortune by following clues in his game. Wade and a couple of his on-line friends are eager to win, but less savory characters are also after the prize. These people will stop at nothing, including murder and cheating, to get the money. Enmeshed with this is an unbelievable amount of 80s throwback references, including music, movies and TONS of video games.

Cline’s attention to detail in representing this world was amazing

Three in One

Today was a book fair day, and I took the opportunity to do a quick read of three titles. We all have young kids in our lives, whether our own children, nieces, nephews or a friend’s child. Any one of these three titles would be great gifts!

The first, Love by Matt de la Pena and Loren Long, has been popping up in different library lists that I receive. This is a beautifully written story showing all the many places/people that give and receive love. It shows that love can be found in many places. For me, it’s not just love, but finding beauty in the unexpected. Its illustrations are rich and invite opportunity for talking about multiple situations and cultures.

Next is a random eye-catcher, Unplugged by Steve Antony. A little robot named Blip gets unplugged for the day after a blackout. He is able to escape into nature and make some friends before returning to his computer terminal. He acknowledges that there are very cool things he can do while hooked up to the computer, but that interacting in real life is pretty wonderful. What a great message for all ages! This one reminds me a bit of a much younger kid version of Wild Robot (a great intermediate read).

Finally, there is Good Day, Good Night by Margaret Wise Brown and Loren Long (again!). Wise Brown is the same author of Goodnight Moon, a book that brings me back to reading every night before bed with my babies. This story is just as sweet, with beautiful illustrations and simple text showing animals at wake up and bed time. It’s a perfect book to read aloud and share with a child. I think this one would have been a favorite in my house.

Never Assume

booklist Recently, I came across a list of someone’s top ten or so thriller books. This is probably one of my favorite categories so I jotted down the whole list. My plan is to gradually chip away at all of them. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I found the original so I need to hang on to my handwritten copy!

Since snow was heading our way, I headed to the public library to find any of these possibilities. They only had about four titles from my list, and these were all checked out! I’m hoping this means they’re really good for when I finally get my hands on them. Instead, I used my Kindle to download The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor. This one grabbed my attention most from all the teasers that I read.

This story has shades of the movies “I Know What you Did Last Summer” and “Stand By Me.” It centers mostly around a boy and his friends’ experience with discovering a dead girl’s body in the woods. But there is a lot more to it than this; there are sub plots that all relate in some way to the main event. The time frame switches back and forth between 1986 and 2016, and is told from the main character’s point of view throughout. The chalk men begin as messages/signals among the group of boys. The chalk men end up being used against them when it seems that someone else gets involved.

There are an abundance of odd characters in the story, making it a constant guessing game as to who might be guilty. Is it the new, albino teacher in town who always seems to be nearby when something intense occurs? Is it the zealot minister who appears to be physically abusive toward his own daughter (among other actions)? Is it his friend Mickey, who was already edgy, but seems to take a turn for the worse when his bully of a brother winds up dead too? Or maybe it’s the dad, who showed both aggressive and forgetful tendencies in the book?

A point is made several times throughout the end of the story: never assume. I won’t spoil it, but the intricacies are mostly all explained in the end. Some with simple explanations and others with more complexity. There were a few actions that I predicted and others that were more of a surprise.

Did this book keep me up at night (as another reviewer stated)? No. Was it a good story? Sure.

All American

A colleague recently shared Trevor Noah’s interview with author Jason Reynolds. His closing lines of the interview, in which he talks about how to make reading matter for teens, resounded with me, “they [students] then build relationships not just with literature but with literacy. Then we start fixing violence, we start fixing gangs, all of that, once you realize that your life is dependent on your relationship with words.” Coincidentally, the timing of watching this interview was the same as I was starting to read All American Boys by Reynolds and co-author Brendan Kiely. This is my first Reynolds novel, but it most definitely won’t be the last.

I can’t help but make the initial comparison to The Hate U Give based on the primary conflict of police brutality and racism. For me, this book added a different element to the table. Point of view and empathy are critical pieces to this novel. The narrative switches back and forth between Rashad and Quinn’s voices. Both are regular high school guys from the same school getting ready to start their weekend with a party. They attend the same high school and have acquaintances in common, but don’t personally know each other.

The Friday night takes a terrible turn for Rashad. He stops at a convenience store for some snacks, and he’s thought to be stealing because of a silly accident by someone near him. An officer is in the store, and he is pulled out and horribly beaten while handcuffed. Quinn (and other bystanders – there’s a tape made) witnesses this event, and it turns out that the officer is the older brother of Quinn’s good friend. It turns out that this officer is also the same man who has been a stand-in father figure for Quinn. The intense internal and external conflict that this creates for the main characters and their families, friends, and the school community as a whole is compelling.

I was caught up in even the most minor character and the emotions of everyone involved from the very beginning. Even the ways that different teachers tried to handle the aftermath was representative of how people deal with the reality of harsh situations. From the basketball coach who wants the team to “leave it at the door,” to the teacher who breaks down in tears in front of her class, to the teacher who helps organize their march. So many lines stood out to me, including this one on page 296, “Had our hearts really become so numb that we needed dead bodies in order to feel the beat of compassion in our chests?”

Every word of this book matters.